Your body weight is one of the most popular and easiest personal health metrics to track over time.
We’ve written this short guide to explain how best to track your weight and include simple tips on the approach, with a sample spreadsheet or free sign-up to our body tracking platform to set you on your way.
Why track your body weight?
- It’s a quick and easy metric to measure and record
- Body weight is correlated with health and fitness and can be used as an indicator of progress (although it does have its limitations which we'll come to shortly)
- Tracking your progress encourages accountability and reinforces health and fitness goals
How to track your body weight?
The most important factor when tracking body weight is consistency. The trend over time is more important than a single measurement as your weight can fluctuate on a daily basis for reasons other than actual changes in fat or lean body mass (your body can be affected by factors such as water storage and glycogen levels as affected by your carbohydrate and fluid intake).
Four simple steps to tracking body weight;
- Weigh yourself
- Record your body weight measurement (we’ll cover how best to capture this in a moment)
- Each week, take the average from your daily measurements so that you’re recording a 7 day moving average
- Compare your weekly averages to get a picture of how your body weight is changing over time
Tips on measuring body weight
- Take weight measurements every morning, first thing
- You should preferably be naked and having just used the facilities!
- Always use the same scale to take the measurements
- Consider tracking other health and fitness metrics as well as just body weight. Reccording weight alone provides no insight into actual body composition (weight loss might not be fat loss!). We would also recommend tracking body fat % and taking measurements like waist circumference to get insight into actual composition changes.
- Stay patient, change doesn’t happen overnight but it will come in time when following basic health and fitness principles
How to record your body weight data
We recommend tracking your body weight digitally as the data can be graphed, analysed, compared and searched easily. We’ve included two suggested approaches below;
| Tracking Method | Notes |
|---|---|
| Body Weight Tracking Spreadsheet |
We've built a Google Spreadsheet for you to use freely. Benefits:
Limitations:
|
| Digital Weight Tracking Applications |
There are many dedicated weight tracking applications and services available, from websites to smartphone applications. Check out our own body tracking tool. Benefits:
Limitations:
|
Fitstream have both a fitness tracking application and weight tracking spreadsheet option for you to track your body weight that are both free to use;
Fitstream Health and Fitness Tracker
We have developed a purpose-built health metric tracker that can be used to record body weight as well as many other measurements over time.
The Fitstream tracking service includes;
- Support for tracking weight, body fat, waist, chest, biceps size (and many more measurements)
- Photo logging to see visual changes over time
- Tagging facility for enhanced reporting
- Graphs and report breakdown on progress
Find out more about Fitstream health tracking and start using it for free today.
Bodyweight Tracking Spreadsheet
If applications and dedicated weight tracking services aren’t for you, we’ve created this Google Docs Bodyweight Tracking Spreadsheet to help track and analyse your bodyweight. Feel free to make a copy and start tracking!
This spreadsheet includes your daily records and calculates a 7 day average. The data is then mapped to a graph to view the trend in weight loss or gain.
To use the spreadsheet, make a copy of it for your own use and simply populate the green cells with your bodyweight each day. The formulas will do the rest for you.
Also see the Fitstream BMI Calculator to work out your Body Mass Index.
