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Why I weigh myself at the same time every day

admin 2 min read

Body weight moves by a kilo or more across a single day. A fixed time does not remove that swing - it stops the swing being mistaken for progress.

Weigh yourself twice in one day and you will get two different numbers, often more than a kilogram apart. Nothing has happened to your body in between. What changed is how much water and food it is currently carrying.

Where the swing comes from

  • Water. Salt from the night before, and how much you drank, both move the number by several hundred grams.
  • Food still being digested. A meal weighs what it weighs until it is gone.
  • Time of day. Morning is consistently the lowest reading, for the two reasons above.

None of this is fat. It is noise, and noise is only a problem when you mistake it for signal.

What a fixed time actually buys

Measuring at 07:30 every morning does not eliminate any of that swing. It holds the conditions roughly constant, so that when the number does move, the movement means something. Comparing this morning to yesterday morning is a fair comparison. Comparing this morning to last night is not a comparison at all.

The routine I settled on: after waking, before eating or drinking, same scale, same floor. Hard floor rather than carpet, which sounds fussy and is worth a couple of hundred grams.

Missing a day is fine. Weighing at a different hour and logging it next to the morning readings is worse than missing it, because it puts a number in the record that the trend line will take seriously.

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