Weighing In: How often should you get on the scale?

Oprah Winfrey says she never steps on the scale because it ends up sabotaging her waist-control efforts. If her weight is up, she gets discouraged and loses motivation to follow her diet. If her weight is down, she winds up eating too much because she figures she can afford to cheat. Instead, Oprah prefers to use the way her clothes fit as a indicator of how she's doing.

I'm guessing that a lot of people that use NutritionData weigh themselves pretty regularly and that many chart their weight. We're obviously the kind of people who like to keep track of the details! But how often should you get on the scale?

Weight loss experts often say not to weigh yourself too frequently when you're on a diet. I guess the idea is that your progress will be easier to see if you only weigh yourself once a week. As long as you're sticking to your eating and exercise plan, you shouldn't have any nasty suprises.

If you are at or near your goal weight, you might want to weigh yourself more often, just to stay in touch with reality. At the moment, I'm not tracking my food intake on a daily basis. I'm just trying to choose healthy foods and maintain my current weight. But I still get on the scale almost every day. If I do put on a few pounds (it's been known to happen), I want to know right away so that I can nip it in the bud.

The only problem with that is that your weight can fluctuate as much as 3 or 4 pounds from day to day without reflecting actual loss or gain of fat or muscle tissue. Weight can be temporarily affected by things like the amount of fluids you've consumed, the timing of your last work-out, or (how to put this?) the status of your digestive processes.

If you're in the habit of charting your weight, you might want to start plotting the moving average as well. A moving average is a statistical trick that smooths out those daily ups and downs and gives you a much more accurate picture of the overall trend: are you gaining, losing, or maintaining?

One of the things at the top of my wish list for the new ND is a daily journal tool that will let you track your nutrient intake, work-outs, and weight over time. While we're working on that, I've been using this nifty little gadget called The Google 15. Type in your weight every day and it is displayed on a graph. After 7 days, the graph will also display your moving average. The gadget even gives you encouraging pats or stern little warnings if you drift too far from your goal.

If Google's pending domination of the universe gives you the creeps and you're good with math, here's the formula for calculating a simple moving average yourself.

$SMA = { p_1 + p_2 + \cdots + p_n \over n }$

Weigh in on our poll: How often do you weigh yourself?

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