How to measure weight loss progress… without the scale

An old measuring tape (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oh scale… you’re so cruel sometimes.  I eat great, I watch my carbs, I don’t touch even a crumb of bread, and you don’t move a single pound!  Has this ever happened to you?  Of course it has, because you are a human on planet Earth.

Okay, here’s the thing with your body.  There’s a lot of variables.  Even if you’ve lost a lot of fat this week, you may have drank a lot of water too.  You may have a lot of poo in your intestines right now.  You may be swollen.  It’s normal for your weight to vary by several pounds throughout the week.

I knooooow… you wanna see that number go down.  You wanna jump on that scale every morning.  But.. stop it!  At most, you should weigh in once a week.  It would be perfectly acceptable to weigh in biweekly or monthly as well.  And there are many other ways to track your weight loss progress.

Take measurements

I find that about once a month, I have a week that the scale doesn’t move (or goes backwards… that jerk!).  I take that opportunity to update my measurements.  You can track your measurements on several websites, like Sparkpeople, MyFitnessPal, countless apps, heck, you can even just use a spreadsheet program or a notebook.  A measuring tape only costs a couple bucks, and will show you a lot of information.

Take pictures

If you haven’t taken “before” pictures yet, do it.  I forgot to take “before” pictures, and before I knew it I’d already lost 20 pounds.  When I compare my 20 pound weight loss pictures to my now 60 pound weight loss, the difference is stunning.

How do you FEEL?

Even before you see a difference on the scale, in your pictures, in your measurements, once you get into ketosis you are going to FEEL different.  If you don’t have ketone strips to monitor, you can usually tell when you’ve kicked yourself out of ketosis by checking in with yourself on how you feel.  If you start to feel that fog come back, you’ve probably gotten off plan.  LCHF should keep you consistently high energy as long as you are following it correctly and getting enough salt/broth.

How do you monitor your weight loss?