So, I've been on a fitness journey the last few years. Overall, I've lost 76 pounds. But the last year, I've been really stuck. I have a really great private gym, but they don't give much diet advice, so I've been floundering. In February of this year, I reached out to a professional forum, got some good advice about my diet, plugged it into a system that works for me and I love it! My experience has been that I tend to lose a few pounds, but then my body seems to put up a fight because my weights just bounce back and forth back and forth, with no real progress. I finally decided -- also in February -- that I would start tracking my weights every single day, no matter how good or bad it was. Today is August 5th and I've been tracking since February 19th. I'm a data geek, so I've been using Excel to do this, and every day I've made an entry about what I did or ate the day before that might have affected my weight. I KNEW that in order to know whether what I was doing was working and if I was on the right track, I HAD to digilently track. I can definitely see changes in my photos!! But no matter what I was doing, I would never lose on the scale! My body just seemed to be in an endless recomposition phase -- changes in my physique with nothing but bouncing on the scale!!! It was maddening!! It never EVER occurred to me that the problem WAS my scale! A week ago today, I logged . . . "I've got to do something. This is crazy!" I started at 252.1 on 2/19 and as of last week, I was only at 246.8! How can you be in a deficit, your clothes fitting better, and yet the scale seems to NEVER catch up to the changes in your body?? So I looked at scales and decided on this one. I'm going to say, though . . . I knew it was a risk. There was the possibility that this new scale would read higher than my old one. And it did. But if it was going to be consistent and tell me the TRUTH, even if that meant I start from a higher point, I didn't care. So this is what happened e . . . Wednesday AM, 7/28 -- OLD SCALE: 244.8. Scale came in that afternoon. Thursday AM, 7/29 -- OLD SCALE: 246.8 NEW SCALE: 250.8 (Ouch. But keep reading.) Friday AM, 7/30 -- OLD SCALE: 247.1 (0.3 gain) NEW SCALE: 249 (1.8 lb loss) ---This is when I knew I had hit on something. The scales may not match with the same number. And they may not show the same RATE of loss or gain. And both of those are okay. But they should BOTH be going in the same DIRECTION!! Either BOTH UP or BOTH DOWN. This is when I chucked my old scale (11 years old). And here are my further weights on my new scale: Saturday, 7/31 -- 247.2 (1.8 loss) Sunday, 8/1 -- 247.2 Monday, 8/2 -- 247.2 Tuesday, 8/3 -- 247 (0.2 loss) Wednesday, 8/4 -- 246.6 (0.4 loss) Thursday, 8/5 -- 246.6 In the last week, I've lost 4.2 lbs! I haven't seen that much loss in a week's time in . . . I don't know how long. And I've weighed myself at other times of the day and still find the scale consistent unless I've just eaten or drank something. My other scale always varied throughout the day. It's a little heartbreaking to realize that some of the discouragement I've felt has been attributed to a faulty scale. I think I really HAVE been making progress, albeit from a higher point than I thought, but it's the scale that's been driving me bananas. And as a caveat to this, a year or so ago, I tried a different scale from Walmart and found it much worse than my own scale in consistency and took it back. I wasn't looking for a scale to make me feel good. I was looking for a scale that I could TRUST, whether that meant telling me I weighed more than I thought or not. I've fought my weight my ENTIRE life, so I know the mind games and the excuses you try to tell yourself about your scale not working. But I have 3 years of various diaries and weight logs to prove how hard I have been working to change my thinking and my life. At a certain point, something JUST didn't make sense. I've learned to feed myself excuses over the years. Part of my practice of conquering this part of my life has been to make myself face, head-on, my actions and not look for other excuses. Therefore, I categorically rejected the idea that the problem might have something to do with my scale -- because, of course, wouldn't everyone LOVE to think the problem with their weight is the scale and not even consider that the problem could possibly be THEM??? But I've learned through this experience to not discount that possibility. I swung so far to the side of not giving myself excuses anymore that I never entertained the thought of any other factors being an issue BUT myself. Now, don't go looking for a new scale if you're not doing the work to warrant looking for results! But the truth is . . . scales CAN be faulty.
