PODCAST - How Often Should You Weigh Yourself_ (Why I Do It Once a Week)
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Athlete with Asthma Show. I'm your host Johnny Ha, an ultra runner endurance athlete, and yes, a guy who's had an inhaler prescribed since birth. Despite doctors telling me I could never play soccer nor run a marathon, let alone a hundred K ultra. I prove them all wrong. This show is where I share everything I've learned from breathing techniques to mindset shifts to help you become the athlete and the person you truly want to be.
So if you're ready to achieve your goals, despite limitations, let's get started.
Back in 2022, I found myself 40 plus pounds overweight, and I have done a lot of different things over the years to lose weight, but the most powerful thing that you can easily do and [00:01:00] integrate into your life on a weekly basis that doesn't even take a lot of time is what I wanna spend today's episode talking about.
Now, I do have my three pillars of healthy living and my. Three Pillars of Healthy Living Guide linked in the show notes and in the description below. If you're listening and watching on YouTube, these three pillars ultimately empowered me to lose those 40 pounds and keep the weight off. With that being said, over the past year or two, I have really fallen off track on tracking my caloric input and output every single day.
I found that it helped me for a long time, but then it just became a chore for me. Well, what I have been able to keep in my tracking routine is weighing myself every single week. So today on the show, I'm gonna share with you the importance. Of watching your weight and working on, or working towards getting to a healthy weight for you and your body.
Then I'm gonna go [00:02:00] through why I chose the weak interval. Not daily, not yearly, not monthly. Why? I actually weigh myself weekly, and then I'm gonna go through the. Five reasons why I choose to track. This is one of the tracking metrics that I consistently do every single week and why you should do so to kick things off.
The reality really baffles me. Did you know that 75% of Americans I live in America, y'all, and 75% of Americans or US adults are. Overweight or obese. This is crazy to me. This is three outta four people. Three outta four adults in the US have an unhealthy weight. And while I know in America and in the world, we have this whole craze right now where it's, Hey, don't be vain.
It's okay what your body looks like. I 100% agree it is [00:03:00] okay with what your body looks like. And there is research that shows that you can decrease all cause, all cause mortality rates for you in your body, in your life by having a consistent movement or workout routine that you do every single week.
This means multiple days per week, you are working out. Well, the other benefit of having a consistent workout routine is decreasing your weight. If you're overweight or obese and you're able to decrease your weight and you are able to healthily decrease your weight by doing something like exercise or movement, you are increasing your longevity.
You are improving your health. So this is America. So what does this look like in the rest of the world? Well, this is what the CDC said about America. This is what the WHO says about the rest of the world. [00:04:00] 40% of adults. Are overweight or obese. Now, this number is baffling as well because. It used to be that being overweight and obese was really a first world problem or a, they even have said that diabetes is a disease of the affluent of the wealthy has now.
Saturated 40% of adults worldwide. This is baffling, especially with all the information out there about how important about longevity and about how important maintaining a healthy weight is. Yet again, I. Can't emphasize this enough. By integrating a consistent workout routine in your life, you are potentially decreasing all cause mortality rates in you, in your life for [00:05:00] your health by 35%.
There is no drug that can do this. Dr. Peter Atia, the author of Outlive Highly You check out Out live. I have it linked in the show notes and in the description. If you're watching this on YouTube, amazing book talks about all this and how this is the silver bullet of medicine. Sin that everyone's looking for.
Just move multiple times a week, consistently decrease your weight, get rid of the extra weight. And if you're obese, let's bring it down to just being overweight. And then let's bring it down to not being overweight. This is why. I consistently decide to weigh myself every single week. Now, my three pillars of Healthy Living Guide, I talk about tracking because what we focus on expands.
So if you've. Focus on the intention of losing weight or maintaining a healthier weight. Well, we need to complete actions to support that, and that's why I believe [00:06:00] that just weighing yourself once a year when you go see the doctor. Isn't enough, so it's better than nothing. But yearly weighing yourself equals bad data, in my opinion.
