Daily Weigh-In May Help Dieters Lose | Hacker News Reader

Daily Weigh-In May Help Dieters Lose

webmd.com

14 pointschegra8418 comments

I can confirm this. I weighed myself every morning since the end of December 09 and I have dropped 53.2 pounds (240 lb to 186.8 lb).

Obviously the weighing in didn't make me the lose the weight, it was the reinforcement and the notice of a gradual change (or gradual increase day-over-day) that kept me going with my new eating habits.

This is one of the tips espoused by the Hacker's Diet. I used this more than a decade ago to drop 20lbs:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html

The concept should be familiar to those in startup land, though: "You Can't Improve What You Don't Measure"

Since your day-to-day weight fluctuates, daily weighing wouldn't show you accurate day-to-day improvements properly. My guess is that weighing yourself daily is more about staying focused and engaged; you're constantly checking-in with what you're doing, and more likely to think about it and stick with it.

The Hacker's Diet accounts for this by encouraging you to look at a moving average of your daily weight, rather than the number itself:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/e4/signalnoise.html#Fa73

Weight lose is super simple, I am down 25kg since Jan 2010 following the primal blueprint guidelines: http://www.marksdailyapple.com

No gimmicks, no hours of pounding the pavement, no stupid exercise machines, no processed crap food, just eat the right healthy and natural foods and your body will naturally drop down to the right body fat percentage. Plus I can eat heaps of bacon and steak and not feel guilty about it anymore.

This video is fantastic, well worth the 90 minutes to watch it, explains in detail what happens to carbs in your body: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM&feature=playe...

This is a fantastic movie also, highly recommend you get a copy: http://www.fathead-movie.com

This is pretty obvious to me, made complicated by people who want super answers or miracle get rich quicks or anything like that. If you see your weight every day and seeing it going up, you eat less. If you see it going down, you get motivated and stay on the same track.

"I lost 20 pounds...How? I drank bear piss and took up fencing. How the fuck you think, son? I exercised."

People will probably bite back saying that exercise doesn't correlate with weight loss. That is true, but less important than the ultimate result: persistent weight loss. And exercise corresponds damned well with persistent weight loss. Cheers!

As a personal anecdote, daily weigh-in was crucial for my (rather humble) weight loss - from 82 to 75 kg in about 12 weeks. I would weigh myself in at the same time - in the morning, before taking in any food or drink, but after taking care of the bodily needs. I never had the need to count the calories, so I have absolutely no idea what my calorie intake was while losing weight compared to normal diet. I do, however, keep a fairly consistent eating regime. So, the daily weigh in results were just used to adjust the size of portions a little bit here and there. It definitely helped.

I have no idea if it works or not, but I want to point out two things. 1: It seems that this is a correlation study rather than a causality study. 2: Your weight can fluctuate on a day to day basis, especially depending on what you've eaten recently, how much water you've drank, the time of day, whether you've gone to the bathroom, etc. The overall trend over a larger period of time is what's important. Still, this 2nd argument may be irrelevant if the point is just to keep you motivated rather than to track your weight.

Yes, but if you keep track of it, you learn how much weight a glass of water adds, for example, and you can calibrate for that. I'd say you learn more about how to control your weight in the long run if you keep track of these daily fluctuations.

But these fluctuations are often just noise. Having a glass of water before you step on the scale isn't going to help you lose or gain weight, but it still shows up on the scale. You're just micro-managing things that don't matter on this point. And then are just some things you can't control. If you have bowel movements at the same time every day, then that's not an issue; but if you go at different times every day (or not even every day), you might register as having gained two pounds one morning, when in fact you ate at a caloric deficit the day before.

But if you are going to weigh yourself every morning, keep this in mind and try to keep the exact same conditions every morning. Do it at the same time every day, either eat breakfast before weighing yourself every time or after every time, etc., otherwise you'll be worrying about changes in weight that don't mean anything.

The excel graph will take into account those little things. As long as the direction continues downward, the daily numbers don't matter.

I found that weighing myself in the morning, after going to the bathroom but before eating or drinking anything gave the most consistent results.

Seems logical to me, the body has been given enough time to process / eliminate the results of your latest food / drink intake, so there would be the least amount of 'fluctuation'.

When I was actively trying to lose weight, I was checking it every day. What I found was that I might lose a pound every day or so, then next day I'm up 3 pounds. But over time I was noticing a new, lower, upper limit to the down/up cycle.

At first it was 205, then 200, then 197, and now I'm surprised if I go over 180.

Yeah, checking it helped me keep u running and not eating crap, because it gave me some sense of accomplishment and further motivation.

What gets measured gets done.

This definitely works for me. I weigh myself each morning and night. I frequently weigh myself after drinking x glasses of water or eating a meal. Sometimes I'll even weigh myself hourly to learn how quickly I'm burning energy. After a few years, I've gotten a really good idea of what (and how much) I should be eating to lose or maintain my weight.

Weighing yourself hourly to see how quickly you're burning energy is misguiding. When you burn carbs/fat you're not expelling them from the body. You're converting them to another form in a process that releases energy that your body can use. E=mc^2 considerations aside, as you wouldn't be able to detect those differences anyway, your weight is still the same. The waste products later get expelled when you go to the bathroom, sweat, etc.

I'm traveling through the US South this week and the Publix grocery stores have scales in the entryways. (I assume for this purpose.) Great idea.

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