Tai-Lin's Journal, 16 July 2017

Yay!! You are right, every little bit counts and it is exciting. You hang in there and keep doing what you are doing so well! 

Well done every bit matters 

Every ounce matters!! ;) 

Thanks, my friends! Well, i was right ~ every little bit counts. This morning i had gained ~ 2.1 pounds! That sure took the wind out of my sails. But i may weigh less again tomorrow. Or maybe not. I had an appointment in Tacoma at noon today, and didn't get a chance to exercise before i left. Nor when i got home. :o( 

Soon come off again, could be humidity, stress hormones - anything really. 

While I weight every day, I monitor the trend. OK for me at the moment it's pretty static but when I'm doing well, the trend takes away the worries about fluctuations. I use an iPad app called HappyScale but there's lot of other things around that do the same job. Take care 

Tai Lin your body weight can fluctuate by 1-4 lbs on average, daily, sometimes it can be more, it depends on what you did, ate and drank over the last 24 hours...I do not grasp why people do not understand this...You need to understand the difference between natural fluctuations and real weight gain, there is absolutely no need nor in fact any real valuable reason to weigh yourself daily, it serves no valuable purpose for most regular folk, aka, you are not on a special medical/training diet such as taking medicines where weight is critical to your dose or you are training to be an astronaut or something, or you are not an athlete whose weight is critical to performance or similar...Thus for most folks, it serves only to relieve the psychological need for instant gratification of effort, as in you like to know your efforts have been rewarded, but your scales are incapable of actually providing this with any meaning, because the measurement is too short term and as you have discovered, suffers from natural variances that can be wildly different from day to day, thus clouding the true value even more...Most people cannot weigh themselves daily without it changing their behaviour and messing with their head, which makes it a mistake, if you can then fair enough, otherwise, just weigh yourself 1 time every 7-14 days, you will still see the trend over the week, and without the mental daily torment of seeing your body weight naturally fluctuating and being trapped into thinking you have somehow put xlb on over the last 12 hours, which you haven't, the scales are only 1 tool you can use for measuring your success and are supposed to be the indicator of a long term trend of either up or hopefully in our cases, down...Your Avg is 1.8 lbs per week this is a great place to be...1-2 lbs a week is the advised long term, sustained, average... 

Thank you, misterbee, for the information. I do know that one's weight fluctuates according to time of day, clothing, food/water intake, etc. I do get a little disappointed when i see that i have gained two pounds, especially if i know i went way over my calories the previous day, or so. On the other hand, i don't get seriously upset because, as i said, i do realize that a fluctuation,is not necessarily going to be long-term. I'm not the type that can wait to weigh once a week. My thinking is that,by weighing daily, if i notice a gain, i can try and compensate, and then i will go down again. However, if i weighed only one every week or two, it would be a lot more work to get it off if i had had a large gain. I guess what i'm saying is, i'm just trying to stay on top of it. :o) 

Hi Tai-Lin, thank you for the response, I understand your thinking. Best of luck and success to you.