I want to talk to you about how to use a scale properly. The scale can be used as a good tool to measure your weight loss or weight gain progress - only if used right! If used incorrectly, it will lead to erroneous results and can cause unnecessary stress.
It’s a topic that comes up frequently in my discussions with clients. They will see a number on the scale for one day after they haven't weighed themselves for a couple of weeks and then they see it, they're like, "Holy crap!" They'll freak out because that number isn't what they expected or they thought it was gonna be higher or lower.
So let's take the weight loss example for a second here. Let's say you're trying to lose weight. You weigh yourself one week and then you weigh yourself again. If you've seen my other video on daily fluctuations in the weight you'll know that there are many factors that come into play in terms of what affects body weight.
Water retention depending on where you are in your cycle, food from the day prior, carbs, salt, heavy training sessions, stress, etc, are all things that can affect fluctuations in weight on a daily basis.
So you're not accounting for that if you just weigh yourself once a week. So you might be catching yourself on a “bad” day and you may have missed some other lower numbers throughout the week and now you've only seen that higher number.
So, on average, you may have actually lost weight on the weekly average but you've only seen that higher number today. And that's why I recommend weighing yourself more frequently over the course of at least three days a week up to seven days a week to get the most accurate average of the week.
Now for some people I know, it causes some stress and anxiety, getting on a scale, but I think once you understand how to use the scale properly and understand what it's actually measuring it will help to decrease those feelings. The scale is measuring your weight at that moment in time and takes into account everything that's happened in the 24 hours prior in terms of food intake, water retention, etcetera. Remember that to use it properly you should get a weekly average and know that we should be comparing weeks to weeks in terms of our weight. It's a very valuable tool in terms of measuring progress for body composition changes but because a lot of people don't understand the factors that affect body weight and how to actually use the scale properly to track weekly averages it does cause some anxiety and freaking out.
So measure yourself and track your weight more frequently over the course of a week, get weekly averages and compare those weeks to each other.
Now, if you're a woman that's pre-menopause and you're not on birth control, you want to take a week in your cycle, we'll call that the anchor week, and you're gonna compare that same week in your next cycle. So you're comparing apples to apples and not apples to oranges. That way you get a more accurate measure of your body weight going forward. Hope this helps.