A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine is concluding that the key to maintaining weight loss is daily weighing in order to have immediate feedback from which to correct any potential bad behavior or changes.
Personally, this strikes me as making someone incredibly obsessive over every single pound gained or lost in the ebb and flow of a given week. I can understand vigilence, but this is ridiculous. Think of the people who will make wholesale dietary changes after the increase of 2 pounds one day, when it could be nothing more than water retention and maybe not enough fiber. They’ll end up starving themselves for a quick fix.
Stupid. Changes take more than one day, so how can you possibly adjust anything based on a body’s daily fluctuation? The body can easily shift 5 pounds in one day. If you’re looking at that every day and adjusting from there, how can you possibly make any kind of significant changes?
I agree with your assessment. I weigh myself once a week. Unless doing something like the V-Diet your not going to see marked progress everyday due to simple flucuations, and I think it’s discouraging. Just my 2 cents.
This is f’in stupid. I can’t believe a Dr. is recommening this. I’m sure if the article continued on a bit, they would recommend daily binging or purging to bring those massive daily fluctuations under control.
I weight myself when I need to know whether I am going to make weight…which is not that often. Otherwise, I stay the hell away from scales. They make me focus on wrong stuff. Instead, I look at myself in the mirror, and make sure that my belts are not getting tighter. (Incidentally, I noticed a few weeks ago that my squat belt shrunk, but it somehow stretched back out since then.)
It’s a page from “The Hacker’s Diet”. The dieting advice is pretty antequated compared to what we know here, but the page I linked is pretty interesting, as it deals with teasing out statistically significant information from the daily weight fluctuations.
The “floats and sinkers” weight charts are particularily interesting.
The only benefit I can see is it might keep people focused on not eating crap like cookies and cake because they would be afraid that it might effect the scale reading.
Of course once they eat crap for a day or two and see the scale not change they might think it is OK to eat crap.
I weigh myself daily every morning out of habit and just general overall curiosity. But I make no decisions off of this number. My decisions are made if my weight stays the same 3 saturdays in a row. Then I will adjust. Slow and steady wins the race!
There is nothing wrong with weighing yourself daily.
You’ll find that you start to know what to expect based on what you were eating the day before.
These days, because I’m calorie cycling, I can expect a four or five pound shift, and then if I up the fiber intake, that can have effects as well.
If the weight doesn’t do what it should, then you can probably figure out what to attribute it to. Perhaps the weekend of drinking and partying. Maybe the two days missed at the gym. Perhaps the day of NEPA compared to sitting in the office.
All that said, I wouldn’t advocate blindly looking at the weight on a daily basis and thinking it means you need to make an adjustment because of normal fluctuations. However, the fluctuations are in fact based on what you eat and drink…
This level of being “in tune” might be more important for those that have trouble losing fat or gaining muscle. However, I think it is best combined with the mirror check and/or the tape measure check (as long as you aren’t the obsessive type).
[quote]Kuz wrote:
A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine is concluding that the key to maintaining weight loss is daily weighing in order to have immediate feedback from which to correct any potential bad behavior or changes.
Personally, this strikes me as making someone incredibly obsessive over every single pound gained or lost in the ebb and flow of a given week. I can understand vigilence, but this is ridiculous. Think of the people who will make wholesale dietary changes after the increase of 2 pounds one day, when it could be nothing more than water retention and maybe not enough fiber. They’ll end up starving themselves for a quick fix.
How’s that going to be healthy in the end?[/quote]
I wonder what is more valuable for the advancement of knowledge: YOUR opinion or a fucking scientific study.
I’d need to read the study, but if empircal evidence supports daily weighing, then your opinion is worthless.
Why do you so many of you believe your a priori assumptions trump empiricism?
It’s a page from “The Hacker’s Diet”. The dieting advice is pretty antequated compared to what we know here, but the page I linked is pretty interesting, as it deals with teasing out statistically significant information from the daily weight fluctuations.
The “floats and sinkers” weight charts are particularily interesting.
If you’re geekily-oriented, give it a look.[/quote]
Awesome site! I’d been using daily weighings for the V-Diet in Excel and had created a line graph. Excel also lets you create a trendline. Cool stuff: http://www.statsclass.com/excel/graphs/trend.html
I wonder what is more valuable for the advancement of knowledge: YOUR opinion or a fucking scientific study.
[/quote]
Becuase “fucking scientific studies” also tell us that weightlifitng is unhealthy for you and causes blindness. I think accepting what a research paper shows as holding greater signifigance than your own personal experience and knowing what works for you in the gym is an easy path to paralysis by analysis.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
The only benefit I can see is it might keep people focused on not eating crap like cookies and cake because they would be afraid that it might effect the scale reading.
Of course once they eat crap for a day or two and see the scale not change they might think it is OK to eat crap.
[/quote]
I agree. It’s not necessary for most here, and it’s true that daily changes in weight mean little to nothing. But it helps people not as ‘hardcore’ as T-Nationers to keep accountability and focused on a healthy lifestyle.
[quote]CaliforniaLaw wrote:
I wonder what is more valuable for the advancement of knowledge: YOUR opinion or a fucking scientific study.
I’d need to read the study, but if empircal evidence supports daily weighing, then your opinion is worthless.
Why do you so many of you believe your a priori assumptions trump empiricism?[/quote]
Having spoken only for myself as one not given to “a priori assumptions” (usually, though I’m only human) this would be of no use to me.
Further, not all alleged “scientific” studies are created with equal empirical objectivity. Especially when the interpretation of human behavior is an integral component used in the conclusions as appears to be the case with this one.
