When was the last time you enjoyed the experience of stepping on your bathroom scales? Most people can share Garfield’s sentiments of those bathroom scales being an arch enemy!
There are various reasons the bathroom scales can feel like an enemy to us;
- We step onto them and find out we weigh more than we weighed before (when we’re trying to lose it)
- We step onto them and find out we’ve lost weight (when we’re trying to bulk)
- We step onto them and find out we weigh exactly the same (the disappointment of absolutely no progress)
Personally I’m one of those people who find it hard to gain weight - and for a guy, being underweight is not a good place to be! You might be like my wife who complains of the opposite problem!
Who else has made a concentrated effort to lose weight, gain mass (whatever your goal), only to step onto the scales and be bitterly disappointed?
I find for myself it can be one of the most disconcerting things because, unless the scales are broken, they don’t lie! It makes me wonder whether it’s actually possible for me to reach the goals that I’ve set for myself and I start to think my genes have doomed me to a life of skinny, ab-less geekiness (we may laugh now but you all know how we feel in the moment)!
What we need to realize is that although the scales may be accurately measuring our weight at that moment, it may not be an accurate measurement of our progress.
Don’t step on the scales every single day
Our bodies are not constant. We are made up by thousands of different parts which are always changing depending on how we feel, what we eat, whether we’re relaxed or not and other factors. In fact, it has been said that if a child is absolutely relaxed, even a grown man will have difficulty lifting them up (ever had a child fall asleep on your lap before?).
It is for this reason that I recommend stepping on the scales only once a week and making that either Saturday or Sunday morning.
Why just once a week? You’re much less likely to run into fluctuating weights if you only weigh yourself once a week.
Why not once a month then? Once a month is too long to provide enough data to track your progress. There is too much chance that you’ll weigh yourself at a time when you are not feeling well, or are stressed over something, and this will put your data our of whack for that whole month. Weighing yourself weekly will smooth that out even if you do weigh yourself on days like that.
Why on Saturday or Sunday morning? This may not be the best for all readers, but I find that Saturday or Sunday morning is when I feel the most similar week to week. I wake up after a sleep in and I don’t have to go to work so I’m not in a rush. I find that this will give an accurate picture on what kind of progress I’m making (and it is also for this reason that evenings during the week are the worst time to weigh yourself).
Another important thing to remember is that even if you haven’t lost weight, it doesn’t mean that you haven’t made progress.
Fat weighs less than muscle - that is a fact. If you lose fat and gain muscle there is a chance you’ll weigh the same (or even more) but this will probably mean that you’ll look better and feel better than you did when you weighed less! It’s a funny thing with fitness - we can’t just focus on one particular area. And remember, the more muscle you have on your frame, the higher and faster your motabilism levels will be so your body will help to keep the flab off even when you’re not working out.
So scales (as helpful as they can be to track progress), are not the be all and end all of our success. Sometimes the mirror is a more accurate measurement to go by. Although as we are all so critical on ourselves, it’s quite often our spouses or friends (that we can trust will be honest) who can help us gage our progress.
Next time you step onto your scales, just remember that they can never tell the whole picture!
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