Does daily weighing ensure weight loss?

Do you weigh yourself often or obsess over what the scale tells you on a regular basis? Researchers at the University of Minnesota wanted to know if obsession of frequent weighing would impact the diets and weights of teenage girls and boys. They studied over 2,000 junior high and high school kids in 1998 and followed up with these same kids in 2003.

I often work with clients and encourage them to weigh themselves no more than once a week at the very most. Some I will encourage them to only weigh monthly. The scale will tell you a trend, but daily weighing just tells you fluid status. What I have learned is when someone is unable to avoid weighing themselves on a daily basis, or is obsessed with the scale, they have a harder time controlling their weight. I see it time and time again.

The study mentioned above was recently published in the Journal of Adolescent Health and found that the girls who weighed themselves daily practiced unhealthy eating habits and gained, on average 33 pounds, almost twice as much weight as those girls who did not obsess over their weight. Almost 10%of the girls said at the beginning of the study that they agreed with the statement, ‘I weigh myself often’, and in follow-up, these girls said they engaged in some type of unhealthy weight control behavior, compared to 68% of girls who strongly disagreed that they weighed themselves frequently. These girls averaged a weight gain of 18 pounds.

Boys who frequently weighed themselves didn’t gain weight, but they did practice unhealthy eating habits and measures to lose weight.

What does this study tell us? For me, it’s nothing new; you cannot obsess and weigh yourself daily as a way to ‘control’ your eating habits. The habits must improve and often discovering the underlying reason for uncontrolled eating is the only solution. Many women feel that if they just weighed themselves daily they can keep themselves from gaining too much weight. However, for anyone who knows someone like this, you know that their obsession does not result in weight loss or ideal body weight. It results in higher stress levels and a very unhappy individual.