I’ve been keeping detailed logs of my weight and calorie intake, and from that process I have learned a great deal in the past couple of months and that is what I will be talking about in the weeks(s) to come.

So be prepared. This is going to be a long one.

I set a goal this summer to increase my lean mass by 3kg before the holidays and set up a program focused on muscle hypertrophy using Lyle’s Generic Bulk and a 3300kcal/day diet which put me at roughly 500kcal above my daily maintenance calorie requirements. Today, 14 weeks later I have managed to gain roughly 6.5kg of weight and if we assume roughly half of that is fat, then I should have reached my goal by a slight margin. If this actually holds true or not we’ll see in a few weeks when I’ve dieted off the excess fat.

What I do know for certain is that during this time I have done a lot of hard work in the gym, eaten a lot of protein, consistently gained weight, gotten stronger and added weight to my previous personal bests. And this illustrates the key factors that you need to keep track of in order to make sure you are on the right path towards your fitness goals. Your weight, calories consumed, maybe a rough macronutrient breakdown, and your training progress. Potentially you could track a ton of data related to your training, such as caliper measurements, but their usefulness can be debated.

Weight measurement pitfalls

I can now see how easy it can be to become discouraged early on when you have less than a couple of weeks worth of data points to look at. This is because your weight tends to vary a lot during this time-frame. You might initially be on the right track, and then all of a sudden your hard earned results are gone and even reversed seemingly magically over night and you might wonder what you did wrong.

The mistake a lot of people do is to assume that this sudden jump or drop on the scale is all due to fat-gain (or muscle loss). As you can see from the graph below, my weight can vary by as much as about 2kg from one day to the next! What is going on here?

My body weight (in kg) as it has varied over the past 14 weeks.

The thing is, in order to store 2kg of fat over night, I would have to eat an excess of over 15000kcal in one day, which is very unlikely to happen without me knowing about it! So thinking rationally, it can’t be fat or muscle varying this much over night. A more likely explanation would be that I was dehydrated the day before and then I ate something that made me retain a lot more water than usual. A combination of sodium (salt) and carbohydrates can have this effect. This is because when you eat a lot of carbs, and those carbs are stored as glycogen in your muscles and your liver, they will bind four water molecules for each glycogen molecule. That is a lot of water. There’s nothing bad about that, both the glycogen and the water is in fact still considered “lean mass”, roughly 2/3 of your body should be water anyway. However, that slight excess of water can make you look a bit “bloated” when you look at yourself in the mirror the next morning. Typically this happens during the weekend binge when you go out for a few drinks/beer and eat junk food high in sodium and carbs.

But a lot of people seem to loose track of rational thought and just panic. All they can remember is what they’ve been told that “junk food and crisps and beer is bad mmkay?” and so they think they’ve just ruined a couple weeks worth of dieting progress with that one binge. And then they either give up, or do something stupid, like dropping all the fat or carbs from their diets and increase the amount of cardio they do in the gym to an unsustainable level and burn out.

What is interesting is that this goes both ways, not just to people wanting to loose weight. Skinny guys wanting to gain muscle might see a sudden jump on the scale, see those hard earned abs dissipating under the ugly bloatiness they observe in the mirror, panic, and draw the conclusion that they are eating way too much and decrease their calorie intake or increase the cardio in the hopes to reduce the perceived “fat gain”, effectively also making it impossible for themselves to gain any appreciable amount of muscle. Spinning their wheels forever and ever.

So how do you deal with this?

You can try to eliminate some of this variation by always measuring your weight at a fixed time during the day. The best time would be directly after you have emptied your bladder after waking up in the morning. But this won’t help much as witnessed by the graph above. You’ll still see these seemingly huge variations from one day to the next.

The most common recommendation however seem to be that you should not measure your weight daily, but rather measure your weight only once per week. But I feel that this is exactly opposite of what you should do. You should in fact measure your weight daily simply because then you can learn how much your weight fluctuates on a daily bases. If you measure once per week you might actually encounter something called “under sampling” and be tricked to believe that your weight has gone linearly from one data point to the next while in reality it may have not. Plotting a graph in a spreadsheet or some online tool is in my opinion a very good thing to do, it makes it much easier to see the overall trend if you are patient enough to keep tracking your progress for a couple of weeks and don’t panic. As you can see in my example above, my weight has varied up and down a lot, but the overall trend is clearly linear. In fact, I would claim it’s as close to a perfect linear weight progression as you can get. And that is what you want to look for. If the trend is linear and the rate of gain/loss is as you had expected, you are on track and don’t have to panic when the scale jumps up and down on a daily bases.

If you are not seeing any progress after keeping up your diet and training program for two weeks you need to change something and usually the easiest thing to change is your diet. For those wanting to loose weight, it is much easier to subtract 300-500kcal from your diet rather than trying to increase your calorie expenditure by the same amount. This is especially true if you are already doing tons of cardio. It might even be that you are doing too much and need to reduce the cardio even in a fat-loss program. If you on the other hand have trouble gaining weight, the first thing I’d look at is how much cardio you are doing, and reduce it if it exceeds 2 hours per week. If you are already low on cardio, then I’d add 300-500kcal to your diet. After the change you keep up your program and diet for another two weeks before you make any conclusions about the effects of the change. If you do this iteratively you will eventually find that sweet spot where you are gaining or loosing weight consistently.

And that is pretty much what I have to say about weight measuring and tracking. Later this week I will continue and write about how and why you should measure and keep track of your daily macronutrients (which once to actually care about) and calorie consumption (how to measure and keep track of the food you eat).