I've been giving serious thought to NOT having a weight loss goal...as in, not having a goal weight. I mean, if this is TRULY a lifestyle change, why have a goal weight at all? Isn't it true that if you are consistent with good eating and exercise, your body will decide where to stop anyway?
Also have been thinking about cutting my weigh-ins down to one day a month. I want to focus on something other than the dang scale for a change.
Still mulling this over......
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2 comments:
Hi Jen,
I always enjoy reading your blog.
I can see your point about not setting a goal weight, but regarding the scales I thought I'd alert you to an article I read recently that said researchers had found that people who weighed themselves at least once a day were the most successful in achieving and maintaining weight loss. See:http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/living/13370442.htm
I weigh myself a couple of times every day now and don't worry about being so obsessive. I only write down my weight once a week so I can compare how I am going long-term, but I think it really helps to use the scales a lot.
Good luck with however you decide to go...
The URL in my previous comment got cut off so I'm posting the article. I hope it works. Apologies if it doesn't...
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Weighing in on daily weigh-insExperts are saying not to scale back stepping on scalesBy ROSIE MESTELThe Los Angeles Times“It’s sort of like tracking stock prices. You know they’re going to vary day to day.”
— Psychologist Patrick M. O’Neil, director of the weight management center at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, on daily weigh-ins
Losing weight is hard — and you might say hardly studied.
Only recently have scientists clinically shown that the widely used Atkins diet actually works, and they’ve yet to definitively weigh in on another diet-related question: Does regularly stepping on the scales help a dieter lose weight?
Sure it does, say many weight loss experts. Weighing yourself is a clear way to monitor progress or catch (and nip in the bud) a slow, steady uptick in lardage.
Not so fast, say others. The glacially slow nature of weight loss, plus those spiky daily fluctuations in body weight, might actually make dieters more apt to throw in the towel.
Now, just in time for the waist-expanding holiday season, a new study has come down on the side of daily weigh-ins. Published in the December issue of the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, it reports that dieters who weighed themselves regularly shed more pounds over a 24-month period than people who didn’t regularly weigh themselves. Those who weighed themselves daily lost the most.
To the authors, the implications are clear: Dieters should be encouraged to weigh themselves — and often.
“We talk to people about monitoring calories daily, about monitoring their exercise daily … if we’re asking them to do those … on a daily basis, then why not add this other recommendation?” says Jennifer A. Linde, lead author of that study and an assistant professor at the school of public health at the University of Minnesota.
Yet there’s a chicken-egg caveat here that some critics point to and that even those who believe in the findings acknowledge. Sure, successful dieters may weigh themselves more.
But the studies don’t tell you what caused what — just that the two things correlate. It’s fun to step on the scales when you’re succeeding. When the numbers are nudging upward or stubbornly refusing to change … less so.
“They’re assuming that weighing yourself frequently leads you to lose weight. I think losing weight makes you weigh yourself more frequently, because — ‘I’m losing weight, yes, yes, I’m down another pound,’ ” says Janet Polivy, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Toronto, who is not a fan of the bathroom scales.
That confusion is why, to this day, you’ll sometimes get roomfuls of Ph.D.s and M.D.s sitting around discussing an issue you’d think 21st-century science might have put to bed by now.
A curious study from the 1960s points to the potential effect of frequent weighing. Eight overweight women in a small private college were enrolled in a weight loss plan, part of which consisted of coming in to be weighed four times a day. By the end of the study the women had lost an average of 40 pounds each.
The study was small; it lacked important controls. But it was intriguing. “People in that group lost more weight than any study since then in nearly 40 years,” says Joseph A. Risser, director of clinical research for Lindora Medical Group, which runs the Lean for Life weight loss program.
The scales couldn’t possibly have registered real loss from one weigh-in to the next, but maybe, Risser muses, something else was going on, such as a reminder of the mission the dieter was on. His own studies of more than 600 clients show that those who were weighed five times weekly lost more weight (24 pounds) than those weighed twice weekly (19 pounds).
The new study by Linde and colleagues tapped statistics from two populations. One was a group of 1,800 obese or overweight adults enrolled in a weight loss trial. Participants were asked at the start of the study and at intervals thereafter how often they weighed themselves.
After one year, the monthly, weekly and daily weighers all lost weight on average, but those who weighed themselves daily lost the most — about 8 pounds. (Those who never weighed themselves gained weight.)
The other data came from 1,226 adults in a weight-gain prevention trial. At 12 months, those who weighed themselves daily had lost 2 to 3 pounds. Those who weighed themselves less often, or not at all, actually gained weight. In both studies, significant differences also were seen at two years.
People who weighed themselves also did other healthy things such as exercise more, but the self-weighing effect was statistically significant on its own, Linde says.
James O. Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado, says the findings fit with a registry of adults who have lost at least 30 pounds and, even more impressive, maintained that weight loss for a year or longer.
A key thing those succeeders report, Hill says, is regular self-weighing — at least weekly and often daily. (They also have an emergency plan of action for when the reading creeps above a crucial number of pounds.)
Psychologist Patrick M. O’Neil, director of the weight management center at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, says he’s a strong proponent of daily weigh-ins, based on Hill’s data and his own clinical experience — but that the practice should be paired with a weight chart that focuses on trends, not short-term, zigzag fluctuations.
“It’s sort of like tracking stock prices,” he says. “You know they’re going to vary day to day.”
Regular weighing is one thing. But every single day? After all, hormonal changes, fluid intake, sweating, medications and salt intake cause day-to-day, hour-to-hour differences in body weight of up to several pounds.
At Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers, dieters weigh in each week with their personal consultants or at meetings.
“We encourage them to take a break from daily weigh-ins because weight fluctuates,” says Jenny Craig spokeswoman Gail Manginelli. “It can be demoralizing.”
Meanwhile some specialists think either daily or weekly scale-hopping may have downsides. Psychologists and psychiatrists who treat patients with eating disorders note that encouraging people to weigh themselves might exacerbate such pathologies.
Other scale-doubters, such as psychologist Michelle Dionne of Ryerson University in Toronto, believe self-weighing can also be counterproductive in psychologically healthy folks who just want to shed some poundage.
Among the studies she points to: ones in which students were brought into an experimental clinic and weighed — but on fixed scales that actually recorded their weights as heavier or lighter than they truly were.
Students led to think they were 5 pounds heavier than they had thought scored significantly lower on psychological scales measuring mood, self-esteem and body satisfaction.
Experts debate how students given false information in a lab relate to real-life dieters using scales to monitor their progress. But even proponents of weighing advocate restraint.
“I don’t think anyone in a responsible professional position has argued for weighing oneself more than once a day,” O’Neil says. “We do not want to encourage people to turn this into a fetish.”
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