How frequently should you weigh yourself?

So when it comes to burning fat and losing weight, we of course need to make sure that whatever we're doing is supporting the process. Now, I bring this up because one of the things that can often derail us is weighing ourselves too frequently or not understanding what the weight on the scale actually represents. Now, what I mean by this is if we weigh too frequently then what we sometimes find is that the changes that we see are not profound enough to our own mind that we actually become demotivated. So for example, people that weigh every single day tend to be, I guess, in the worst place in terms of mental, mental state or psychology towards their weight loss. And this is because we can see too many fluctuations. For example, even myself, I average around 73.5, 74 kilos at the moment. But if I step on the scale in the morning, I can be up to 2 kilos heavier in the evening. And then of course, the next morning I might wake up and I'm now half a kg heavier than I was yesterday morning. And then I go to bed and then I wake up the following day and I'm now half a kilo less than I was 2 days ago and so on. So we see these big fluctuations, but it doesn't really mean anything because we're weighing so frequently that not really too much could have actually taken place within our physiology, aside from variations and fluctuations within our hydration levels or our carbohydrate content and so on. Because what we have to remember with carbs is the, the greater our carbohydrate consumption, the more water we will tend to hold on to and things like this. So they're all going to affect the scale weight. So we might jump on and be like, oh, I've lost 2 kilos in the last 2 days. But have you really? It's like you might have lost 2 kilos in terms of literal weight, but that doesn't mean that you necessarily lost or burned off 2 kilos of body fat. And let's face it, for most of us, it's the body fat that we're trying to get rid of. So this is the issue that we have with daily weighing. Now, for some people, they're like, okay, well, what about weekly? Now, weekly weighing can be a good way to hold you accountable because quite often it's like, oh, well, if I've got to weigh in every single Friday, for example, then I know that I need to at least do some of the right things throughout the week in order to sort of ensure that when I get to Friday, I jump on the scale and I see my weight moving in the direction I want or need it to go. So weekly can be good for accountability, but unfortunately, because it's still only a relatively short period of time, we can still see big fluctuations in both directions that in the moment don't really seem to make any sense. So for example, I might jump on the scale today and I'm 70 kilos and my goal might be to lose weight. So my goal is to get to 65, for example, but I jump on the scale today, it's my first Friday, I jump on and I'm 70K. Brilliant. Now I might go about my week, do all the things I think I know I need to do in order to get the result I want. Then I get to next Friday and suddenly I'm up 1.2 kilos. And I'm like, hold on, I've been doing all the right things. Last week I was 70, this week I'm 71.2. What the hell is going on? This doesn't seem right. Oh well, hopefully it's a blip or an anomaly, and I carry on. So now I carry on doing the right things again, hopefully get to the end of the following week. So we're now 2 weeks out from that original 70 kilos. I jump on the scale, suddenly I'm 69.5. So it's like, hold on, so I gained 1.2 kilos and then I lost 1.7. Now what happened obviously as a net result of that is we lost half a kilo in a 2-week period, which is a reasonable amount of weight to lose. Yes, we can lose more if we do more extreme things, but half a kilo every fortnight is very sustainable for most people. So what we would find is, okay, well, actually I lost half a kilo. That's good. It's the direction I'm looking to go in. But the fluctuation in the middle, the 1.2 up and the 1.7 down, to get me that 1 point— oh sorry, that 0.5 total loss, didn't really mean much. So I had this emotional upheaval because what the fuck, I've gained 1.2 kilos, and then of course I get this massive relief where, oh my God, I just lost 1.7. So what it often does for us is it creates too much of a swing in our emotional pendulum. So what I recommend you do is actually weigh fortnightly if you're going to weigh at all, because fortnightly tends to give us a much clearer picture of whether we're truly moving in the right direction because things tend to balance out over that approximately 14-day period. We will often see a much better reflection of what changes have taken place in the body. Have I really lost weight, or is this just simply fluctuation in my daily hydration levels or daily carbohydrate stores and things like that? So fortnightly is, is the best, um, weigh-in frequency that I would recommend if you're doing, uh, something where you need to weigh in regularly to, to help keep you on track, whether it's weight loss or even gaining weight and so on. So we would check every 2 weeks. But what I would recommend you do, if possible, is that you use a scale that allows you to also track your body fat percentage. Because overall your body fat percentage is much— well, in reality, more important. It's a much more important statistic or data point to track than your weight, because your weight doesn't really mean much. What, what makes it good or bad is what that weight is made up of. So for example, 70 kilos at 10% body fat is, generally speaking, a lot better than being 70 kilos at 25% body fat for the average male. So if I jump on the scale, but we're both 70, the two of us, we're 70, one of us is 10% and one of us is 25%. Well, we on the scale appear to be identical. We're both 70 kilos. But of course, it's what that 70 kilos is made up of that's going to determine whether you are maybe at increased risk of certain health issues, metabolic conditions and so on. So if we can track body fat percentage as well and The truth is most of these digital scales that we step on and check, they're not 100% accurate. They're always plus or minus a few percent, but they give you a good indication of the change over time. No different from the weight. So we jump on the scale, oh, my weight is 70, then it was 69.5, then it was 69, and so on. Oh, I see this change over time. That's also what we would be looking for in the body fat percentage that we're tracking at the same time. Now, if you wanted to get real technical, and do things even better, um, but still in the comfort of your own home, you could buy yourself a set of skinfold calipers. And then you can just— of course, there are specific sites you can use and track if you want to work out complete or whole body fat percentage and things like that. But if not, you could just pick a few sites on the body. You could pick the abdominal region, maybe the love handle, maybe the thigh, maybe your bicep or your tricep, and so on. You can just pick ones that are easy enough for you to get to, to get the pinch so that you can measure it and then track again the changes in millimeters over time. Oh, today I'm 25 millimeters on the app. Next week, oh, I'm 24 millimeters on the app. Cool. Another week after that, oh, I'm 22 millimeters on the apps, and so on. So as long as you see things trending in the right direction, all of these different markers that you could track will help to keep you on track. And obviously, help to show you whether you're losing the correct weight or not. Because if you're just jumping on the scale and losing weight, that could mean anything. Could mean you're losing muscle mass, could mean you're losing bone density and so on, which tends to take a bit longer than a week or so, obviously, with bone density and things like that. But my point being, over time, we want our body to get better. We want to be fitter, leaner, stronger, healthier. But that doesn't necessarily come just from weight loss alone. We need to know what weight we are losing, what that weight that we've lost consists of so that we can ensure that we're losing the correct weight, as in the fat mass and not our lean mass. So hope that helps, guys. If you have any other questions, like I always say to you guys, drop them in the comments below and I will get them answered for you in my upcoming videos. And if you want to know more about what it is we do here, check us out at strongerthanlife.com. And I look forward to chatting with you all in my next video. Take it easy, people.