When most people take on a new diet or exercise program, they probably use a scale to measure their overall success. Seeing a few lost pounds can sure be a nice motivator, but there are a couple things to consider.
First of all, your weight can fluctuate by sever pounds over the course of the day. Weighing yourself in the morning one day and after dinner the next could show exaggerated differences. These fluctuations occurs over the course of a couple days too. Many things factor into these fluctuations, like what you've eaten, how much you've exercised, how much you've had to drink, or how much sleep you've gotten. Most fitness professionals recommend weighing yourself no more than once a week, which will give all these little fluctuations time to even themselves out.
Also, a simple scale won't tell you what you actually want to know, which is your percentage of body fat compared to your fat free mass (FFM). You might work out hard all week, resulting in a 2 pounds loss of fat and a 2 pound gain of muscle. If you simply weigh yourself and see no change, you might become frustrated and give up your exercise/diet routine thinking that all your hard work didn't amount to anything (when in reality you did a tremendous amount of good!).
For the sake of this experiment, I'm weighing myself every day. I'm tracking my results in a Log because I want to see all those little details over time. I don't get caught up in all the little ups and down due to those daily fluctuations because I'm more interested in the overall downward trend, displayed by the graph(s).
I'm using a Tanita Scale, which measures not only my weight, but my body fat percentage and total body water (TBW). I realize that it may not be 100% accurate, but it will give me a relative point of comparison from day to day. For a more detailed explanation of how a Tanita Scale works, read this article from Livestrong.com.
I try to be as consistent as possible. I weigh myself every morning after I wake up and take a shower, as I figure this is by far the most repeatable moment of my entire day. There have been a couple times when I weighed myself at other times of day and I've gotten some weird spikes in % fat (see 1/31/10).
My long-term goal is to be able to look back at my weight log and compare the trends to my food summary and workout log. This will be a nice "at a glance" way to see what's working and what's not (hopefully more is working than not!).
As of this post, I've been eating right and exercising for about 5 weeks. According to my Tanita, I've lost just over 13 lbs. of fat (4.8% of body fat), which equates to about 2.5 lbs. lost per week. I've very happy with this progress, and hope to keep it going. I can't wait to look back at this six months or a year from now and see how far I've come. Stay with me (or better yet join me!).
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