The Scale Isn’t the Problem
When you’re dealing with two different bathroom scales that both show different weights, it is universally agreed that the scale that shows your weight higher than the other scale is the one that is wrong. The scale with the lower number is always the more accurate one. Even if you’ve been using the same scale without question for years, if you step on the floor scales while visiting someone else’s house and their scale is lower, then you start mentally adjusting for the error when you get back on your scale. “Well, this scale is 2 pounds heavy, so I actually didn’t gain any weight.”
As long as both scales are floor scales, that works. You can convince yourself that either one might be wrong, so it might as well be the one with the less preferable result. When you head to the doctor’s office and step on the medical scales, however, there’s no equivocating. A doctor’s office usually has a balance scale which, once calibrated properly, should be perfectly accurate every time. The best you can do there is to start blaming the clothes you’re wearing that day. Blue jeans, you tell yourself, can run three or four pounds all by themselves.
The truth is that most people gain and lose several pounds during the course of any given day depending upon when they weigh themselves. You can step on the same bathroom scale first thing in the morning and see one weight. Then, you might see yourself a pound or two heavier in the early afternoon when you go to the doctor’s office. After your evening aerobics glass you may be down even lower than your morning weight.
Most of this fluctuation is due to varying levels of hydration. In other words, your weight is partially dependent upon how much water you have in your system. If you go to aerobics class and sweat, for example, you are expelling water from your tissues. Once you dry off, you’ll weigh less because of the missing water. Of course, the weight will come right back once you have a drink and replenish the lost fluids. Don’t skip water to lose weight though, without adequate hydration your metabolism works much less efficiently and you’ll tend to pack on real pounds.
What you should do to counter this is to weigh yourself at the same time every day, preferably first thing in the morning. When you wake up each day, you’re at a pretty constant state since you’ll have gone eight hours or so without drinking and taking on any extra water. That helps you get a consistent reading on your weight so you can really see trends up or down in your real weight. So the next time you step on two different scales and see a different reading, it might not be either scale that’s the problem. Any difference may be caused by your own daily hydration fluctuation.