By now, you’ve almost certainly heard someone, somewhere, tell you that the scale is a liar. Is it? Is scale weight ever useful as a metric to chart progress? Who benefits from knowing their scale weight? Let’s get…gravitational.
I’m gonna start with a disclaimer ‘cos new year, same old me (wait is that not how it goes?), and your girl here loves her disclaimers. Some people shouldn’t ever get on a scale. These people include (but are not limited to) persons with body image issues, eating disorders, who are unable to separate their weight from their self worth, and/or those who don’t have access to a scale. FWIW, IMO, a person’s worth has absolutely nothing to do with their scale weight (or anything to do with their body composition, size, mass, health, or any of these other metrics), and this is not a dig at a person’s inability to separate their scale weight from their self worth. All I’m saying is that if this is you, this newsletter isn’t for you. Zero judgement, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. Cool? Cool.
Let’s be clear: I don’t think a scale is a perfect tool. (I’ve yet to find a “perfect” tool, so it’s definitely not the scale.) It is, in fact, extremely limited in its reach — after all, the only thing it tells you is your body’s total mass. I don’t even think it’s a necessary tool. Unless you’re a competitive athlete (e.g. a weightlifter or a physique competitor) and have a weight class to qualify for in order to compete, there are a bunch of other metrics you can use to gauge your progress. If you’re embarking on this fitness journey because you’d like to shed some excess fat to look and feel better, progress photos, body circumference measurements, or the fit of specific articles of clothing would probably be a better idea! Or, if you’d like to get stronger and fitter, measuring your performance will be a better yardstick against which you can gauge your success.
However, if you’ve got a significant change you want to effect on your body’s mass (whether that’s an increase or decrease in mass), the scale can be pretty helpful. A scale won’t tell you exactly how much of the weight you’ve gained or lost was fat or muscle tissue, but — over time — it’s gonna be a helpful indicator of whether your total body mass is trending in the right direction. For example, if you’re trying to “bulk”, but your body weight hasn’t budged at all? That’s a pretty clear sign that you need to increase your calories. Similarly, if you’re trying to “cut”, but your scale weight keeps increasing, in spite of how “clean”, or how few carbs, you’re eating, you’re probably eating too much food for your body’s energy requirements.
The single most important thing to remember when using a scale for tracking progress is this: the scale doesn’t tell you the whole story. (I don’t personally like to think of it as a liar, since giving an inanimate object malicious intent is a peculiar thing to do.) Some things that can and will affect your scale weight (without any change in the amount of fat- or lean-mass your body contains) include:
dehydration (e.g. from excess alcohol consumption, hot weather, changes in water consumption patterns)
water retention (e.g. from excess sodium consumption, increased carbohydrate consumption, hormonal changes, medications)
changes in glycogen stores (e.g. from workouts, changes in carbohydrate consumption)
digestive matter in your gastrointestinal tract (e.g. from marked changes in fibre or total food consumption, gastrointestinal distress)
cosmic curveballs (e.g. because I’m also convinced — even with zero scientific backing — that if the gravitational force of the moon can change tides, a full moon can and probably will also fuck with your scale weight)
But this doesn’t mean that the scale is a tool without any use to us at all: it simply means we’ve got to be aware of these limitations. Most smart scales today (such as those made by Withings or Fitbit) come with nifty apps that will plot your scale weight out, which allows us to see a visual representation of the direction in which that’s trending over time. If you kick it old school, plotting that out on a spreadsheet manually, or using an independent app like Happy Scale achieves the same effect. Having access to the bigger picture can help you chart your progress and focus on how, for example, you’ve successfully liberated 10kg over the last 3 months, even if you’re PMS-ing hard this week and have gained 1.8kg in the past 72 hours.
On the topic of menstrual cycles — I’ve made mention in the past that changes to your scale weight should be monitored over a 2–4 week period. For individuals who experience a menstrual cycle, I would recommend hovering around the 4-week mark, ideally tracking weight between similar stages in your menstrual cycle. (For example, the 7th day after the start of your period.) Anecdotally, and exclusive of I’ve-just-inhaled-all-the-chocolate-in-a-10-mile-radius type PMS episodes, I’ve gained anywhere up to 3kg in the week leading up to the start of my period. If you’re someone whose hormonal fluctuations rarely manifest as changes in your scale weight (or, if the fluctuations are predictable to the point that you’re comfortable factoring them into your adjustments), feel free to use shorter intervals when adjusting your nutritional targets.
It is also usually a good idea to reduce as many variables that can affect your scale weight as possible. You may not have full control over how (de)hydrated you are the day before your weigh in, but variables like how clothed you are, whether you’ve eaten anything etc can easily be kept constant. To illustrate this, my standard operating weighing procedure is:
daily (this isn’t necessary, but multiple data points reduce my sensitivity towards fluctuations and provide more information to chart trends — weighing once a week or once a month is also a legitimate strategy)
no more than once a day (some people like doing 3 weigh-ins and taking the average, but I have a smart scale that sends the readings straight to an app, so I don’t do average this out manually. Limiting myself to one weigh-in also helps to keep obsessive-type behaviours at bay.)
after I use the bathroom, brush my teeth & remove my retainers
before I eat or drink anything
wearing only underwear, activity tracker + a couple of wrist accessories (I don’t take these off to sleep), and the same pair of glasses
Charting your scale weight can be a really useful tool — if you’ve set your intake based on some algorithm you found online, monitoring any changes in your scale weight is an easy way to assess if your actions are aligned with your goals, and will often be more objective than questions like “how loose do these clothes feel”. Changes in our body composition can often feel painfully slow, and as humans, we tend to be our own harshest critics: zeroing in on flaws instead of objectively comparing progress photos, especially when things move slowly.
If you decide to use the scale as one of the tools in your arsenal, couple it with some other metric(s). I’m a fan of progress photos (so you have something to eventually look back on to see how far you’ve come) and body circumference measurements. If you can afford them and/or have access to them, a couple of DXA scans per year can also provide a much deeper analysis into your body compositional changes. No single method is infallible, but in concert they’re probably gonna give you a pretty good gauge of how things are going.