Chronicles of a Late Bloomer

Friday has been my traditional weigh-in day, so I thought today was as good a day as any to describe my new weighing procedures. In the long and slow process of breaking up with Weight Watchers, I’ve had to re-think my need for accountability and come up with some alternative-yet-sane way to measure my goals.

I like the concept behind weighing in every week. I do. For the past 2 months, I’ve been attending a Friday morning meeting, where I would weigh in at 9:30 in the morning. I understand the concept of the weekly weigh-in. I get that you want to try to eliminate extenuating factors such as meals, bloat, etc. I know that it’s designed to keep us from obsessing, to register a weight frequently (but not too frequently), and to give us a reliable measure of progress. Frankly, though, the weekly weigh-in was starting to really mess with my head.

It’s turned me a little bit into a Gollum of a creature, stroking the white metalic floor scale every Friday, purring to My Prrrrrecious as the One and Only True and Living Scale. It is a worship of sorts, and I get hung up on it.

My problem is that (as a person who has regulation issues) I found myself doing things on Friday morning, on Thursday, and even on Wednesday night in anticipation of the Friday morning weigh that I wouldn’t otherwise do. I found myself eating differently than I would. I’d drink less water. I found myself spending more time in the bathroom, hoping to lose a few extra ounces before 9:30. (I’ll leave that to your imagination and hope that you know what I’m talking about.) I’d experiment with combinations of clothing that would be both public-appropriate and also virtually-weightless. These, to be clear, were clothes that I would never otherwise consider wearing in public.

I didn’t like that. I didn’t like acting in ways that I wouldn’t normally act. I’m trying to be my authentic self, here, and pinning so much value onto one specific and relatively-infrequent snapshot moment in time each week was just too much for me to handle.

The solution, I think, is for every day to be weigh-in day, with one condition: that as little emotion be attached to the number that crops up on my fancy new scale as possible. The goal is to disconnect any type of “cause and effect” thinking with daily weigh-in, and to use the scale as a tool. The scale is not God. The scale is not a Mean Mommy, there to spank you when you’re bad and reward you when you’re good. The scale just Is. Leave the poor scale alone.

If every day is weigh-in day, then every day has the same relative value in the big picture process of things. If every day is weigh-in day, I will potentially understand what my body is trying to do at any given point of its cycles. If every day is weigh-in day, then no one day becomes too important. No one pair of shoes or bag of popcorn three nights ago or slice of chocolate cake on your birthday can become the culprit. That is the hope, anyway.

In order to assuage some of the daily-weigh variability, I’ve implemented some tactics. Most of these were picked up from The Hacker’s Diet¹ and the rationale for how I’m handling things is based loosely on what can be found here and here. It is my belief that through a careful dance of geekery and charts, I can soothe some of the neurosis that is inherent with daily weighing and more or less keep the crazy under control. Here’s how it works.

Every day I wake up. I go to the bathroom. Then I strip down and stand on the scale. Bingo! A number. Good little scale. Very good. I detach myself from the number, write it down, and then go about my merry way.

At some point, I plug that number into an excel chart which I’ve concocted. That chart keeps track not only of the raw weight number from day to day, but also a “5-day moving average.” What this means is that if someone were to ask me what I weighed today, my answer would not be the number that my scale spit out at 8:00 this morning. It would be an average of today and the previous 4 mornings. On some days, this means my so-called weight will be much higher than my daily weight. On other days, lower. But, it will represent more the trends of my body than the neuroses of relying on one little itty bitty moment of time to measure my progress and my results. Exit neurosis, stage left.

For instance, on the week of my period, my weight crept up and up and up. The average weight for the week, though, exactly matched the average weight from the week before. In spite of the upward creep, I considered myself to have maintained that week. Sure enough, there came my period, the the numbers charted down again.

On Sunday, I’ll record my weekly average. I’ll compare it to the previous week’s average. I’ll consider any change in the average weekly weight to be my weight loss or gain for the week. The goal is to keep the overall trend moving downward, and not to get too caught up on any one day or one number or One True Scale.

For interest’s sake, I also have some graphs. It’s fun to see the wild, flailing variance in my daily weight boil itself down to a nice, smooth line. Overall, I lose weight. I’ve learned this in a month of daily weights. Around my period, I fluctuate up slightly. The trendline, though, remains more or less downward. This, friends, is what I am trying to care about: the direction in which I’m traveling, rather than how fast or how far.

1. I’m a GEEEEEEEK!!! [↩]