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Old February 2nd, 2009, 03:39 PM posted to alt.support.diet
Doug Freyburger
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Default Which of these philosophies on weighing yourself do you agreewith

wrote:

Well do you agree with weighing every day or do you agree with
weighing every week or what?


If you have an emotional problem with what you see on
the scale after being on plan and not cheating, then you
are weighing too often. Dieting is not supposed to be
about self inflicted emotional trauma aimed at driving
you back off your diet.

If you weigh yourself more than once per day then you
have an emotional problem with the scale and you are
weighing too often. There are a few reasons for weighing
more than once per day but they are about unemotional
gathering of error bar statistics not about fat loss.

I think the trend is to weigh weekly or less early on,
then gradually build confidence and emotional detachment,
then gradually switch to weighings more often than
weekly during maintenance.

So, once past emotional hurdles I prefer a daily weighing
where the number is put into some averaging formula to
see the trends. Average of the last 7 days works well.
The reason for this is random water retention - No matter
how much effort is put into battling water retention it
never works so it's wasted effort. So learn your swing
and use averaging to ignore it.

One simple approach -

During loss phases while on plan only note new lows.
During maintenance while on place only note new highs
and use those new highs to know when to go back to a
losing phase. While off plan, focus on getting back on
plan and use the scale however helps without emotional
problems.