How often do you weigh yourself?

I have a friend who is on a diet and in the pastime she spends half of it on the scale. The other half is spent reading books and articles on the internet about weight loss. How is that possible? In the morning when she wakes up she gets on the scale. After she takes a shower she gets on the scale. She weighs herself every time she gets out of the bathroom, and a couple more times during the day just for fun.

And the baffling thing is that she can also get disappointed by the fact that the scale isn’t showing the right weight or just minor fluctuations. The scale can be the best friend during a weight loss program, but even the best friend can become meddlesome. Getting on the scale too often has the effect of demoralizing you. It will whisper to you wrong ideas about your own weight and figure. After you have eaten a normal quantity of food it is normal for you to weight more than on an empty stomach. Women during menstruation gain 2-4 pounds that disappear just as miraculously when it ends. So don’t worry if your weight fluctuates, it is normal. Nobody has a constant weight.

Here are the rules to follow if you want to have an harmonious life with your scale:

• -keep the scale in your bathroom on a smooth hard surface
• -weigh yourself only once a week without moving the scale from its spot
• -weight yourself in the morning, on an empty stomach, after you have used the toilet and taken a shower
• -weigh yourself naked preferably, or dressed in the same robe or the same cloths.

As an extra motivation when you are on a diet, you can make a graphic of your weight, falling down. You should complete your weight graphic every time you weigh yourself. Of course there are modern high tech scales that can do it for you.

As a statistic you can write down in the comments below how often you weigh yourself.