Trend Weight – How to get over the fear of stepping on a weighing scale.

Gravitophobia is a term coined by psychologists to denote a very common problem among those of us worried about our body weight. It is manifested by a deep-rooted fear about stepping on a weighing scale. We are scared of body weight fluctuations on a regular basis.

You are on a weight loss journey, watching your diet and counting on your fit-bit band the steps you have taken during the day. Yet you are worried whether you are making any progress. You sometimes find the reading on the weighing scale going up by a kg or two overnight.

You are not only baffled, but also demotivated. Especially on the morning after you had indulged yourself a bit, you are dead scared of stepping on the weighing scale.

You will get over this dread once you get the facts right. Any overnight increase in weight is not just because of fat gain or muscle gain. You cannot gain so much fat or muscle overnight. Bulk of the weight increase is because of water retention in the body and natural causes like, say, constipation and menstrual cycle blotting. That is why, to judge where you are going in your weight loss journey, you shall rely purely on what is called ‘trend weight’ and not the up-and-down swings of daily body weight. Trend weight gives you a clear picture of the movement of the body weight graph over a period—from week to week and then month to month.

What is trend weight

Daily reference to body weight is only a data gathering exercise to make the right adjustments in your diet and exercise plan to move towards your timeline target, whether it is weight loss, or muscle gain. It is an important data point that guides our algorithm.

Instead of looking at scale weight, our algorithm predicts your trend weight based on your weight inputs of the past few weeks. While on a weight-loss journey, the trend weight tends to be higher than the scale weight and on a weight-gain journey, it tends to be lower than scale weight. Looking at trend weight instead of scale weight helps you get over the anxiety around sudden fluctuations in weight.