The FastDay Forum

Quite a few people have an issue with how and when to weigh themselves (daily, weekly monthly, time of day etc) so I just thought I would set out the routine I use to measure myself and monitor my progress.
Firstly you have to be aware that your body weight fluctuates for a variety of reasons. Time of day, (also time of month maybe for women), when you last ate, how much you ate etc. Drinks are heavy..a pint of water weighs a pound and a quarter (0.6kg). So if you weigh yourself after a drink you will weigh more than before. Similarly if you weigh yourself after going to the toilet you will weigh less. And obviously clothes will make a difference. So therefore to get a true picture of how you are doing it is important to compare your weight under identical conditions.
I have been 5:2 ing for just over a month and have lost about 6kg and I wanted to see how I was doing for encouragement as much as anything else. So the weighing system I have now settled on is as follows:-
Weigh yourself on a fast day in the morning after going to the toilet, without clothes, and before any intake of food or drink. That should be your lowest weight. And then weigh yourself in the same way the morning after your fast day. You should be less. But it is important to then weigh yourself in the same way the next time you fast. I record these weights so that I can monitor my progress.
As an example I fasted last Friday. In the morning I weighed 95.6 kg. The next day after the fast I weighed 94.5 kg. A loss of 1.1kg which is not surprising as I have only consumed 600 calories. I will weigh myself in he same way when I next fast, probably on Tuesday. I expect my weight will have gone up slightly to about 95.0kg and then the day after the fast I would expect to be about 94.0kg. So I will have lost about 0.5 kg from the morning of my last fast to the morning of my next fast, which I believe is a true reflection of my weight loss. So that's about 1kg a week, which I am delighted with. By comparing my weight under the same conditions I think that is a fairly accurate method to measure my progress. It also gives me a short term target of about 95.0kg for the next time I fast.

Personally I see no need to measure myself before/after fast days, as I just want to track my progress week by week. I agree with your methodology in all other respects though and weigh myself once a week on Saturday mornings. Using this method I've seen a drop in weight every single week since I started 5:2 in late September, including Christmas week! I've gone from 107kg when I started to 94.9 yesterday morning!

I think as long as you weight yourself once a week on the same day at the same time then your results should be good to compare.

I weigh in every Sunday morning

I weigh myself every single day.

Not always at exactly the same time, but always without clothes right after my morning shower, which is usually right after my workout. At this point I have usually had a drink but nothing to eat. I then log my weight, also every day.

I know that weighing every day is often frowned on, but I can't understand why. I am perfectly aware that weight fluctuates, possible even more aware because of the fact that I measure it every day. It never affects my mood badly for the rest of the day, I weigh, log and move on. If it's a bad number or a good number I don't think about it for long.

I think it's fine to weigh yourself once a week but there are other ways which are just as good.

Do you measure yourself? I think that it's possible to go weeks without losing weight but losing inches. If you prioritise the scales over your inch loss you could get disheartened. For me it's more about how my clothes fit rather than what the scales say.

I do both. But I don't think you could go for weeks without losing weight if you are restricting your calories. But I agree with you, it doesn't come off in a straight line.

I don't measure myself, partly because it never occurred to me to do that when I started losing weight last year, so I don't have a base line to compare against. I do agree though that there are always inches lost as well as pounds.

No specifically for the original poster but for those that weigh themselves in pounds an stones one thing to consider when using electronic scales is that those that can switch between Pounds and Stone and Kilograms often give a more fine grained reading with Kg. Typically they tend to read to the nearest pound (~450g) in the former but to the nearest .1kg (100g) in the later.

As with others I pick one day a week, in my case saturday, and always weigh at the same time. I do however also do an 'unofficial' weigh in on the friday and if the reading on the saturday is significantly higher than the friday figure I use the friday value.

I think we are all different. As Skykitty said, as long as it doesn't affect your mood and how you eat for the rest of the day, it's fine.

I personally weigh myself every Friday morning, the day after a fast day. I just like to know that I've lost weight and can have a good drink over the weekend. Makes me feel better. Each to their own.

I started weighing weekly but if you're on a gradual weight loss slope the daily variations in weight for a whole host of reasons mean that a single reading a week probably doesn't give you a true picture - your weight fluctuates during the day more than double what most people are trying to lose in a week! So even if you weigh at the same time of day, you can get weeks that look worse than they are and then you have a whole week of feeling demoralised.

I quickly moved onto weighing daily, putting the readings into Excel and taking a 7-day moving average as my "weight" that I consider myself. I think this is a great way of doing it if you want to know the true picture of what is happening and are motivated by seeing results in pictures

I've talked about this some more on my blog http://intermittentfeasting.tumblr.com/ if anyone's interested, which has pics of the charts I use

you have done so well. congratulations! I saw you had a few pies over christmas from your chart and why not. but you are now back on track. I started about 5 weeks ago at 101kg, now down to about 95 so i am very happy. and the great thing is that its not that difficult to do. knowing that tomorrow you can eat normally is i think the main factor that keeps me going. i'm aiming to lose about 2 kg a month from now on. target is 85kg by end of june.