Let’s start with the elephant in the room.
I mean me, the big, fat, hairy, ugly guy.
This year, instead of buying a single 365 day desk calendar¹, I bought several, one of which was the life hacks 2024 calendar:
I bought the calendar because I thought it might be fun and could serve as fodder for this blog; I must admit I was a bit shocked that day 1 of the calendar was useful for this purpose.
You see, the life hack for the first day of 2024 had to do with how you weigh yourself if you’re trying to lose weight. The calendar recommends not looking at day-to-day results and instead focusing on the trend lines.
The justification for this advice is that weight can change during the day. This justification makes sense because as we eat and drink and then, uh…expel waste, each of those actions will cause changes in weight.
However…
My grandmother taught me that “your correct weight is when you wake up in the morning after you’ve used the bathroom before you’ve eaten or drank anything.”
Your correct weight is when you wake up in the morning after you’ve used the bathroom before you’ve eaten or drank anything.
That sounds a lot more scientific than weighing at random times and looking at trend lines. I mean, if I were to weigh myself right after I ate a big meal, I would expect to weigh more than if I weighed right before I ate that meal.
But perhaps the key idea here isn’t that these two ideas are diametrically opposed; in fact, I think they complement each other.
I think if you always weigh yourself in the morning after you’ve used the bathroom but before you eat or drink anything, you have a consistent set of conditions for your sampling.
This consistency is a more scientific way to approach the problem.
And, because of the consistency, you can compare contiguous days to each other.
But that also means that you can look at the trend lines to see changes over time as well. You’ll be able to see if you’ve lost weight for the week or month, for example. And if you have a “bad” day or a cheat day which may be reflected in the data as a day of weight gain, you can see that the slope of the line ultimately goes down.
Your Turn
Tell me in the comments what time of day you usually weigh yourself.
Do you have rules about your eating and weighing schedule? Do you look at day to day data or trend lines?
¹ It turns out, these calendars are 52 days short of because the weekends are a single page instead of being two pages.
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