1 Apr
The “Weigh-In Day” Diet
I’ve got it right now. It’s only a few hours until I weigh-in this evening at my Weight-Watchers meeting.
What is it? Well, it’s that mode you get into on the day of your scheduled weigh-in where your willpower has an enhancement. The bonus is the affirmation or reminder when you see something you really shouldn’t eat and you tell yourself “I can’t have that, I’m weighing in today”.
Unfortunately, there are two problems here. One is the assumption that almost starving ourselves this day will have an impact on our weigh-in. It will have an impact, but maybe not the right one as we will most likely gorge ourselves after the weigh-in (sometimes to “celebrate” and other times to say “what the heck, I’m already up anyways”). This is bad, because we still do it every week. It is not a good behavior because we lie to ourselves that we’re doing good (if we lose) and it’s hopeless (if we gain in spite of starving ourselves).
The second problem is that the willpower we enforce is over-emphasized on this one day, and then relaxed to the point of non-existence the other six days. We don’t have a balance in our willpower and so we use it all up in one day and it doesn’t recharge fast enough for us to survive the challenges after the weigh-in.
In “Fighting the Urge to Fight the Urge“, the author, Patrick Tucker, quotes from another publication that “People have a limited amount of self-control, and tasks requiring controlled, willful action quickly deplete this central resource. Exerting self-control on one task impairs performance on subsequent tasks requiring the same resource”.
If we use it all up leading up to the weigh-in, we have nothing left afterwards and end up gorging ourselves. We have to learn to “spread it out” a little and exercise that willpower throughout the week… not all day, but definitely all week. Our fight against ourselves is 24/7, weigh-in day is only hours.
If we practice, we can find ourselves using better affirmations such as “I won’t have that, I care about myself”.
Posted by Cynthia on 01.04.08 at 12:27 pm
I agree, the fight is 24/7. You have to maintain the good habits at least 80-90% of the time, not just on or near weigh-in days.
I once kind of did the “weigh-in day diet” back about a decade ago. I ate up hugely after my weigh-in… and then went about my normal eating plan most of the week and then, two days before weigh-in, went really LOW on the calorie scale, like 1200-1000 calories! I did lose weight, and generally in a sensible way, but I stressed too much about having my weight be lower on Monday than the previous Monday.
I suppose it is worse still when you have to do a weigh-in for someone other than yourself. Does WW give any choice about whether you weigh at meetings or not?
It’s most important to just stick to your plan and be consistent with that. Weigh if you like, but don’t attach more importance to the scale than it deserves. What success is, is sticking to healthier eating and exercise. Those bring results with time. The month to month trend is more important to me than the week to week. So little can bring on a water weight fluctuation.
Besides, if you know you are following plan and exercising, that give more long term satisfaction than a number on a scale. Because one day, one day we’ll be at goal. And then the numbers will hopefully more or less stay the same. And we’ll still need that consistency of good eating and exercise to keep it that way.