Tracking bodyweight is an important part of your fitness goals. Whether you're trying to lose weight, gain weight, or maintain weight, an accurate picture of how your body is responding to your diet and exercise is crucial. Here are some tips for tracking your bodyweight so you can get the most out of your hard work.
Logging your bodyweight every day requires making your weigh-ins a habit, but the increase in reliable data is important. Weighing yourself at the same time every day makes this data even more accurate. If you have a scale at home, I find the best time to weigh myself is in the morning before I eat anything. If your scale is not at home (like using a scale at the gym), then any consistency in time of day and how much you've eaten prior to weighing yourself will help with the data input. Using a gym scale also likely means not weighing yourself every day, but as often as you can is still helpful!
It's human nature to want results from any diet or exercise changes to manifest in bodyweight changes as soon as possible. I have found that I need to give my body at least two weeks to get acclimated to the new status before evaulating the progress I'm making towards my goal. As an example, if my goal is to start losing weight, then I might decrease my daily calories by an average of 250 calories per day. My day-to-day scale readings might be flat (or even go up!) during the first week or two, so I need to give my body a chance to settle in to a new normal before making any furthar adjustments.
Seeing your daily bodyweight can be mentally challenging, as each day can have wild swings depending on a lot of factors. A big daily increase when you're trying to lose weight (or a big drop when you're trying to gain weight) can be disheartening. For this reason, I recommend looking at your weekly average instead of a daily value. TrackYourStrength automatically calculates weekly averages for you, as well as showing you the week-over-week change in the weekly average. This bigger picture approach helps you see the trends instead of the daily changes. The weekly averages in TrackYourStrength are automatically graphed and provided for free, so if you haven't already signed up, check it out today!