High Fat, Low Carb Diet Day Five: Why Not to Weigh Yourself Daily

Checking your weight during a diet can help boost morale, and show you that you are making steady progress. However for the measurements to be accurate you should follow certain rules, especially when weighing yourself daily.

Our weight changes during the day for various reasons – dehydration, meals, exercise. For best results it is good to mimic the conditions of the initial weigh in as closely as possible. This is easiest done in the morning, possibly after a visit to the toilet. You will be before any meals, and the morning conditions are least altered by daily activities.

Many diets and weight loss programs will advise against weighing yourself every day. The reason behind this is that diets that promote slow weight loss, can be prone to daily set backs. Simply because just the hydration level can amount to a couple of pounds difference in weight. Nobody likes to fail. And when you are fighting hard to reach your goal even a set back of a pound can discouraging.

Even despite knowing all this I was saddened this morning. But the fact is this is supposed to be a diary, so doing a weekly or bi-weekly weigh in would not be as informative as a daily one to any prospect readers. Thus I have to resist the urge to stop weighing myself and try to keep up with the diet, even despite the possible disappointments.

The important thing to keep in mind is that losing weight in small steps is actually the healthy way. Too quick weight loss can actually produce negative effects like excess skin in previously fat areas or higher risk of a yo-yo effect. Gradual progress helps your body to consistently adopt to the new weight and things related to it: metabolism, skin amount, the portion of food consumed in one sitting, etc.

So far I have not done any extra exercise to increase my weight lose. I am hoping to change that next week with some much needed gym attendance. For the record, I usually do about 30 – 60 minutes of walking every day to work and back, thus obviously some additional activity should speed up the weight loss.

The Boring Stuff

Weight: 82.8kg

Date: 15/08/2008

• Breakfast:

  • Sour cream

  • Water

• Lunch

  • Beef in black bean sauce (without the sauce) and fried cashew nuts and celery

  • Water

• Dinner

  • Sausage with cottage cheese and radishes

  • Water