Making Weight Reliable

When you use weight as a measurement it is important to ensure it’s in a controlled environment to make it as accurate and reliable as possible.

I think everyone recognises that if they step on the scales with shoes on, clothes on, holding a brick, that that number on the scales is not an accurate representation of their weight. The same applies for if your body is holding excess water, or your digestive system is still full, or if you haven’t been to the toilet yet. Its basic logic that those things are going to increase your weight.

So to make your weight as reliable as possible to help give feedback on your body composition and level of body fat we need to remove as many of those potential variables as possible. To do that you need to:

- weigh in a morning
- after you’ve been to the toilet
- before you have breakfast or a drink
- naked or in your underwear
- no jewellery on
- on the same scales
- on the same floor
- in the same place

This is how you can account for as many of those potential discrepancies as you can and make weighing yourself as reliable as possible.

Despite this, sometimes it could still be affected by the things I mentioned previously.

For example if you know you have been out all weekend or on holiday, eating, drinking, you will be heavier after. You will be retaining water from an increased alcohol, salt, and carbohydrate intake. You will simply have more food in your body than normal. So maybe don’t weigh yourself until you have returned to a few days of normality.

In a few days you will get a more realistic figure and save you from that typical despair of – I'm so annoyed I gained 5lbs on holiday. Obviously!!

It doesn’t matter – it’s not fat. Let the dust settle, have a week of normality and you will be fine. If your weight goes up 4/5/6 lbs quickly, in a day or a week, then it isn’t fat, and it will go down just as quickly I promise you.

Friday is a good day for most to weigh in because it is before people tend to indulge a bit more on the weekends and gives you a few days of normality during the week to get a consistently fair measurement.