Weighing yourself every day, is it good or bad?

Arguments in favor of weighing yourself daily

Alert mechanism. According to a study published in the journal Obesity, weighing ourselves daily helps keep us from gaining weight during the holidays, because if one sees that they have put on a little weight they try to compensate for it the next day by eating less or exercising more.
Awareness. Other research from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California also concluded that weighing ourselves daily helps us lose weight because that makes us more aware of how our behaviors affect the weight gain and loss.

Arguments Against Daily Weighing

However, most experts advise against it.

Bad indicator. As Dr. Adelardo Caballero, director of the Obesity Institute explains, weighing yourself every day is not a good indicator: from one day to the next there can be changes in weight (rises or falls) that are not really due to an increase or decrease. decrease in fat, or that the person is gaining weight. In his opinion, weight gains or losses are better valued over the long term.
Danger of anxiety. In addition, in the case of people who are more obsessive about their weight, it can become counterproductive and lead to unnecessary anxiety states.

When and how to weigh yourself?

In spite of everything, Dr. Caballero recognizes that controlling weight on a regular basis helps us to maintain our weight or not to gain weight. And that weighing yourself more or less frequently will also depend on the emotional stability of each one.

How often to weigh yourself. In general, and in his opinion, it is better to weigh yourself once a week, fasting, without clothes and always at the same time and with the same scale.
What day is better to weigh yourself. In most cases, during the week we follow the diet more or less, but when the weekend arrives we usually indulge ourselves, we eat more outside the home … The result is that we can gain some weight. So Monday is not a good day to weigh yourself. Nor is it on Friday because it will surely give us a lower weight that is not real either. The best thing, therefore, would be to weigh yourself one day in between.

Weight is not everything

In any case, as Dr. Caballero points out when it comes to losing weight, what is important is not the total weight, but its composition. The body is made up of fat-free mass (muscle mass, body water, bone mass, protein) and fat mass.

Avoid loss of muscle mass. The important thing is that the weight goes down because the fat mass is decreasing. Losing weight by losing muscle mass would not be losing weight, in the same way that you can gain weight by increasing muscle mass and that would not be gaining weight.
Proper tools. To control the loss of muscle mass, there are household scales that indicate the percentage of fat and that can help us by giving us an approximate percentage close to the real value. Although, Dr. Caballero emphasizes that the ideal would be to be able to have a body composition control in centers or clinics that have professional scales of greater reliability and that also have professionals who can explain the results.