Is It Better to Weigh Yourself Every Day?

A controversy has developed on a blog I visit occasionally. Someone decried daily weighing in by a person trying to lose weight, saying it would make the subject totally neurotic, and the daily variations (water, variations in diet, etc) would just cause unnecessary anxiety (or joy). Others said that concentration on weight changes would transfer into motivation for suitable weight-loss measures – exercise and diet. The matter has been settled to my satisfaction by a report in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine in 2005.

Two studies were analyzed. The first employed 1800 obese or overweight volunteers enrolled in a weight-loss program at the University of Minnesota. They were treated randomly by one of 3 approaches: telephone-based counseling, mail-based intervention, and ’usual care’ control. The average first year loss by subjects in the study was 1.3 body mass index (BMI) units, with a loss of 2 BMI units after 2 years.

In the second study, there were 1200 volunteers in a weight gain prevention trial; they were randomly given an educational weight-control program, the same educational program plus a reward for returning self-monitoring postcards, or a ‘usual control’ condition.

Both studies were successful in their weigh-loss/weight-control objectives; the findings in the different groups are not relevant for our purpose. In both studies, more frequent self-weighing at baseline was associated with greater age, lower fat intake, and non-smoking, among other factors. Both studies included similar weighing instructions. However, weight-loss dieters increased their weighing frequency over time, regardless of their treatment allocation, whereas the weight-gain controllers decreased weighing over time in the ‘usual control’ group but increased it over time in the two intervention groups. Most importantly, higher weighing frequency was associated with greater 2-year weight loss (or less weight gain). Case closed? Not necessarily. Others have found it makes no difference.

P.S. I weigh myself every day, while my wife weighs herself when she feels the scale will tell her what she wants to hear . . .