Daily Scale Weight Tracking Is Useless... and Necessary (Signal-to-Noise) | Ep 276
Try MacroFactor free with code WITSANDWEIGHTS - download on Apple/iPhone or Google/Android
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Should you weigh yourself daily?
Learn about an engineering concept called Signal-to-Noise ratio to explain why daily weight tracking is both meaningless AND essential.
You'll discover how your body's water balance, glycogen, sodium, and other factors create "noise" that masks the true "signal" of fat loss or gain.
Learn how to use the power of trend weight to get clarity on your progress while maintaining a healthy relationship with the scale. Plus, discover how this same principle applies to all aspects of your fitness journey.
Main Takeaways:
Daily weight fluctuations are normal and can be 2-5+ pounds due to water, glycogen, digestive contents
Research shows daily weighing improves outcomes but only when viewing trends vs individual weigh-ins
The 20-day exponential moving average filters out "noise" to reveal true body mass changes
This principle applies beyond weight - use trends for nutrition, training, recovery tracking
Episode Resources:
YouTube video about the research on daily weigh-ins
Try MacroFactor free with code WITSANDWEIGHTS - download on Apple/iPhone or Google/Android
Timestamps:
[03:27] Does daily weighing increase anxiety?
[04:56] Understanding how water weight and digestion affect the scale
[07:43] How to filter signal from noise
[11:21] How to detach emotionally from daily numbers
[14:27] How to implement tracking systems
[15:51] The mindset shift in data-driven tracking
Why Daily Weigh-Ins Are Both Pointless and Essential
Stepping on the scale can feel like an emotional roller coaster. One day, you’re thrilled by the number, and the next, you’re questioning every decision you’ve made. But what if I told you that daily weight fluctuations are essentially meaningless—but tracking your weight daily is still one of the most important things you can do for fat loss, muscle gain, or weight maintenance?
This paradox boils down to a powerful concept borrowed from engineering: the signal-to-noise ratio. By understanding this principle, you’ll not only remove the stress of daily weigh-ins but also unlock a smarter, data-driven way to measure progress.
Why Scale Weight Fluctuates Daily
Your weight isn’t static. In fact, it can fluctuate by 2-5 pounds or more in a single day, even if you haven’t gained or lost an ounce of fat. These fluctuations are caused by factors that have nothing to do with body fat.
1. Carbs and Water Retention
Carbohydrates stored in your muscles pull water with them—about 3-4 grams of water per gram of glycogen. A carb-heavy meal (like pasta or bread) can spike your weight temporarily.
2. Sodium Intake
Salty foods can lead to water retention as your body balances its electrolytes. Ever noticed how pizza or Chinese food makes the scale jump?
3. Digestive Contents
The food and liquid in your digestive system have weight. Depending on your eating schedule and when you visit the bathroom, this can easily add or subtract a couple of pounds.
4. Hydration Levels
Sweating, drinking water, alcohol consumption, or even the weather can affect your hydration and, consequently, your weight.
5. Exercise and Recovery
Resistance training, especially intense sessions, can cause muscle inflammation and water retention as part of the recovery process.
6. Hormonal Changes
Cortisol, reproductive hormones, and thyroid fluctuations also play a role. Women, in particular, experience significant weight changes throughout their menstrual cycle.
Signal vs. Noise
In engineering, the signal is the meaningful data, while the noise is everything that interferes with it. With your scale weight, the signal is the long-term trend—whether you’re gaining, losing, or maintaining weight. The noise is the daily fluctuations caused by all the factors we just discussed.
Think of it this way: tracking your weight every day is like watching waves crash on a beach to determine if the tide is rising or falling. It’s nearly impossible to tell from one wave, but if you zoom out and observe over time, the trend becomes clear.
This is why daily weigh-ins are essential. They provide the raw data needed to uncover the trend. Without enough data points, it’s much harder to determine whether you’re making progress.
The Science Behind Daily Weighing
Research backs this up. Studies, including one reviewed by Dr. Bill Campbell, have found that people who weigh themselves daily are more successful at losing fat and maintaining it long-term than those who weigh less frequently.
Interestingly, daily weigh-ins don’t lead to increased anxiety or obsession, as many fear. In fact, frequent weighing often helps people develop a more objective, data-driven relationship with the scale.
