Weekly Weight Averaging

One of the frustrations of daily weigh-ins is when your weight is unchanged or even goes up a little.
It can make you question all the work you’ve been doing.
The problem is that weight fluctuations are perfectly normal, even if you are losing weight overall.
Daily weight depends on such things as water weight, muscle growth, inflammation, and other issues.
I sometimes like to think of it as the weight slowly migrating off my body, sometimes taking the long route.
One of the ways to fight this feeling of being stuck is to do weight averaging.
Weight averaging occurs when you weigh yourself daily, but measure your progress by averaging your weight periods of a week.
Why do weight averaging? The biggest benefit is that it reduces that fluctuation you get between good days and bad days.
Losing weight every single day is not a realistic goal, but when you look at average weight loss, it is a solid measurement of progress.
It also helps you stay motivated and make better decisions.
By understanding your weight over a longer stretch of time, it shows you whether or not your strategies are effective.
Any minor thing can throw a daily weight off, but if you’re stalling week to week, then you can look at your habits and try to figure out what needs to change, if anything.
Finally, it helps with long-term tracking. I currently have 75 days of daily weigh-ins tracked.
If I look at them without any analysis, all I can tell is that they are trending downward, which is a good thing but not very informative.
When using weight averaging to do some analysis, I can see just how fast I am losing, and understand if the rate is a good rate.
Remember, that losing two pounds a week is considered to be a great rate of loss.
You don’t really want to be losing five to ten pounds every week, because it isn’t healthy and can come back to haunt you in the long-term.
Some weeks, however, will be faster than others.
For example, the beginning of keto brings a loss of water weight because the diet causes you to retain less water.
That can mean a dramatic week or two of loss but then a rebalancing, because water isn’t fat and your body is going to eventually want to level out how much water it needs to retain.
This is the same with issues like diarrhea.
If you’ve been following the journey, you know that I tend to get diarrhea ever week or two.
That usually means some weight loss, although often temporarily.
However, since the start of keto, the diarrhea has not returned.
I don’t know if that issue is solved-long term, but in the first 20 days of keto, so far so good.
One of the reasons I thought today would be a good day to look at weight averaging is that I’ve recently had a stall.
My weight has hovered between 292 and 293 pounds the past few days.
This made me curious about whether or not I would see this reflected in my averaging, and luckily that answer is no, but we’ll go over that soon.
I’ve done a little weight averaging before, but with almost 11 weeks of data now, it seems like a good time to take a look at this.
I began the year at 318.3 pounds.
It should be noted that at the end of last year I had a severe case of diarrhea.
When new years day came around, I was coming off of a liquid diet, and had dropped about five pounds in the two days before I started officially tracking.
Week 1 I averaged 317.8, which was a half-pound drop from my starting weight.
Week 2 brought more progress as I averaged 314.6, a loss of 3.2 pounds from the week before.
Week 3 I averaged 310.6, which was a loss of 4 Pounds. This was my top weekly drop of the year so far.
Week 4 I averaged 308.9 pounds, a loss of 1.7 Pounds.
Week 5 I weighed an average of 306.3 pounds, a loss of 2.6 Pounds.
Week 6 I averaged 304.3 for a loss of 2 Pounds.
Week 7 I averaged 303.4, for a loss of .9 Pounds.
Week 8 I averaged 302.6 pounds for a drop of .8 Pounds.
Week 9 I averaged 299.2 pounds for a drop 3.4 Pounds.
This was my first week under 300 pounds and pretty satisfying.
It was also the first week of the Keto diet.
Week 10 I averaged 295.5 pounds for a loss of 3.7 Pounds. This was great.
Now we get to the latest week, Week 11.
Now, we’re only five days into this week, so it isn’t a full average, but so far it is 292.7 - for a loss of 2.8 Pounds.
So, even though the past six days I have been stalled at around 292 to 293 pounds, looking at it with weight averaging, I’m actually doing great.
This shows just how important it is to use weight averaging to keep track of your weight loss.
Daily weigh ins can get into your head, even when you’re making great progress. Taking a step back really helps.
Averaging works with other measurements as well.
For example, my fasting blood sugar over the past week has averaged 95.
I won’t go over it week by week, but looking at my first week of measuring fasting glucose I averaged 120, so 95 is great overall progress.