Contrary to what you may have heard, weighing yourself every day isn’t detrimental to your fitness goals. Sure, it may spark some obsession with loosing weight, but according to a new study, daily weigh-ins are linked to weight loss.
In the experiment, researchers monitored the self-weighing habits of more than 1,000 adults (78 percent male, 90 percent white) over the course of a year. Participants weighed themselves at home, as they normally would, using remotely transmitted self-weighing data without interventions, guidance or weight-loss incentives from researchers according to Medical Xpress.
The results? Researchers found that people who weighted themselves once a week or less din’t loose weight during the following year, compared to those who weighted themselves 6-7 times a week and showed significant weight loss. Says Medical Xpress:
Monitoring your behavior or body weight may increase your awareness of how changing behaviors can affect weight loss. These findings support the central role of self-monitoring in changing behavior and increasing success in any attempt to better manage weight, according to study authors from the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing and University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine.
Dr. Yaguang Zheng , co-author of the study and Post-Doctoral Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing told Newsweek that the causal relationship between self-weighing behavior and weight changes cannot be established with this study, that “self-weighing behavior could be a cause or a consequence of change in weight.”
Dr Katarina Kos Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter medical School, U.K., who was not involved in the study, added: “This study does not include people with morbid obesity” and “we do not know about their levels of depression, anxiety and potential eating disorders with which people with severe obesity typically struggle.”
But Dr. Fiona Gillison, Head of the University of Bath’s Department for Health, U.K., told Newsweek that the takeaway from this study is that daily weigh-ins can be very beneficial.
“What it confirms is that weekly weighing is not enough – weighing has to be more frequent to be effective, but that this self-weighing is more important at the start of a weight-loss attempt than over time. It doesn’t seem to matter if you stop weighing yourself so much – whether you stop relatively quickly or slowly – as long as you start with regular daily weighing. So this idea that you don’t have to keep weighing yourself indefinitely in order to benefit may be encouraging to some.”
