Weight is a range not a number

Concept of weight by Doug X with Craiyon

I have a pet peeve…okay I have about a 1000 pet peeves. I have pet peeves that have crawled into the attic of my mind and gone into hibernation…

I digress. One of my pet peeves is when people say they lost 5 lbs. I call bullshit.

My weight (223 as of last weigh in can fluctuate close to 5lbs a day. I have weighed my self 5 times in one day and recorded 221, 224, 227, 226 and 223. Depending on the order I’ve gained/lost 5lbs that day.

The only true thing I can say about my weight is I weigh between 220 and 230 lbs. That statement has been true for the past 3 months since I’ve bought a scale.

Now to be fair height does vary throughout the day, but it varies about .3 inches. Since we uses inches as our metric (or perhaps centimeters for you European types) it doesn’t change your stated height.

I’ve asked other people and I don’t know anyone who hasn’t said their weight varies at least a couple of pounds per day. According to a healthline.com article the average person’s weight varies 5 to 6 lbs a day. So why do we give a number that will be wrong several times…that day.

What we can all say is the ten pound range of your weight. Like I said, I weigh between 220 and 230. Other people, skinnier people, can say their weight is between 135 and 145 as mine was once upon a time in my twenties and thirties.

And this gets back to my pet peeve since weight varies 5 to 6 lbs a day, you can’t really say you’ve lost 5lbs and have it mean anything other than a fluctuation. Nor can you say you’re 3 pounds overweight because again, fluctuations. Until you’ve lost more than 10lbs, or better to say you’re daily data set shifts, say from 165 to 175 to 155 to 165, you haven’t lost or gained weight.