How to Track Weight Effectively
To filter out the noise and focus on the signal, you need to:
Weigh Yourself Daily
Do it first thing in the morning, after using the bathroom, and before eating or drinking.
Use the same scale and wear minimal or consistent clothing.
Focus on the Trend
Use a tool like a 7-day moving average or, even better, a 20-day exponential moving average to smooth out daily fluctuations.
Apps like Macrofactor calculate your trend weight automatically, saving you the mental math.
Detach Emotionally
Treat each daily weigh-in as just another data point. The magic happens when you zoom out and observe the trend over weeks or months.
Why Consistency Matters
Consistency in tracking leads to better data, which leads to better decisions. Skipping weigh-ins or tracking sporadically makes it harder to spot trends and adjust your nutrition or training.
For example, if your goal is fat loss, daily weighing combined with calorie and macro tracking can reveal whether you’re truly in a deficit. Similarly, for muscle gain, it can show whether your weight is trending up as expected.
Applying the Signal-to-Noise Concept Beyond Weight
This principle isn’t limited to the scale. You can use it for other aspects of fitness:
Calorie Tracking: Weekly averages matter more than hitting exact numbers every day.
Strength Training: Individual workouts are less important than weekly volume and progression over time.
Recovery: A single bad night of sleep won’t ruin you; it’s the long-term pattern that counts.
My Final Thoughts
Daily weigh-ins might feel pointless when you see the numbers bouncing all over the place. But those fluctuations are just noise. When you focus on the trend, you gain clarity about your progress and can make smarter decisions about your nutrition and training.
By shifting your mindset to see tracking as a data-driven process rather than an emotional one, you’ll unlock a whole new level of control over your fitness journey.
Remember, the signal is in the noise—you just have to know how to find it.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
You step on the scale every morning, hoping to see progress from all your hard work. Some days you're elated, others devastated. But what if neither reaction is even necessary? Today we're using an engineering framework that will transform how you look at progress tracking forever. You'll discover why obsessing over daily numbers is rather pointless. Yet tracking them is essential, whether you're trying to lose fat, gain muscle or just maintain a healthy weight. Understanding this one principle will give you clarity and confidence about tracking that you've never had before.
Philip Pape: 0:49
Welcome to Wits and Weights, the podcast that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique. I'm your host, philip Pape, and today we're exploring how the engineering concept of signal-to-noise ratio can change your approach to tracking and tracking progress and measuring progress. Recent research confirms that daily weigh-ins lead to better adherence and outcomes for fat loss than even weighing five times a week or less. Yet we also know that individual daily weights are meaningless due to natural fluctuations in your scale weight. Today, you're going to learn how to resolve this apparent contradiction and apply it not just to weight tracking, but every aspect of your fitness journey. Now, before we get into it, if you're ready to start tracking your weight and your nutrition properly.
Philip Pape: 1:37
One of my favorite tools is called Macrofactor. It is what I use. My clients use. It's the only app on the market that not only logs your food, it calculates your dynamic metabolism so that it can give you targets for calories and macros each week, unlike other apps that simply allow you to log the data. So if you download Macrofactor from the app store, please use my code, witsandweights. All spelled out, all one word, if you want to try that out for free. Macrofactor has the most advanced trend weight and expenditure algorithms of any app. It's super fast and it does all the complex math that we're going to discuss today. It does it automatically. So go get Macrofactor link in the show notes. Use my code WITSANDWEIGHTS to support me, and here we go.
Philip Pape: 2:21
Let's start by addressing something that might seem like a contradiction. I mentioned in the intro that there is research. There's a study that was reviewed in the Dr Bill Campbell's research review recently. I actually have a short YouTube video about it if you check out my channel at Wits and Weights and it shows that people who weigh themselves every day it actually compared seven days to five days and it showed that the seven days themselves every day. It actually compared seven days to five days and it showed that the seven days was more successful at losing fat and maintaining it long-term, let alone weighing even less than that. And yet at the same time and here's where we have to have two thoughts in our head we also know that daily weight fluctuations have nothing to do with actual fat loss or gain. So it's kind of fascinating, right. It's like we want to weigh every day for some reason, but we know that the data every day doesn't really matter that much, and there was a review in the Journal of Obesity that found better results, not just during the fat loss, but people who continue after the fact were successful at maintaining their results.
