Optimistic Weighing: Musings on an Honest Scale...

Weighing are the metrics of my new weight loss. Keeping score. Standing in judgement - quite literally. There are all kinds of ways to do it, I suppose.

I have found that I and many others have a tendancy to weigh early in the morning. When we have gone the longest without food, after getting rid of the byproducts of the days eating and drinking gone before. And yeah, ...weighing buck-naked - no weight from any clothes or shoes, I even take my watch off. When I am at my lowest possible weight of the day.

During the day I find that my weight may fluctuate as much as 3-7 lbs from my weight in the early morning. And day to day it fluctuates up and down, though mostly down. The past couple of weeks it has been really bad as I have been fighting water retention and/or weight gain for some reason. My calves have been getting really swollen, and once I lose the water weight I see I am still going down over all. I drink alot, and I think I need to. But for some reason on some days I seem to be retaining alot of the fluids.

I suppose it might be more honest to weigh in the middle of the day, or at the end of the day. It would seem to be more honest - as really for most of the day I am weighing higher than I report from my morning weigh-in. But I still need to see myself at my lowest weight during the day, and if I am weighing consistently at the same time I guess it is OK. I guess I am going for the most positive and optimistic reading I can.

The other area of honesty is when you are on the scale. It is hard to resist standing on the scale in certain ways to make the scale read the lower number or the higher number. I am trying hard to stand there flat on the middle and take my medicine. But I so want it to be the lower number that sometimes I catch myself wanting to see the lower number by shifting on the scale a bit. I am trying to resist this type of dishonesty too, by not doing that (though the differences are only in a couple of ounces).

It is funny how badly we (those of us engaged in losing weight) want to see the lowest possible number on that scale tho. And how important it is for me. And how important it is to have an honest number. Good metrics. But also how important the encouragement of seeing positive momentum is, how important positive thought and self-talk is, and even encouragement from others.