Too Much Weight on the Issue?*

(*With apologies to my friend Alice for stealing her line)

I weigh myself every single day, and I have for nearly fifteen years. I've got twenty-five years of records in total. I really like seeing the actual numbers, turned into a picture that tells a story.  This is what I do, for my profession and for my pleasure: I take numbers and make them tell a story. I turn data into pictures, turn points into patterns.  Information is data in context, and nothing makes context better than arranging the data into beautiful patterns, where the color, the shape, the weight of the lines help tell the story.

Do I spend too much time thinking about what the scale says? Isn't this really about being healthy and strong?

Well, no. Actually, a whole lot of "this" is about how I look as well as how I feel. And there is zero doubt in my mind that lower weights on the scale translate into looking better as well as moving better.

But why weigh myself every single day? Some days it's up, some days it's down.  Am I really ruining my day on the days it is up? Well, no, again. Because I weigh myself every day, I don't put too much weight on any single day. Weights are really volatile, and they bounce all over the place. I weighed myself several times over the course of a weekend, and there was a total of seven pounds variation in roughly 24 hours!

But the longer term trend is the truth. It is the fact. But I need to separate out the trend in the data from the daily variation. How do I do that?  There are several ways to do it. Weight Watchers and many other programs use the weekly weigh-in, which over a long period of time does show an actual trend.  But with several pounds variation in the course of a day being possible, a one time check in each week is not giving you a lot of information to act on.  Was the loss this week because I did everything right, or because I didn't have a lot of salt yesterday so the water is down?  The long term trend is true, but the weekly number does not give information you can actually act on.

I read about doing a weekly average back in the early 1990's in The Carbohydrate Addict's Diet.  Weigh yourself every day, then take the average at the end of the week. The seven-day average shows an authentic trend - up or down from the previous week.  This makes so very much sense to me!  Short term variations are ignored, wrapped into the weekly trend. But I don't have to wait for weeks to figure out if what I am doing is working, if I am actually losing weight.

So am I losing weight now? Let's talk a look at the data:

1/1/2013	154.7
1/2/2013	155.8
1/3/2013	155.1
1/4/2013	153.7
1/5/2013	154.9		154.6
1/6/2013	152.6
1/7/2013	153.2
1/8/2013	152.3
1/9/2013	152.9
1/10/2013	153.6
1/11/2013	153.4
1/12/2013	152.6		152.9
1/13/2013	152.7
1/14/2013	153.2
1/15/2013	151.8
1/16/2013	153
1/17/2013	151.7
1/18/2013	151.8
1/19/2013	152.4
1/20/2013	152.8		152.4
1/21/2013	153.6

The numbers on the right are the weekly averages - so yes - I *am* losing weight.  If I was only weighing myself once a week, and saw a 0.5 pound loss, I would have to reject it as not meaningful.  But half a pound on average for the week is true.

Let's turn the data into information, but adding context.  The scattered points are the actually daily weights. The line connects the weekly average dots. There is still a lot of weekly variation, but the trend upwards since this summer is also crystal clear. The daily scores would obscure the trend.

For many years, each year I bought an attractive wall calendar with big boxes for writing in, and hung it on the wall of my bedroom near the scale. I'd write down the daily weights, keep mentally calculating the weekly average, and every few weeks type it into the computer for calculations and graphing.  But this spring I went ahead and splurged big time on a Withings wi-fi scale. I step on it, and it sends the data right to the internet over my wi-fi.  I can look at it on the computer, on my iphone, on my ipad. I can export it to my computer at home for making my own graphs and charts.  It connects to other apps, notably my food tracking app, MyFitnessPal.

It also makes its own graphs and by some math I don't get to peek inside of, it shows trends in terms of a band of variation and a trend line.  It's kind of pretty, but since I don't understand what its doing with the ranges and trend, I don't put a huge amount of weight on it. (Sorry Alice, two times I stole your line in one post!)

So weighing myself daily is useful and not a lot of work. I don't worry too much about any one number, but I get the trend very clearly laid out for me. So this is just the right technique for me.