How Often You Should Weigh Yourself if You’re Trying to Lose Weight

Cornell researchers get to the bottom of the “How often should I weigh in?” quandary. (Photo: Kathryn Swayze/Stocksy

There has always been a lot of conflicting information out there about just how often you should weigh yourself. Once a day? Once a week? Never? According to a new study out of Cornell University, the answer is every day, if you’re trying to lose weight.

The team of researchers conducting this study had previously showed that weighing yourself daily seems to help ward off weight gain in freshmen on campus. So, they wanted to see if the concept might work for weight loss, too.

They recruited 162 men and women from Cornell’s Wellness Center, who were then randomly assigned to either the experimental group or the control group. Those in the experimental group were asked to weigh themselves daily, at a consistent time, and view a graph of their changing weight via a computer program that tracked progress. For a year, they were permitted to do anything they wanted to shed pounds, and were simply given a goal of losing 1 percent of their body weight. When they hit that goal and maintained the weight for 10 days, the computer program would readjust with a new goal of losing another 1 percent body weight.

The control group was told they would receive the intervention after one year, and were allowed to do anything they’d normally do to lose weight in the interim.

The study lasted two years. The ultimate goal for the intervention group was to lose 10 percent of body weight during the first year, and maintain those results for another year. Most didn’t reach this goal as they self-directed their own efforts, as everyone was left to find their own way to lose the weight. Only 8.6 percent hit that 10-percent benchmark, with an additional 28.7 percent losing upward of 5 percent of their total body weight.

But the group, on a whole, did shed pounds. The average weight loss was roughly 2.5 to 5.7 percent of total body weight. The daily self-weighing method might work best for those looking to make small, yet meaningful, lifestyle changes, according to lead researcher David Levitsky, PhD, a professor of nutrition and psychology at Cornell.

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“We found that the self-weighing group not only lost weight, but maintained their weight loss for one year,” he tells Yahoo Health. “What’s important is almost all studies of weight loss show that most people regain the lost weight in about a year.”

In other words, it’s common for those who lose weight to gain it back when they’re off their “diets. ”However, this study showed that daily weigh-ins helped the participants avoid that fate.

Why does a daily monitoring routine work? If you weigh yourself every day, you’re directly plugged into how the food you consume affects your weight. It forces you to become more aware of healthy and unhealthy eating habits, according to the researchers.

Interestingly, the men in the study seemed to find the most success monitoring and tracking their own weight with the interventions. Although the researchers aren’t totally sure why that is, it’s possible that the women were already more in tune with their bodies and diets. “Scales [may have] enlightened the men to the relationship between energy in food and their weight, whereas women already learned this information,” Levitsky says.

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Levitsky says that you only need a scale and a spreadsheet to monitor your weight and visualize the results if you’re trying to get to a healthy weight. Most people only need to reduce their calorie intake by about 150 calories a day for two weeks to shed 1 percent of their body weight.

Although it has not always been certain how often you should weigh yourself to lose or maintain weight, research seems to be confirming that daily weigh-ins are effective tools. Some experts warn of a potential negative psychological impact of seeing a number on the scale every morning, since weight can easily fluctuate short-term based on water retention and slight dietary changes — thereby discouraging people from achieving their weight loss goals. But evidence is beginning to suggest daily weigh-ins are not as detrimental as some assume, with a Duke University study showing earlier this year that it increased enthusiasm for healthy eating and exercise among obese people and also seemed to spur greater weight loss.

Integrate small diet changes into an active lifestyle and add exercise, and you’ll slowly watch the scale dial down. “Find changes in your eating that you can live with, such as decreasing portion sizes, [and] skipping or reducing desserts and snacking,” Levitsky says.

While monitoring your weight daily might prove effective for weight loss, he thinks the method might be even more important for weight maintenance as we age. “As a population, we don’t stop gaining weight when the growth in our height stops at puberty, but continue to gain weight until we are in our 40s,” Levitsky explains. “The prevention of that age-related weight gain will reduce the incidence of diabetes, heart disease, stroke and some cancers.”

But, in any case, if you finally want to lose those last five pounds? It’s time to dust off the scale and find yourself a spreadsheet.

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