How to Lose Weight – When Will the Scale Show My Weight Loss?

Keep an eye on your calorie expenditure

If you want to lose weight, one thing most of us will not get around is reducing calories. Our western diet offers easy access to junk food, pre-packaged meals and snacks that are simple too high in calories for our sedentary life style. Plus we are eating too much because all the fat and sugar tastes too goodto pass anything up.

Sadly, most people do not even know how much calories they consume per day and to what limit they should stick just to maintain their weight. A first step to break through that cycle is to educate yourself and find out about the above values. An easy tool to use is an online BMR (basal metabolic rate) calculator that gives an idea about the calories you may spend for maintenance.

If you limit your daily calorie intake to about 500 calories below that level you will lose one pound per week. You can either search for meal plans of that daily calorie level or look for ways to cut those 500 calories out of your daily food.

“I am eating less, but the scale does not move!”

Regarding how often you should step on the scale to take your weight, weight loss experts often suggest not to weigh yourself for the first few weeks on a new diet, to maybe take your weight after a month or so and then weekly or in 14 day intervals.

On the other side, there are people taking their weight several times a day and getting obsessed with it, waiting for the scale to finally show them the next pound lost, or at least part thereof, and getting frustrated when this does not happen. Probably both ways are to extreme as you will need some feedback that you did the right thing and your diet is working, but also you need to accept that the scale will show you all your fluctuations in weight that naturally happen anyway.

Take your weight daily but do not get obsessed

The solution lies in taking the weight daily always at the same time under the same conditions when possible without putting too much judgment into what the scale reflects for that one moment in time. Record and chart your weight and keep an eye on your average weight going down.

If that is not the case, you have hit a plateau and might need to apply some changes to your diet or throw in some extra exercise. But use that feedback to keep yourself motivated and as an early warning when things start to go wrong. Just continue to stay on a daily calorie deficit and with a bit of patience your weight will come down!