How often should you weigh yourself?

How often ought a person hop on the scale?

There is a number of ways of keeping track of a person's body mass. Some may find tape measures appealing, but it appears as though most people are most comfortable with the scale. It has been proven that about once a week ought to do it for any person wanting to keep a waking eye on his or her calorie intake and body weight.

More frequent measurements may prove demoralizing if the person is trying to lose some, since they can provide with but the tiniest of figures of progress – and especially in proportion to the effort involved. Nope, once a week seems to be just about dandy.

What is a good scale?

There is a broad range of scales to pick from... One of the recommendations comes from the PEERtrainer Community Leaders, and it is the Tanita BC533 Glass Innerscan Body Composition Monitor. This scale may be somewhat costly, but has a wide variety of functions such as measuring body fat, body weight, muscle mass and so forth. This allows the person who's gained some to know whether it's water, muscle or whatever – which is a pretty functional trait.

How important is social support and self-motivation?

Goes without saying that group and peer support play huge roles when it comes to losing weight. This is because there is quite a difference between learning how to lose weight and eat more healthy and setting the two into motion. This is exactly when the previously two (peer and group motivation) kick in. Getting tremendous amounts of support (which a weight loser surely needs) via such anonymous groups may be quite the motivational factor.

On the other hand, and to the contrary, another useful tool should be self-motivation. This would involve keeping a log of a person's food, exercise as well as thoughts. Writing these things down is different from making "mental notes" of them. This is because as they are written down, the person takes more time and thinks about them more thoroughly. This in turn helps the weight losers think and facilitate in more purposeful ways, all in order to make better decisions while on a diet plan.

Conclusively, both of the factors are of critical importance when it comes to long term weight loss, and will most certainly bring about faster results when coupled than when either is left hanging on its own.