If you are obsessed about this number which is appearing on your scale every time you are standing on it and you tend to weigh yourself every day, you shall better take few minutes to read what I am about to explain you.
There is a reason why I recommend always to weigh yourself maximum once a week (in some cases even only once a month): because the differences in weight you see by weighing your body every day are irrelevant and not due to a real increase or decrease in lean mass or fat. Furthermore, seeing those differences, it might make you wrongly thinking that you lost control of yourself causing panic and crises.
Those differences could be due to several causes. Here the main ones:
Amount of water in our body
The balance between water contained in our body and the amount of sodium that we ingested, can influenced our weight up to 2 kg: this phenomena is called water retention.
Our body is mainly composed by water. When we eat too much salt, the body retains extra sodium which increases the amount of fluid in the body, outside of cells. This increase in fluid allows the body to continue retaining sodium and fluid while excreting higher levels of potassium in the urine.
Gut content
If we weigh ourselves after eating, our weight will be increased proportionally to the quantity of food ingested. For this reason it is necessary to weigh yourself in the morning (after urinating), to minimize any possibility that content of the intestine influence the scale result. But be careful: morning after a huge dinner, it is normal that the weight is even higher, it should drop the next day.
Glycogen
Muscle glycogen is a supply of carbohydrates that we store in muscles and liver. With intense physical activity, but also during a weight loss diet, this supply can decrease, giving rise to a fictitious weight loss that will be recovered when the carbohydrate supply is restored.
By seeing those variations, we might tend to be depressed, demotivated and lose willingness to reach our goal or even take extreme actions which might instead damaging our self and our stability, like extremely fasting if we see an increase of weight of about 2 kg from one day to another. In order to see long term result, it is fundamental to avoid panic and instinctive reactions.
Another important point to consider is the scale error. More and more we see usage at home of impedance metric scales. Unfortunately, diffusion of this type of scale not only for professional usage, increased the amount of low quality instruments available on the market. The result is evaluations with an error which could be even of about 50%. Not really useful!
Just two words to explain the principle those scales are following.
When an electric current is applied to a cylinder filled with a saline solution, the fluid opposes to the passage of the current (electrical resistance). The resistance is directly proportional to the cylinder length and inversely proportional to the cylinder diameter.
If you replace a part of the fluid with fat (which is a poor conductor), the resistance increases.
If we consider the human body as a series of cylinders joined together (arms, trunk, legs), the resistance measured considering the whole body will reflect its composition. Actually, if an alternating current is applied, the conductor opposes to the electrical current passage according to its impedance (opposition strength of a circuit to the passage of an alternating electric current).
The main factor which could influence the result using this type of scale is body hydration. The scale value will be deviated in case of dehydrated or overhydrated body. That's why intense workout, a very abundant sweating, abundant meal etc. alter the data.
We have to consider then the formula established for the measurements: any scale uses a description of the human body which is necessarily an average of the population. Already this concept indicates that for the individual there will be an error that is proportional to the deviation from the expected model of the organism being measured to set the formula.
Finally, it is necessary to consider that the electrical current path crosses almost the whole body, but not all. It measures the percentage of fat especially in the lower district; this means it takes for granted that muscle mass is equally distributed also on the upper district. But we know this is not always the case!
In conclusion:
· Stop weighing yourself every day: once a week is more than enough;
· A regular scale providing you only weight is sufficient. Just verify time to time that is still calibrated;
· If you cannot effort to buy a professional impedance metric scales which guarantees accuracy and repeatability of measurements but you still want to have an overview of your body composition, just book an appointment with your nutritionist to perform a body composition evaluation in a proper way.
In the end, weight value is just a small part of the story: what count is how you feel, how you see yourself and your health status.
If you are interested in a first free consultation, just write me and we can have a chat (in English, German or Italian) valenutricoach@gmail.com
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