Trend weight changes your bathroom scale from your greatest enemy to your best friend in your weight loss journey. As anyone who has weighed themselves regularly with a bathroom scale knows, the scale fluctuates like crazy.
When you weigh yourself on the scale, you’re not just weighing your fat. You’re also weighing what you’ve recently eaten, your clothes, how much water your body is temporarily retaining, and a ton of other things. The scale can mislead you because you could be doing all of the right things and burning fat correctly, but for some reason, the body decides to retain some extra water or something, and then shows that your weight is even higher than before, even though you’ve done everything right. This is not only discouraging, it’s a lie.
Weight loss progress is measured in fractions of a pound per day. Yet your water weight can go up or down 5 or more pounds every day! This is why Luuze calculates trend weight, and why it is important to focus on trend weight instead of your scale weight.
What Trend Weight Looks Like Compared to Scale Weight
Take a look at the picture below, for example:
The pink line above is a line connecting all of the scale measurements I made over two weeks. You can see how it jumps up and down like crazy.
The blue line is what you will see in Luuze. It is a trend weight calculation that more accurately represents your true weight.
On October 14th, my scale told me that I weighed 166.5 lb. On November 1, my scale told me that I weighed 166.6 lb. My scale measurements suggested that I didn’t lose any weight at all the past two weeks! But the truth was that progress was being made. The trend weight showed that I lost around a pound.
If I just trusted the scale, I would also feel incredibly demoralized on October 25, when the scale told me that I weighed over 2 pounds from the day before.
Focus on the Trend Weight, Not the Scale Weight
Luuze does some math in the background to smoothen out these water weight variations to give you a more accurate representation of your progress. The calculation is your trend weight and is the number that should be compared to your goal weight. If your trend weight is going down over a long period of time, you’re definitely losing weight. If it goes up over a long period of time, it’s important to reflect on why and re-adjust.
Be sure to focus on your trend weight instead of your scale weight as you progress through your weight loss journey. I can’t repeat enough that the scale lies, and the number on the bathroom scale can be a major reason why we give up. However, tracking our progress accurately is essential to fixing the root cause of weight gain so you can repair your feedback loop and permanently lose weight. The trend weight is a way to do this.