Otherwise you will think your diet stopped working after a while
The reason checking the scale is useful is because they can clue you in on where a given caloric input is taking you, up or down. The details and timeline aren't really relevant, because if you want the gains to stay then that "diet" is your new, permanent, lifestyle.
If you were overweight but stable, a temporary restriction followed by a return to the original diet would suffice, right?
That's where this article is helpful, as it explains how (and how much) weight gain can be expected when you end the temporary restrictions.
The reason going on a fixed deficit (or bulk) will not just endlessly let you lose or gain weight is because when you lose weight, your body starts being able to operate on fewer and fewer calories. Your metabolism might improve, but nowhere near enough to counter this effect. And vice versa when for bulking.
If you have a high tolerance for food repetition, you can even experimentally see this really easily. Lay out a diet for cutting and you can see the scale will gradually trend towards some specific weight with the decreases getting smaller and smaller. And vice versa when bulking, where you'll see initial big gains followed by a leveling out as your body approaches its new equilibrium caloric intake. This is something anybody who's done any e.g. body building can attest to.
So going on a deficit and then going back to eating what you were just means that you're just going to head back to your old weight. So diets really need to be a permanent lifestyle thing, which is why finding one you can be comfortable with is so critical.
> The reason checking the scale is useful is because they can clue you in on where a given caloric input is taking you, up or down.
you could just grab your stomach fat to get a more accurate progress measurement
You just track your weight and your caloric intake and it tells you how much you're burning and how much more or less you need to hit a particular rate of weight change.
So I did a big ass spreadsheet, plotting rolling 7 day + rolling 24 days and their derivatives.
Key insights of my strategy:
- instant measurement does not matter, as in it's actually not worth looking at every day, only retrospectively when observed as a collection upon looking for root causes of deviations of the averages. most advices about weighting in at a certain time or a certain day of the week is about faking an average with discrete measurements (which kinda works but requires extremely effortful consistency to make sense, and any error throws the fake average off big time)
- 24 day average is really nice and meaningful: missing or mismeasuring (not weighting early morning+ after poop, scale glitch...) a few measurements would be inconsequential, a couple stray events would not affect it, a positive derivative would mean I must take immediate action (as in, get back on track with being consistent) to correct course and reverse the trend. when in the losing weight phase, a negative derivative closing in towards zero would mean I should pay a bit more attention to being consistent. as target weight† nears or is attained the meaning of that derivative shifts a bit (obviously one does not want to perpetually lose weight, so things offset and taper off)
- if weighting multiple times a day for averages it would consider only the minimum for that day, but it would also give me a spread for a given day, allowing me to understand fine grained details of my body behaviour in face of specific events (overeating, undereating, doing sports, drinking water, drinking alcohol when partying) and compare that to the next day(s). such events preceding each measurement were annotated on the corresponding row.
- from an initial data gathering and retrospective, 24 day appeared to be my body latency: when I did something effective or veered off course the effect would visibly settle in as long term weight loss or gain after that amount of time (this would be visible in raw data, not artificially come from the average construction, so I tuned that average to 24 days to produce the corresponding synthetic, immediately meaningful derivative value)
- 7 day allows for shorter term observation and reactions, but is more susceptible to noise. It appeared from observational data that it was the rough scale at which things would start to have long term effects happening at t+latency. e.g not doing sports, or overeating, or bad sleep from t to t+5~7 would produce a long term, lasting effet at t+20~25 days; lower than that and it would just evaporate.
overall it removed a whole lot of complexity, guesswork, and guilt, which translated in not skipping measurements, which produced more and better data, making the whole process a non-event, progressively building healthy habits, making it easier to course correct, and so on and so forth.
the end: I shed all the excess weight two years before the "deadline" without feeling that I put much effort into it (there was effort, especially when I needed to kick my ass a couple times, but it did not feel like I was constantly abusing my body; the "consistency" effort was spread out and thus much more manageable). concretely I ended up both feeling (internal assessment) and looking (external feedback) younger in my late 30s than in my late 20s.
I've since replaced that with a Garmin watch + scale and the Garmin app does pretty much what my spreadsheet did, minus the derivative bits, which I really miss.
† I never aimed for an actual weight value, but for an intrinsic feeling of healthiness, which for me happens to correspond to a specific weight range.