It sounds crazy and you have probably heard it said before “if you are trying to lose weight then throw away the scales”
Well guess what, IT IS CRAZY!
Scales can’t tell the whole picture on body composition but what they can do consistently, reliably and cheaply is measure weight. Almost all of the methods used to calculate body composition actually use weight in their equations and it is one piece of data that we can use to give an unbiased glimpse of the big picture.
So why then would this be good advice? Why not try and run faster but don’t time yourself? get stronger but pay no attention to what you can lift? save money but don’t check your bank account? Well by ditching the scales it ensures one thing. Zero accountability and zero chance of failure because we simply wouldn’t know if we were. More importantly there is zero accountability for the trainer who told you to throw them out. If you had a tradesperson do some work but made you promise that you would never check thier work and to take their word that they actually did anything, would you keep paying them? Sure we can see how we feel in our clothes or how we look in the mirror but why are we discarding the one piece of information that our minds can’t play tricks with?
Yes weight does fluctuate and there are many reasons for this. Whether you have been to the bathroom or are dehydrated, have a full or empty stomach, muscle glycogen etc. It is a long list. Which also begs the question why people advise infrequent use of scales. Weigh once a month and you could find yourself perhaps going from a bad day to a good day or the other way around and you could be getting a false indication of what is really happening. If you were trying to measure any sort of trend with regard to something prone to variation, common sense would dictate you gather as much data as possible to try and establish a more reliable picture. So why are we gathering less information especially when its free and takes seconds? Could it be to protect ourselves and those advising us from scrutiny if things are not going to plan and we don’t have the skill to head things back in the right direction.
while not everyone has the single goal of losing weight, if you do and you don’t get lighter, you have failed regardless of whether you decide to remain ignorant of your results or not. Yes it can be disheartening to see small set backs but letting them go unchecked or not cross referencing them with other information only makes failure much more easy to take and when results are a must, failure is not acceptable.