Philip Pape: 3:27
What's really interesting is that daily weighing does not increase anxiety or obsession, like many people fear or like many people claim. In fact, studies often have shown the opposite. People who weigh daily report feeling more in control, less fixated on their weight over time. Daily report feeling more in control, less fixated on their weight over time. They develop a more objective, data-driven relationship with the scale, and the wild thing is that your body weight can easily fluctuate by, on average, two to five pounds or more in a single day, even with zero change in body fat. And so I want to explain why that is, so that you have the context for why, then, the tracking is so important in the context of this signal-to-noise idea.
Philip Pape: 4:11
So first, here are the reasons weight fluctuates. One of the big ones is carbs and glycogen. Every gram of carbs stored in your muscles pulls in about three to four grams of water. So if you load up on pasta one night where you normally don't, that could be an extra 100 grams of carbs means a pound of water weight the next day. Right, and that's totally normal. It has nothing to do with fat gain. And then there's salt. There's sodium intake. Higher sodium foods cause water retention as your body tries to maintain proper electrolyte balance, and that's why a salty meal can spike the scale temporarily right, think Chinese food or even pizza. Your body is just doing its job. It's very sophisticated, it's very smart to maintain homeostasis.
Philip Pape: 4:56
Then we have, like, what's in your gut, digestive contents gut, what am I trying to say? Gut content, right, are a pretty big factor for some people, because the food and liquid in your digestive system it has mass, and, depending on when and what you last ate, depending on when you go to the bathroom. This can vary by several pounds, right, and it's why weighing yourself at different times of day is not a great strategy for consistency, because even just literally after having a glass of water you're going to, you're going to weigh more. Um, then we have our hydration status, which is always changing. It's not like you're a fixed creature, right. You sweat during exercise, you drink more or less water on different times, you might have some alcohol. The humidity level in the air can affect your body, body's water balance. All of this can cause multi-pound fluctuations.
Philip Pape: 5:45
Then we have training, right. Intense training exercise, especially resistance training, especially a leg day, can cause some inflammation and temporary water retention. Your muscles are holding more water. It's a good sign that you are adapting and you're getting stronger than happens, but it does sometimes cause a pop in weight. Then we have hormonal changes, right, especially relevant for women, but even men experience fluctuations that affect your ability to retain water. There's cortisol from stress, reproductive hormones, thyroid function. All of it impacts how much water your body holds onto.
Philip Pape: 6:19
And now people wonder why the heck the scale bounces around. Well, there you go. When you understand all these factors, you realize that expecting a linear change on the scale is actually completely unrealistic and not to be expected whatsoever. You actually want your scale weight to look like a huge oscillating up and down line or curve over time. It's never going to be that tight, it's rarely going to be that tight. Let's put it that way, right? It's like trying to measure the tide by looking at waves. I mean, that's a decent analogy. If you think of the ocean, it's just pointless.
Philip Pape: 6:54
So this is where the concept from engineering that you probably have heard of before, it's called the signal to noise ratio, where the signal is that meaningful data that we want to measure and then the noise is everything else that interferes with that measurement. Right, and sometimes the noise is a lot more than you want it to be. So if I give you a real world example, when you're listening to you, remember radios, remember radio in your car Okay, I'm speaking to my demographic, which is probably a lot of you listening and you're on a road trip and you get closer to the station and it's nice and clear, and then you start to drive away from the station. What happens? Right, the music, that's what you want to hear, that's the signal. It starts getting mixed with static and the static is the noise and then, as you get further away, the of that signal to noise gets worse and worse, until you can't hear the music at all.
Philip Pape: 7:43
And your body works the same way. Or your body weight, your scale weight, works the same way. The trend in your weight, whether you're gaining, maintaining or losing, that's the signal that we want to know. But all the daily fluctuations we talked about, that's the noise. And in engineering we solve this using a filter. This is a tool, this is a piece of math that you can turn into electronics, and it separates the signal from the noise. So for body weight, we can do that using a moving average. We can just weigh yourself every day and then use, like a seven day moving average or what I like, which Macrofactor uses, a 20 day exponential moving average. And you know, don't let that scare you, it's actually a pretty simple thing. You can even do it yourself in a spreadsheet. But think of it like this Imagine if, instead of looking at the waves hitting the beach and trying to determine the tide, you look at a time-lapse video over several hours.
