How Often You Should Weigh Yourself
Introduction
Simply put, body weight is a core health and wellness metric that people should remain cognizant of on a routine basis.
Body weight matters as a health metric because, when combined with other metrics like height and waist circumference, it can paint a holistic picture of someone’s overall size and shape.
Beyond mere aesthetics, your overall size and shape are linked to the short- and long-term health risks you face (and to what should be done about them). Awareness of your body weight is therefore one component of overall health awareness that supports thoughtful health and wellness decisions.
Regardless of whether you are satisfied with your current weight, it can be difficult to develop weight-related habits that work best for you.
One common question people face is how often to weigh themselves: how often is enough, and how often is too much? Let’s look at the extremes of weighing too infrequently and too frequently before introducing the happy medium.
The disadvantages of weighing yourself too infrequently
If we assume that body weight is a metric you should be aware of, weighing yourself too infrequently would be akin to flying an airplane while checking your altitude only every 30 minutes.
Even so, many individuals do not know their current body weight accurately. Many of them rely on infrequent opportunities like annual physicals and wellness checks to find out.
A significant drawback of this approach is that, as time passes after the appointment, the single measurement fades from our minds; as its relevance to our day-to-day experience diminishes, so too do its significance and our motivation to influence the results of future measurements.
There is also the risk that infrequent body weight measurements give us an inaccurate picture of our weight. For example, many individuals gain some weight during the winter and lose some during the summer. If you visit the doctor only in certain seasons, you could be left with a cloudy picture of your typical body weight.
Lastly, it is important to remember that doctor’s appointments and other healthcare visits often touch on a wide range of topics. When reflecting on any one visit, it can be difficult to remember all of the topics that were discussed or to assign each an appropriate level of significance in our minds.
Most of the time, a healthcare professional will measure your body weight at the beginning of your appointment. If the consultation later in the visit happens to focus on serious topics like cancer or high blood pressure, it becomes easy to forget, or subconsciously de-prioritize, even a recently measured body weight.
If yearly or even seasonal measurements of body weight are too infrequent, would monthly or weekly measurements be substantially better? As a guard against forgetting or subconsciously de-prioritizing the measurement, the answer is “yes.”
However, weighing yourself at home on a monthly or weekly basis introduces the added risk of tempting you to read too much into any one measurement. Making a ritual of body weight measurements can create fear and anxiety around weighing yourself, which ultimately undermines the purpose of measuring in the first place.
Imagine someone who weighs themselves once a week, on Sundays, as part of working toward a weight-related goal.
Early in the following week (Monday, Tuesday), they may be fixated on the result of their recent measurement. If they over-interpret its accuracy or significance, they may overcorrect or otherwise deviate from their weight-related health routines.
By Wednesday or Thursday, the most recent measurement may fade from their consciousness, and they may slowly begin to make different diet and exercise decisions than they did at the beginning of the week. As Friday and Saturday roll around, they may begin to feel apprehensive about the next measurement, now only a day or two away.
Each of these stages introduces some inconsistency and uncertainty into someone’s attitude toward, or behavior around, a key health metric. Depending on how absorbed they are in weight-related thinking and routines, this instability may cloud their decision-making and lead to eventual disappointment with future measurements.
The disadvantages of weighing yourself too frequently
Upon considering the disadvantages of infrequent body weight measurements, you may conclude that measuring your body weight as often as possible is the optimum solution. In reality, weighing yourself too frequently has disadvantages of its own.
Specifically, weighing yourself several times a day can lead to an unhelpful fixation on your moment-to-moment body weight. After all, it is natural for body weight to fluctuate throughout the day with our activities (e.g., exercise) and our consumption of food, fluids, and salt.
For example, most individuals weigh slightly less in the morning than at night because they go without food and fluids while they sleep and lose water through breathing and perspiration overnight.
As a result, weighing yourself multiple times a day can contribute to disappointment or confusion, because the number on the scale shifts with these natural fluctuations. Such negative emotions can serve as the seed for a weight-related obsession that eventually pushes us to view all of our health and wellness decisions through the lens of body weight.
Ideally, new diet and lifestyle changes should be guided by rational, long-term health-related values. It follows that the impact of new health and wellness choices should be assessed on a week-to-week or month-to-month basis.
At shorter timescales, your brain will be searching in vain for a body weight signal amongst the noise of physiological fluctuations and lifestyle influences.
The Goldilocks zone
If weighing yourself weekly or monthly is too infrequent, and weighing yourself multiple times a day is too frequent, what about exactly once a day?
Provided that the measurement takes place at a consistent time of day (ideally the morning), you could make the case that weighing yourself once a day is the best overall approach.
Some specific advantages of consistent daily measurements, taken upon awakening, include:
Establishing a steady awareness of body weight and its relationship to your lifestyle choices
Providing a reliable, apples-to-apples comparison of body weight between two points in time
Smoothing out the impact of day-to-day differences in fluid and salt consumption when readings are viewed as a trend
Allowing you to visualize accurate body weight trends across weeks, months, or years
Diminishing the significance of any single measurement, which can reduce anxiety or shame about past and future readings that occur more infrequently (e.g., weekly, monthly)
Reducing the risk of body weight fixation that multiple daily weigh-ins can worsen
Wellness takeaways
Setting aside aesthetic preferences and social judgments, body weight is best thought of as a key health metric that everyone should keep tabs on. For most people, weighing yourself once a day upon awakening is enough to build an accurate picture of your body weight over time.
As with all health habits, a long-term perspective on body weight is key: do not read too much into the number you see on the scale. No single number can capture your health status, so no measurement, or series of measurements, should fill you with shame or despair.
Rather, body weight measurements are simply one piece of medical information: you can use the insights they provide to set and work toward positive health-related goals.
Tracking daily measurements over time can also reveal meaningful trends that you can reference when revisiting your approach to food, exercise, or other health and wellness habits.
Thank you for your time and attention!
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