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For bariatric surgery patients, tracking weight is an essential part of the recovery process and long-term success. Our practice recommends weighing yourself once a week. Here’s why.
Consistency Over Obsession
Weighing yourself weekly strikes a balance between staying informed about your progress and avoiding the unnecessary stress that can come from daily weigh-ins. Fluctuations in weight are normal due to factors like water retention, digestion and hormonal changes; these can be misleading and discouraging, especially if you’ve been trying hard with your eating habits.
Weekly weigh-ins can help you develop a healthier relationship with the scale and your body. It allows you to focus on the bigger picture rather than getting caught up in minor daily changes. This approach can create a more positive mindset and reduce anxiety related to weight fluctuations.
Tracking Progress
Weekly weight measurements provide an accurate picture of your weight trend over time. It helps you and your healthcare team to identify patterns and make informed adjustments to your diet, activity levels/exercise, and lifestyle if needed. Seeing consistent progress on a weekly basis can be incredibly motivating and affirming.
Being Accountable
Regular, scheduled weigh-ins create a routine that keeps you accountable. Knowing that you have a weekly check-in can encourage you to stick to your dietary and exercise plans, reinforcing the healthy habits necessary for long-term success.
If your weight isn’t going in the right direction, this may be disheartening but it shouldn’t be discouraging. Being aware of weight gain through weekly tracking is a great way to motivate yourself to stop falling back into bad habits, or to speak to your doctor about changes you can make to get back on track. We’d recommend talking to your doctor if your weight has increased by 2-3kg or more.
Turbo-charge your weight-tracking
When you observe that your weight loss slows down, or if you’re trying to lose more weight after having stabilised, it can become very confusing to track your progress because of day-to-day variations in your body’s fluid stores. Body composition scales are the perfect solution for tracking your progress when weight loss or weight maintenance becomes difficult. Body composition scales measure the amount of muscle, fat, water and bone that contribute to your weight. Clearly, the things we are mostly interested in are muscle, fat and water.
Muscle
The amount of muscle you carry is mostly related to your age, diet and how much exercise you do. Muscle supports your overall health, your skeleton and raises your metabolic rate. If your diet is deficient in protein and if your schedule doesn’t include regular whole-body exercise, you will lose excessive amounts of muscle over time. The older you are, the worse this will be. As muscle is a lot heavier than fat, people who exercise can sometimes become confused about their weight loss as they often become smaller but not lighter due to gaining healthy muscle. Body composition scales make a big difference if you are exercising appropriately as you can focus on muscle gain rather than weight loss as a target.
Fat
This is the enemy you are trying to tackle. Reducing fat towards healthy levels helps your fitness, metabolic health and cancer risk. Fat loss can only be achieved when you eat appropriately and exercise well. Snacking, grazing and excess carbohydrate consumption in liquid or solid form, will stop you from burning fat and will increase your fat levels very quickly.
Water
The amount of water you store in your body can vary, sometimes without obvious reasons. The amount of water you carry leads to the greatest confusion and frustration in people during the “slow phase” of weight loss and during weight management. If your weight goes up, but it’s all water you can be reassured that you are not doing something wrong.
Which scales?
We don’t support one manufacturer over another, however you should consider comparing your chosen scales against a high-quality scale like the Withings Body+ or Withings Cardio scales – these link via wifi to your phone and automatically record and track weight, muscle, fat, water and bone mass and allow you to track them over time. Many of these scales also allow other family members to track their own weight as well.
For further guidance to help manage your weight long-term, our practice provides professional support from a team of highly experienced Bariatric practitioners. For more information specific to your needs, check out our website, contact us, or make an appointment via HotDoc.
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