Philip Pape: 8:34
You ever seen those where now you see the tide clearly moving in and clearly moving out, even though individual waves are always crashing, moving in and clearly moving out, even though individual waves are always crashing right. The exponential moving average does that. It gives more weight to the recent measurements and smooths out the daily fluctuations, and so, as a result, you get this trend line that actually tells you what's happening with your body composition. And I want to get into this, just nerd out on this a bit, because I've looked into this, and I want to get into this, just nerd out on this a bit, because I've looked into this and I even talked to Greg Knuckles a while ago on the podcast.
Philip Pape: 9:05
Why 20 days? Right, it's not random. It's actually long enough to filter out most noise, but short enough to still be responsive to real changes. Because you don't want to wait six months to determine your trend weight. That would be ridiculous. But we also know we can't do it in as short as seven days because it's still too noisy, right. And so you want to balance in between, and that's where the 20 days is really nice. And so when I'm working with clients, it's like the first couple of weeks, we're just collecting data. Let's not even worry about what it says. And then there's the question of the linear versus exponential. If you care about that. I mentioned an exponential average. A linear average would treat the last 20 days the same, but an exponential average gives more weight to recent days, even though it still considers older data. That's a very smart approach, because what's happened to your body recently is more signal than what happened 20 days ago, so that makes it more responsive to the actual change in direction, but still filtering out the noise. And so what's really powerful about this is it gives you better data with less perfect adherence. Okay, so if you In other words no, let me restate it If you only weigh yourself occasionally, you're going to get less reliable information than someone who weighs daily.
Philip Pape: 10:22
That's what I'm trying to say. It's kind of this counterintuitive thing, but the math proves it. Just look at how the formula works. It proves it mathematically that if you only sporadically weigh yourself, it's not going to work so well and it's not going to give you a great idea of what's going on. But if you weigh yourself daily, it will. And it's not going to give you a great idea of what's going on, but if you weigh yourself daily it will. So again, with my clients, I kind of get on them a little bit when they miss some days of weighing because I don't want to sound like a tracking Nazi here, but it's actually going to help you. It's going to help you to know am I actually losing fat or gaining fat, so that I can change my calories appropriately.
Philip Pape: 10:55
So how do we apply this in practice appropriately? So how do we apply this in practice? Well, pretty simple. We need to collect enough data points. That means you need to weigh yourself every day, and the best, most reliable way to do that is first thing in the morning, after you use the bathroom, before you eat or drink, wearing the similar clothing or preferably none, or, you know, underwear or something like that and using the same scale. But this is crucial. This is the crucial part. That's all the logistical stuff.
Philip Pape: 11:21
Emotionally, you need to detach emotionally from those individual numbers. Now, when I say you need to detach, like, can you just flip a switch and do that? Of course not. I get that. But over time, as you do it daily, you will detach right, unless something else is going on. You will detach and I see this over and over again as long as you relate it to the why and the trend and are kind of treating the data like it's supposed to be, like it's meant to be like.
Philip Pape: 11:47
These are just data points. They mean nothing. The magic happens when you look at the trend, right. And so, going back to macro factor, it handles this for you, right. It calculates your trend weight and then it uses that along with your food intake to say okay, based on what you're eating and based on what you're weighing, over a long period of two or three weeks, we know that you're actually gaining weight or you're losing weight and therefore we're going to adjust your intake accordingly. Or maybe you're gaining more or less than we thought, so we're going to go up or down with your calories right Now.
Philip Pape: 12:18
This principle can apply to anything, for example, your calories themselves, your calories and macro targets. I don't want you to hit them perfectly. That's impossible. It's the weekly averages that ends up driving your results. So, again, we don't want to obsess over hitting the exact number every day. That's super counterproductive. Some days will be higher, some days will lower.
