Weight measurement

[Dan R.]

Have been dumping a pound a week for twelve weeks now, and wanted to share what's working.

In the past I've been frustrated by the way my weight would fluctuate plus or minus two pounds day to day. It was difficult to know if I was seeing results or just dehydrated in the wake of a random low salt day or however it works. I started weighing in first thing upon waking hoping for better comparisons, and found that my weight would fall through the routine of the week, and then shoot up following the antics of the weekend. I started setting weekly weigh-in goals, one pound down per week, to be measured Friday morning after a week of stability, and when my weight would be lowest. The tweak removed doubt from day to day fluctuations, and offered confidence that my effort were working, or, one week, that I needed to tighten up.

[jessebruni]

I also do morning weigh-ins. Weight in the morning seems to be more stable for me than any other time of the day. Also I found that if you're weight is fluctuating a lot doing a weekly average and comparing across weeks tends to show the weight drop nicely.

[dryfarmer]

Not sure if this is what Jesse meant too, but I weigh in first thing every morning, and track both my daily weight and my 7-day moving average. Actually at different points in time I've tracked 3-day, 5-day, 9-day (and higher) moving averages but mostly just glance at the daily and weekly weights now. As expected, the daily weight jumps all over the place and the 7-day moving average is a more or less straight downward-trending line. I think in the course of a few months of losing weight my 7-day average has blipped upwards 2-3 times. Of course, this kind of measurement tracking can produce weird measurement effects along the lines of, "if I don't lose 1.8 pounds today my 7-day moving average will go up tomorrow morning, so I'm subconsciously going to starve and dehydrate myself." I try to avoid this sort of thing but am only human.

One thing, though, is that as you approach your optimum weight, the 7-day moving average becomes kind of irrelevant. The timescale of measurement is too coarse. You're actually interested in tracking and manipulating the finer-scale variations. To illustrate with the extreme case, body-builders are not interested in a weekly average. They want "veins in their teeth" (to quote either Mark or Mike I don't remember) at the precise moment they step on stage (four days earlier will be different and so will three days later, and intentionally so, not just due to uncontrollable daily variation). Personally I haven't really gotten down around my optimum I don't think, but my impression is that, even for climbing, as you approach your fighting weight a weekly average is not going to be that useful.

That said, for longer-term general weight loss above your fighting weight, the 7-day moving average is great at smoothing out the daily variation that's not necessarily associated with a decrease in body fat percentage (as the other posters already pointed out).

Cool that you have lost a pound a week for 12 weeks though Dan! That's about what I got out of myself before slowing way down.

[Tony Monbetsu]

+1 on tracking an average being the way to go, absolutely. Weigh yourself regularly and you'll quickly find how much people vary- I can be up or down a full kilogram based on what I ate the day before, how much I drank, when the last time I used the bathroom was, and so forth. I'm a big fan of the app Libra- it takes your weight and gives you a graph charting your general trend, which is really good for seeing what your general tendency is. I weigh in every morning.

[Charlie S]

Interesting to see your pattern, there. I've been weighing in Sundays and Wednesdays. Curiously, Sundays are my light days, usually after a day of climbing outside all day. Wednesdays tend to be heavier (probably from an office job). The exception being multi-day trips. Both alpine trips and multi-day sufferfests have me gaining several pounds.  However, single-day outings generally lighten me.

I've been trying to be less-and-less concerned with weight for my training goals as to avoid a psychological problem. However, I think I like pizza and beer to much to ever be "manorexic".

Tracking helps a lot.

Here's my weight history over the past season (and including the end of the previous season):


The big spike is from the spring Indian Creek trip.  Body inflammation or too free with "recovery beer"?  It took a whole week to lose the "Creek Weight."