How to Monitor Your Weight Loss

SCALE WEIGHT

Scale weight alone may not always be the best method of monitoring changes in your body. There are variables such as sleep, stress, stage of menstrual cycle and diet choices that can mask weight loss/gain through water retention and other factors.

Considering things like hunger level, how you ‘feel’ and how clothes fit can be used alongside scale weight to give you a better picture overall rather than getting lost in daily or weekly fluctuations of a few hundred grams.

Ultimately, over the course of weeks and months, scale weight will be dropping if you are accurately adhering to a calorie deficit and rising if you are adhering to a calorie surplus.

BANDED WEIGHT TRACKING

Using loose targets is a common theme in this guide as it helps to keep us remembering the bigger picture and context rather than obsessing over minutia. For all these same reasons we can take a loose view on our “weight”.

If you’ve ever jumped on the scale twice in the same day and been shocked to see 1-1.5kg difference in your weight you’ll be familiar with this concept. Our weight can fluctuate a lot, mainly due to hydration, water retention and physically having more food inside of us! This is why it’s a fairly bizarre concept when someone reports gaining or losing half a pound at the end of a week. 

Half a pound is around 250g. It would be very, very difficult to accurately determine that your weight has reliably changed by that factor and it isn’t just down to having slightly less/more undigested food in your system, being more hydrated or having not been to the loo.

A better way to track changes in weight is to use “banded weight tracking”. If for example right now when I get on the scales I tend to be between 75-77kg I can use that 2kg band as my bracket. When I begin my weight loss plan, for the first week I might expect a daily weigh in to be anywhere within that band.

Over the next week I’ll be pretty happy with progress if I start to see some days where the number is lower than 75kg and little to no days when it’s higher than 77kg. For the following weeks I might start to see the band move more toward 74-76kg, some days it’s 74kg and a bit and some days it’s closer to 76kg. A few weeks later the band might be more like 73-75kg. 

By this point in time I can be pretty confident that my weight is down by around 2kg, even though it’s possible I could have had a 75kg reading in both week 1 and week 3. In week one this would have been the lower end of my band, in week three it would have been the higher end. The important difference is, by week three some days I’d be seeing weight around the 73kg mark and never seeing weight at 76kg or 77kg. 

This exact same process can be used when moving up in weight.

DAILY WEIGHING

Daily ‘weighing’ often gets a bad name as being obsessive or relying ‘too much on the scale’. I think this is only the case if too much stock is being placed on any one reading. Yes if the scale moving from 74.6kg to 74.8kg from Monday to Tuesday made me think I was gaining weight and caused me to start rethinking my whole plan or go off the rails then yes, this is a problem.

However, if I know I’m going to ‘check in’ everyday I can start to see how much my weight will fluctuate up and down, and take the ‘rough with the smooth’. I won’t celebrate uncontrollably if the scale weight has dropped a kg overnight nor will I feel sad if it hasn’t dropped at all. 

Instead I can take a more objective view by considering how the weight is trending over time. If five of the seven check-ins this week said somewhere around 74.5kg and two said 75kg I’ll know it’s roughly somewhere between the two. If the next week I see more 74kgs than 75kgs it’s likely good news for weight loss. This puts the power back in your hands and gives you context and perspective over whats going on.

The alternative is getting on once a week/month and putting all your stock in that one reading. What if the reading last week was atypically low for whatever reason and the one this week was atypically high. This may give you an inaccurate depiction of reality that knocks confidence and faith in your plan leading to lack of adherence.

My advice, regardless of the frequency you weigh yourself, is to not put too much stock in any one reading, and look for general trends in weight over time (weeks and months). Use a weight band of 1.5-2kg to define your current weight and adjust that band as lower readings start appearing and higher readings start to disappear.

For weight gain goals, this will be the opposite. Overtime, the ‘lower weight’ of the band will start to be less common/non-existence and higher numbers will start to appear. This is a good sign of steady weight gain.