Weight Loss: Watch Out for the Bathroom Scale

Losing weight is itself a challenge worthy of applause when it has been accomplished. First you want me to change my eating habits, then you want me to exercise more, then you want me to give up certain things, then you're telling me everything is bad... but everything that is "good" for me tastes bad, I'm tired after two minutes of exercising. It's no wonder people get discouraged after trying to lose weight! You get such contradictory information about how to lose weight and things you should do and things you shouldn't do.

I have been a person who's lost a good amount of weight and keep it off for a period of time and for me it was a lifestyle change. I had to change how I was eating and actually do some exercise... but then I started seeing some results, good results... and that encouraged me to do it more... and I saw more results. You can lose weight if you change your lifestyle. Once you get the weight off, you'll need to work just as hard to keep it off. I listed ten ways in one of my other articles, it's called "10 Best Ways to Lose Weight and Keep It Off."

For our purposes in this article I want to mention one aspect that can discourage you from losing weight, but it can also encourage you to lose weight depending on how you view it. What is that thing? How often you put yourself on that bathroom scale.

But Tim, how does the bathroom scale help or hinder me from losing weight? I'm glad you asked! The bathroom scale can be encouraging but it can also be discouraging depending on how YOU view it. Let's take the discouraging side. Let's say you're one of those who has started this journey and you want to see what you way today and let's say it is 200lbs. If you get back on the scale tomorrow after eating right and exercising it may say 202lbs, and this may be for two reasons. First, consider what you last ate, and how much you ate. Also, consider what you drank, and how much you drank. If you drank a bottle of water before going to bed, and didn't use the bathroom, there's potentially a pound of water inside of you. Similar with food, if you haven't excreted the remnants of the food out, the weight of the food is still inside of you. So in a 24-hour period you could easily have (falsely) gained a pound of two. Then you get discouraged, give up, and go back to eating what you want to and doing nothing as far as exercise. This is the wrong approach. For those trying to lose weight, you really should only weigh yourself once a week, or at most once every few days to measure progress... and do it early in the morning once you're awake but not after eating breakfast.

So how is it encouraging? Once you've went through the process of changing your lifestyle... eating right... exercising... resisting sweets sometimes... walking more and watching your caloric intake... when you DO get on the scale, you'll see the difference. You won't notice it in a day, but you may notice it in a week. That's what happened to me when I first started losing weight. I had lost a couple of pounds in the first week and that encouraged me to keep going. In the second week I'd lost another two pounds... and eventually in the first year I'd lost 50 pounds! In the second year I lost another 25 pounds. It seemed like weight was just melting off. I wasn't taking any pills nor was I throwing up my food after eating it... I was doing it the right way -changing my diet and exercising regularly.

You can do it the same way. Changing your lifestyle was there before Atkins, before Jenny Craig, before South Beach, and before all of these other diets. That's the way you lose weight. Some people try and go to extreme measures to lose weight. There are bad ways to lose weight; I've listed ten of them in my article, "10 Worst Ways to Lose Weight." You may say, "yeah, but weight loss is weight loss, right?" Technically, that's incorrect. Some weight loss isn't fat loss but muscle loss which is worse because the fat is still there; that's what you want to get rid of.

I don't recommend buying a fancy bathroom scale for your weight loss goals, but if you want one for your bathroom, any scale will do. Some are digital and measure weight to the tenth of a pound. Then there are the old school scales with the weights that you shift and have to balance to get an accurate reading... whatever route you decide to do, just remember, even if the numbers you see aren't appealing it is a process. Don't be afraid to get on the scale, get on there knowing you did your best and that you're sticking with this no matter what a scale tells you.