Jim KatsoulisJim AI — Your Personal Guide to Living at Your Goal Weight

the scale is a crappy motivator

6 Aug 2025 · 1 min

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Jim Katsoulis argues that using the scale alone is a poor motivator for weight loss for two main reasons: weight changes are inconsistent (plateaus and fluctuations) and people often trade food enjoyment for the brief pleasure of seeing lower numbers — which fails when the scale stops dropping. He recommends tracking multiple measures of progress (physical, mental, emotional feelings; appearance; strength; mobility; flexibility) in addition to the scale to sustain motivation and improve short- and long-term results.

Chapters

The scale alone is a shitty motivator when it comes to losing weight for two big reasons. The first one is that your weight loss is going to be inconsistent and unpredictable. It's not going to be like that weight loss calculator. There's going to be plateaus in there, weeks when you put a little bit of weight on, and weeks when you lose what you expected. But if you're only using the scale as the main source of motivation for you, when you hit those plateaus or the weeks when you put a little bit on, it's devastating and it's very discouraging and hard to keep going. The second reason the scale alone is a shitty motivator is that what a big mistake a lot of people make is they trade the pleasure of the food for the pleasure of that scale going down. But at some point, the scale stops going down, and at that point, a lot of people struggle to stay motivated. So what you need to do is you need to have more measurements of your success than just the scale. Start tracking how you feel physically, mentally, emotionally, how you look, your strength, your mobility, your flexibility, other things other than just the scale. Now, again, you can use the scale, but we need other things as well, and this is going to set you up to get much better results in the short term and the long term.