The Ups and Downs of Weight

I've been weighing myself a couple times a day for seven months. The first three months feature a slow decline as I would have days where I couldn't get enough food in my body and was then unable to recover. Then there was a rise as I had a drug that let me eat food (and also triggered water retention). Then a drop after surgery and I was on a liquid diet, then a rapid rise as I started eating like a normal person, then a plateau at what appears to be a new stable weight, though it's 10 lbs lighter than I used to be.



One thing worth noting is how noisy the numbers are: my weight before urinating at night is often 2 lbs higher than my weight the next morning after urinating. There are also several periods where I'm up a couple pounds for a few days and down a couple pounds for a few days as my body retains or excretes water and waste. The upshot of this is that the number on the scale is an overly precise measure of a person's general weight, especially if they're wearing clothes—my weight at a doctor's office was often five pounds higher than when I was naked at home in the morning. If you're weighing yourself hoping for a psychological result (you want the number to be high or low), you can cheat a little by timing when you step on the scale. If you just want to know how much you weigh, just round to the nearest 5 lbs and don't worry about weighing in more than once a week.