I, too, am in the club of daily weighers. I find it keeps me focused and accountable each day, so I stay motivated to do what I need to do. Number moved down? Sweet! Time to work to the next one! Number went up? Well, that sucks. Let's see what I can do to get back down. That's pretty much how it goes in my head. Now, I only move my tickers once a wek on Wednesdays, just because I'm weird that way, but I do keep track of each day's weigh in on a spreadsheet, along with a graphing website - Which is nice for seeing the generally downward trend of my weight!
My one downfall with the daily weighs is when I get stuck. A few days is fine, but I was stuck for 9 days recently and it just screwed with my head a little bit. I know that in reality a 9 day stall is nothing, but I made a coupole bad choices, went up a pound for a couple days, and now I'm down past my *stuck* number of 244(I wasn't kidding when I said recent - I haven't gotten to update my ticker since the pound came up last week! )
Ultimately it just comes down to how you handle things, and if you can deal with some of the weird stuff our bodies are bound to do!
I'd been doing it everyday but I think I am going to stop and just do once (maybe twice) a week. I too stalled for 11 days and it drove me INSANE, I don't think it was worth it so I'm going to do 1/2x per week for a while and see if I can still stay on track that way with a little less stress in my life. Weigh in is Wednesday (-1 lb today!) so I think Sunday or Monday might be the other day I check. We'll see.
I weigh and measure officially once a month. I do, however, usually step on the scale in the middle of the month at least once. Usually right after I've gone camping, and I'm trying to see how the extra exercise, coupled with the increased sodium (camp food is seriously salty!) has affected me. It's silly, because it's not a "normal" reading and it will change by the end of the month. But I still do it.
I'm a pretty habitual twice a day weigher - right before I go to bed, and right after I get up. But, I notice I'm becoming too obsessed with it lately, so I'm going to take a couple days off (or try anyway ). The fluctuations don't bother me very much - I know what my fluctuations are now, so that probably helps. But I am going camping next week, and feeling panicky about not having my scale - and I don't think it's good to be that dependent on ANYTHING. My official weigh ins are Weds (for me, from the beginning), and then Monday for the BL Challenge I'm doing. I'm going to try to stay off it until Monday. (Even just typing that makes me feel all panicky! Yikes!).
I put my scale away. I get obsessive about weighing myself and did it several times a day so this time, I am only going to weigh in every 3-4 weeks. I refuse to let a number on the scale to determine if I am going to have a good or a bad day, like I have before. I think most of my diets have failed because I didn't see what I wanted to see. I am doing P90X, so a scale is pretty irrelevant to me anyway. I am going to focus on how my clothes fit and inches lost this time.
I weigh myself once a week, and can happily go longer than that. I don't see the point in weighing any more often as the changes would be so much smaller and prone to fluctuations. I like to have it regular enough for it to give me a motivation boost, but I find it so much better to wait for it and have a significant loss. I try not to get too worked up about my weight loss. It's really important obviously, but getting panicky about the every slightest little change isn't really going to help me that much in the long run, whereas staying relaxed about it will help me stick to the diet.
Currently, I weigh daily (sometimes multiple times daily), and it works well for me.
Most of my life weighing daily was "bad" for me, but only because I believed it was bad for me. I was told that weighing daily would make me obsessed and discouraged. I believed it, so it did make me obsessed and discouraged.
A few years ago I started challenging the common dieting dogma, to determine what was really true for me, and what wasn't (shortly after I learned that low-carb not only wasn't "unhealthy" for me, it improved many of my health issues). I started weighing daily, or many times a day to both learn about my weight fluctuations, but also to practice "not getting upset" by the scale.
I decided to learn how to use the scale as an objective tool. Neither as my best friend or my worst enemy, but just as a tool - that measured my weight, not my worth as a human being, and not even a measure of my success on my lifestyle changes.
I decided to learn to use the scale, and not allow myself to feel that the scale was using/manipulating me.
For me, learning about the fluctuations and the causes of them has been extremely valuable. It's allowed me to use the tool of the scale in more productive ways.
For example, during my period I have such a problem with water retention and hunger/cravings, that it can actually be beneficial to weight many times during the day and to even weigh my food and beverages on a food scale. It helps remind me how much of the period weight gain is just from water retention, the weight of the food and (tmi) constipation. When I know the weight isn't "real" (fat) weight gain, I'm less stressed over the fluctuations.
Though I find it really important not to let myself get stressed even over "real" weight gain. I am not my numbers. I am not my weight, and my value is not associated with whether or not I've lost or gained wieght.
Being objective about the weight loss process is extremely liberating. I am losing weight to improve my health, not to become a better person, and I don't find diet guilt productive at all - so I don't do it. And part of givng up the guilt of weight loss has been giving up the guilt of the scale. I use the scale, it doesn't use me.
So it doesn't matter if I weight once a year or once every 15 minutes. As long as the scale isn't influencing my self-worth, it's a usefull tool not a millstone around my neck.
wow its so interesting to read how other people manage it. It's all mind games isn't it? I was driving myself crazy, thinking I could see a tiny difference in my clothes fit, then I think am I just imagining it? Maybe I haven't lost an ounce! lol I am going to try to continue off the scales until my first weigh in and see how that goes, I may switch to fortnightly after that. Wish me luck!!
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). The fluctuations don't bother me very much - I know what my fluctuations are now, so that probably helps. But I am going camping next week, and feeling panicky about not having my scale - and I don't think it's good to be that dependent on ANYTHING. My official weigh ins are Weds (for me, from the beginning), and then Monday for the BL Challenge I'm doing. I'm going to try to stay off it until Monday. (Even just typing that makes me feel all panicky! Yikes!).
