When Is The Best Time to Weigh Myself?

(Photo by Kizette on Flickr)

I get this question quite often. “Should I weigh myself in the morning?” or “How about at night?” There’s also the “How often is good?” and the famous “My weight just went up for no reason at all!”physics diet or the great iPhone app called WeightBot to track your overall, moving averages weight loss instead of your day-to-day fluctuations.

All these questions have one thing in common — they assume there’s an objective, ideal, perfect time to weigh yourself, when really nothing like that exists.

They also assume weighing yourself is actually important at all, but that’s something I’ll tackle at the end of this article. First, on to the advice.

On A Fixed Schedule — And No More

Stick to a specific weigh-in schedule and do whatever you can to not break it. And while you’re working hard to stick to those weigh-in days, you need to do everything in your power to not over-weigh yourself.

Don’t sneak in extra measurements when you don’t need to. Don’t give yourself false hope and optimism by making sure it’s 6AM in the morning and your stomach/bowels are empty before you sneak in an extra little glance at the scale.

This isn’t how metrics become effective. They only start to work when you can compare back, and see a clear progression from point A to point B. Constantly checking and trying to game the system won’t get you any closer to this.

Moving on — if you want to get that “from point A to B” sense, when is the best time of day to do your weigh-in?

Whenever You Want.

It doesn’t really matter. You shouldn’t be eating caloric bomb-meals on a daily basis anyway, so the chances of you doing a catastrophically de-motivating weigh-in in that crucial 2-hour window after a Thanksgiving or Christmas overload dinner are pretty slim.

There will be variation regardless, so you need to learn to deal with that variation from a more distanced perspective instead of trying to tweak it on a daily basis.

“And how do I do that”, you might ask? Well, that brings us to…

Use A Trending Graph Instead

Don’t use a standard graph that just shows a line jumping up and down with your weight. Use something like the physics diet or the great iPhone app called WeightBot to track your overall, moving averages weight loss instead of your day-to-day fluctuations.

This really works because it lets you be more realistic about your weight, and see a longer trend towards fat loss and weight loss as happening over weeks and months, making it all the easier (mentally, at least) to ignore the fact that you might be a few pounds heavier one day (or morning) than another.

Get Away From the Weight Game if you Can

In the end, all these tips are just propping up something you should try and move away from, anyway. If you’re doing strength training, just plain old weight loss isn’t going to be your goal. You’ll want fat loss, and that often means converting fat into muscle. Sure, you’ll see weight loss too, but it’s not going to be the cliched idea of just “dropping the fat off” like you see on TV commercials or on “The Biggest Loser”.

The more you read about strength training, and the more you do it — the more confident you become that your exercises really are having an effect, and suddenly a before/after photo can become way more of an inspiration than any scale ever could.