Current Weight: 144.6
Dietbet Weight Goal: 145.3
Starting Weight 171.3
It’s hard not to get excited when I looked down at the scale this morning and saw that I had beaten my Dietbet goal by a few ounces. But I must resist getting too excited. After all, last week when I hit 145.7, I got super excited. The next day, I gained 2 lbs and the day after that, I gained another lb. The day after that, I gained another lb…at that point it was very hard not to get too down on myself. I was eating less, exercising more, and gained 4lbs in 3 days. Well, it took me that same 3 days to realize I was about to get my period.
Luckily for me, during this time I did not go off the rails and sure enough, the water weight fell off as quickly as it came…and apparently it took another lb with it –which, probably was just the lb of fat that I lost last week when I didn’t give up on myself just because the scale wasn’t agreeing with me.
Still I should not get too excited. Being the science person that I am, I have been tracking my weight on a daily basis to try to spot trends in my weight loss. Now, tracking your weight on a daily basis is generally not encouraged because it is easy to get very discouraged when the numbers go north instead of south. It is more commonly recommended to weigh yourself no more than once a week.
But weight loss is not all I am interested in. I’m interested in my own body, how it works, how it metabolizes food, how it builds muscle. I’m interested in the pattern and process of weight loss, not just in seeing results on the scale.
Years ago, I created an excel spreadsheet where I would track my weight and then look at the graph and look for trends over time. While this was tedious, it did help me to see that my weight fluctuates a lot, even when I am generally on a downward trend.
Thanks to the Withings Scale, I am truly able to track the weight loss trends –without having to remember to enter figures into a spreadsheet. Pretty convenient overall.
Still I wouldn’t recommend the Withings scale to everyone, nor would I recommend my method to ANYONE. While looking at your weight as a part of a trend can be mathematically desensitizing, it’s very hard not to get caught up in the highs and lows of every loss and every gain.