Weight Loss Week 5: 14.5 pounds to go

February 4 weight: 176.5

Last 5 days average weight: 178.2

January 28 weight: 181

Workouts in last 7 days: 6

Ah, back on pace. I’ve lost 4.5 pounds in the last week, which makes up for last week’s gain and then some. And not only that, it takes me past the “10 pounds lost” milestone after just 5 weeks. Apparently working out regularly and not snacking on calorie-dense foods is important to weight loss. Who knew?

Chart!

Weight loss graph week 4

Very squiggly. And here’s me this morning:

So, let’s talk about weighing. People sometimes tell me that you shouldn’t weight yourself every day because your weight fluctuates naturally and you can get depressed when you stay the same or even gain weight the morning after what you considered a good day. Poppycock. It’s true that your weight fluctuates (look at the green line in that graph above), but the regular feedback motivates me more than it demotivates, and if I have a bad (or a particularly good) weigh-in I remember that the orange, 5-day average line up there is what matters more.

I weigh myself every morning. I stumble into the bathroom, use the toilet, get nekkid, and then step on the scale. Same conditions every morning, which removes many sources of random error variance, such as what you’re wearing and how full your bladder or stomach is. Sure, it doesn’t eliminate the variance in your weight not attributable to diet and exercise, but it gets close enough. Heck, one dieting hack I’ve started doing is weighing myself in the evening after dinner, thinking “Okay, if I don’t snack on anything else for the rest of the night, the laws of physics demand that I will weigh no more –and maybe less– than this in the morning.” It works.

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