You can't make decisions as easily when you weigh yourself once a year because you're looking at a year's worth of data in between the numbers. So let's say you're like me. I am a five nine male. And one year I weigh 150 pounds, and the next year I weigh 200 pounds. There's 50 pounds of data that it's really hard to decide what happened.
I mean, you could look and be like, okay, I just overate for a whole year. Well, if we then weigh another year to weigh ourselves, then we may not. We may weigh more the next year. Weighing yourself yearly just creates bad data. So then we look at monthly. [00:07:00] Monthly does give us better data. This is better, but it's still hard to make adjustments.
This is better. But I don't know about you. I struggle sometimes to remember everything going on in the past week if I weigh myself monthly. First of all, it's gonna be hard to remember when I weigh. So if I weigh myself in the first of every month, that could be on a different day. It, it is gonna be on a different day.
So just the habit of weighing monthly can be very confusing. When do you do it? The first Monday, the first of the month. When do you do it? And then how do you remember, okay, this is how I lived my life this past month. Let's make some decisions. Now, monthly is better data, but it's still hard to make.
Adjustments. So that's why, even though I guess if you're gonna weigh yourself, I'd rather you weigh yourself [00:08:00] monthly than yearly, but I just still think the data just isn't good enough. Then we have daily, so if you weigh yourself daily, then this will allow you to make a lot of adjustments. Right? Well, really daily really just creates stress.
Because now every single day you feel the pressure to weigh yourself. And, uh, I'll tell you this, if I have all you can eat sushi one night, the next morning I'm gonna weigh significantly more than I weighed the prior morning. This is actually what I call noisy data, or this is still, I think, bad data.
It's not, it's not a big enough sample size. That's why I like. To do weekly. Weekly gives you enough time to make adjustments, be like, okay. Well, over the past couple weeks I ate a lot of [00:09:00] sugary snacks. It was over the holidays. I was eating a lot more. I was getting a lot of gifts. Maybe I was drinking a lot more Na beer.
It's easy to see. Okay, that's what I did. It's easier to see. That's what I did the last couple weeks. Let's make some changes moving forward. I actually did this this past year after the holidays. I weighed 171 pounds. I haven't weighed 171 pounds in a couple years, but I weighed myself and I'm like, okay, that makes sense.
'cause it was over the holidays. Now all I need to do is watch my portion sizes a little bit. I'm not gonna make any big like dietary changes right now because my body's used to eating all the unhealthy stuff I ate over the holidays. So I'm gonna consciously make the decision to just have smaller portions.
Well, I did that and I lost 4.7 pounds over the next week, and I knew that was gonna happen because it was just an anomaly of, Hey, this is what happened the last couple of weeks, and I weigh myself weekly. I was able to make that decision weekly. Equals the ability to make real [00:10:00] adjustments. Now, depending on your goals in life, maybe you're a specific athlete, maybe you have a specific health condition that you need to weigh yourself more than weekly.
Maybe you need to weigh yourself daily, then please go and do that. There's certain things I do daily. I track my HRV daily. I have a whole video about. HRV track and how it's helped my life. I highly recommend you check it out or go listen to the podcast episode as well. With that being said, here are my five reasons why I weigh myself on a weekly basis.
The first one is, and I've kind of talked about this already, what you focus on expands. Or is important to you when you tell yourself, I'm gonna weigh myself every week, you are telling yourself that your weight, your healthy weight is important to you, and then you will in turn start taking actions towards from that healthy weight.
This is why tracking in every aspect of your life is so important. When you have a goal and something's important to you, you need to put focus on [00:11:00] it. You need to track it in some way. The next thing is it just, it takes so much less time. Takes less time than tracking calories. Now, if you're really trying to lose weight quickly, then you probably need to track calories as well.
But the reality is the scale doesn't lie. You could be tracking calories and mis inputting if you don't weigh yourself. Let's say you're only tracking calories. If you're just tracking and you're not weighing yourself and you're not seeing results of your weight decrease. Well, first of all, you're not gonna know if there's results unless you weigh yourself.
