How often should you weigh yourself? Every day, if you read the trend
Some advice says to weigh yourself once a week, so the daily ups and downs do not upset you. The research points the other way. Daily weighing goes with more weight loss, as long as you know how to read the numbers.
What the study found
In 2015, a team of researchers looked at 47 overweight adults in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who took part in a six-month weight loss program. Everyone had a scale that sent each weigh-in to the study team, so the researchers knew exactly how often each person weighed.
About half of them, 24 people, weighed every day. The other 23 weighed on most days, 5.4 days a week on average. The results:
- The daily weighers lost 6.1 kg more than the others, on average.
- They took up more weight control habits, 17.6 on average against 11.2.
- The two groups did not differ in the diet strategies they used, the calories they ate or the calories they burned in activity.
The authors' conclusion:
Weighing every day led to greater adoption of weight control behaviors and produced greater weight loss compared with weighing most days of the week.
What the study cannot prove
The study is small, and people chose for themselves how often to weigh. So it shows a link, not proof that weighing causes the loss. The people who weighed daily might have been more motivated from the start. Still, the link points one way: weighing more often went with doing better, not with giving up.
Why weighing daily can help
A single weigh-in is noisy. Your weight moves up and down with water and food, often by more than you lose in a week. We explain why in why your weight changes every day.
If you weigh once a week, you get one noisy number a week. A bad Monday can hide two weeks of progress, and you have no way to tell. If you weigh every day, you get seven numbers a week. Averaged into a trend, they show the real direction sooner and with more confidence. You also see quickly how a salty dinner or a weekend away shows up on the scale, and that it goes again.
How to weigh daily without the stress
- Weigh at the same time each day. Morning is easiest, after the toilet and before you eat or drink.
- Wear the same thing each time, or nothing.
- Use the same scale on the same hard floor.
- Record the number and move on. Do not judge the day by it.
- Judge your progress by the trend over two to four weeks.
If the daily number still upsets you, let an app show you only the trend, and look at the single readings less often. Downtrend leads with the trend. Its reminder is off until you turn it on and never mentions a missed day, and its streak counts weeks with a weigh-in, so one missed morning does not reset it.
Sources
- Steinberg DM, Bennett GG, Askew S, Tate DF. Weighing every day matters: daily weighing improves weight loss and adoption of weight control behaviors. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 2015.
- John Walker. The Hacker’s Diet, chapter Signal and Noise, on why single weigh-ins mislead.
This article is general information, not medical advice. Talk to a doctor before a big change to what you eat or how you train, and especially if you are pregnant, under 18 or have a health condition.