Philip Pape: 12:38
It is the trend that matters Now. If you're always over, the trend will be high. If you're always under, the trend will be low. But you've got to give yourself some up and down room to navigate, similar in the gym, with your strength. Your performance in a single workout matters far less than your overall volume for the week, your sets for the week, your recovery for the week, the intensity going up session to session. You're going to have bad days, you're going to have great days. Neither of them defines you or your strength level in the moment. It's the trend over time. Look at your, the weights, the working weights and the volumes over days, weeks and months. I can go on. Recovery right.
Philip Pape: 13:15
Individual sleep scores, individual things that your aura ring tells you like oh my God, it's terrible. Your stress levels through the roof. Your HRV is terrible. Don't stress. I mean, one bad night's not going to ruin you. One perfect night's not going to fix everything. You know, one night of catching up on sleep isn't going to matter. It's the patterns over time, right, get those naps in, get the sleep schedule to be consistent, you know, slowly lengthen the amount of hours over time, and I can go on.
Philip Pape: 13:46
Like progress photos same thing like looking at yourself in the mirror every day can be misleading, but like monthly shots, those show the changes. Now, that's kind of a weird example, because I don't want you to take photos every day, because it doesn't work that way with photos, right, it's not like photos average out that it doesn't work that way. But for you to see the changes over time, you're going to need data points over time to compare to, and then even subjective metrics, like the biofeedback that I asked my clients to give me to rate their energy, hunger, mood. I look at them when they check in, but I really care about the trend, because you're going to have stress, you're going to have soreness, you're going to have issues here and there, you're going to get sick, et cetera. It doesn't matter. What matters is the trend over time.
Philip Pape: 14:27
So if you put all this together, what does it look like? You've got to have some sort of tool to track. It could be an app, a spreadsheet, a notebook. Have a system that works for you, I don't care what it is. Establish the protocol, right. When am I going to track it? How am I going to do it? So, for for weight we already talked about that every day in the morning, blah, blah, blah, um. Commit to doing it regularly, right? If it's daily, that makes sense. Do it daily. Consistency matters the most, so don't beat yourself up if you miss one Um, but also allow yourself to see the benefit of doing it as frequently as you think you need to do it like daily for scale, weight and maybe less for other things.
Philip Pape: 15:05
And then you're going to review your data weekly or biweekly and spot the patterns. You're going to look at the trends. That can be a really fun part of it, because now you've got enough data to give you a trend. And now you're like, oh, I'm glad I had all that data right, because otherwise it'd be missing and it wouldn't be able to figure out what's going on. Same thing with me as a coach. It's like if you weren't tracking for the last two weeks, I can't help you as much because I don't have that data. And so then you can make adjustments based on those trends, not the fluctuations, and it helps you avoid the obsessiveness and the emotional response, because now you're like, oh cool, like that early bad night I had, whatever it was eating too much or not getting sleep actually is just kind of some noise. It's noise in the signal, no big deal, right. And so it helps you reduce anxiety and obsession around tracking. That's the magic of this whole thing.
Philip Pape: 15:51
When you understand that the daily numbers are noise, you stop giving them so much emotional power. That's all it is. It's just a false sense of emotional power over you. Then you become more like an engineer or a scientist, right? You're just collecting data points and then you're going to reveal patterns. And this shift in mindset is really liberating. It is really empowering, because suddenly you can enjoy that dinner out without stress you know it's just noise and a larger signal dinner out without stress, you know it's just noise and a larger signal.
Philip Pape: 16:21
You start to see your fitness journey as a data-driven process rather than an emotional roller coaster. So the next time you step on the scale, remember you're not looking at a verdict, a judgment. You're collecting a data point that, combined with many others, dozens, hundreds of others, reveals the true story of your progress. And this isn't about weight tracking, right, this is about the mindset the mindset of an engineer, actually. That's why you listen to me, I think, someone who can look past the daily noise and see the signal that matters, all right.
Philip Pape: 16:50
So if you want to start tracking the smart way, a great way to do that for your food and your weight, which then gives you your metabolism and your targets if you're trying to gain muscle or lose fat, is to download Macrofactor and use code WITSANDWEIGHTS all one word to try it out. You're going to get access to one of the best trend weight and expenditure calculators out there. That's doing it for you as you log your weight, as you log your food. It makes it super easy. All right, until next time, keep using your wits lifting those weights and remember, in fitness as in engineering, the signal is in the noise. You just have to know how to find it. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