Let's say you go to the doctor, you weigh yourself like, Hey, you need to lose 50 pounds. You say, I'm gonna track. I'm gonna start tracking my calories. And then you go back to the doctor six months later and you didn't. Change and the doctor's like, Hey, like what's going on? You were tracking for, yeah, I was, but maybe you weren't weighing yourself.
You need to weigh yourself weekly to know if the math is right. 'cause caloric input, it's really [00:12:00] calories in
minus calories out equals either a plus. Minus or equal for your weight each week. If you take in more calories than you burn in a given week, you're gonna gain weight. If you burn more calories than you take in, then you're gonna lose weight. If it's about equal, then you're gonna stay the same, but when you weigh yourself.
You get the true picture, you may be under caling your calories out. You may be over, caling your calories in or vice versa. The scale doesn't line number three, more accurate, more accurate than tracking calories[00:13:00]
and dieting. People think that just by going keto, you're gonna lose a bunch of weight. What if you don't weigh yourself? What if you're still taking the same amount of calories in and the same amount of calories out? You're gonna plateau at some point. 'cause it is a mathematical equation. So you may as well weigh yourself and figure it out.
Figure out are you actually losing weight? And if you're not, then make adjustments. And really the adjustments are simple. Work out more, eat less. Number four. I can make adjustments on a weekly basis by weighing myself weekly. I can look back at my week and make adjustments if I weigh myself monthly.
It's hard to remember the whole month, even if you're documenting in a journal. If you're doing it eely, you really don't have the time to look back. If you're doing it daily, then you could be over adjusting. But when you look at weekly, you can make small adjustments and see what that plays out over the next week.
And number five. [00:14:00] You build body awareness. This is really interesting. So before I even weighed myself for the week and saw that I was 171 pounds, I could have told you that I gained weight and I could have told you how much I approximately weigh. Well, because I weighed myself a week before as part of it, and I probably wasn't gonna put in 20 pounds in a week.
But it's also because I've been doing this for so long and my brain has created different connections and I know that when I weigh more, I have more acid reflux. And for a couple of weeks I was having acid reflux almost every single day. And yes, I was eating less healthily, but this is like after. I started eating healthy again.
I was still getting the acid reflux and I knew, I'm like, it's probably 'cause I weigh over 170 pounds. I know it, and it's probably fat. It's not like I've been lifting a lot, but I don't think I put on that much muscle. I'm pretty sure that [00:15:00] I am over 170 pounds and that's where this is coming from. And I weighed myself and I was 171 pounds, and then after I lost the five pounds acid reflux went away.
So you're creating. Body awareness by knowing what your weight is related to how you feel. I know that I best feel in the 160 to 165 pound range when I race ultras all go below one 60. I don't like being under 1 55. 1 55 to one 60 is fine, but really I feel the strongest at one 60 to 1 65. I feel extremely strong in that range.
So remember what you track, what you. Put attention on expands. Grab my three pillars of Healthy Living Guides so you can not only track, but implement movement into your life to decrease that weight, increase your vitality, your longevity. And then the third pillar of healthy living, having accountability, partner, having accountability in your life.
You can combine these three pillars. This is [00:16:00] my formula for losing 40 pounds in 90 days where I went from weighing almost 200 pounds to my perfect weight that I love around 160 pounds in 90 days. You can grab your copy. It is linked in the show notes and in description on YouTube. You can also go to www.athletewithasthma.com/healthy-living-guide to grab your copy.
I'll see you in the next episode.
Thanks for tuning in to the Athlete with Asthma Show. I hope today's episode inspired you to overcome any perceived limitations you may have. Remember, your health and wellness journey isn't about perfection. It is about progress. So I invite you to take a small step right now towards your goals, and if you found something helpful here, make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share the podcast with others on a similar path.
Until next time, [00:17:00] keep challenging yourself and redefining what's possible.
