What it does to the weight

This chapter is short and it's the one place I'll talk about weight itself, because you'll want to know. Does the daily step at least keep the weight down? For you, as you're using it, I doubt it, and here's the reasoning, which is mine and not a finding.

The trials in chapter 6 found weighing helpful in people who plotted it and acted on the line inside a programme. Madigan's meta-analysis found no evidence that weighing on its own did anything, and no difference between daily and weekly. So the daily step, as opposed to the line, isn't what the research credits.

What the daily step gives you, chapter 9, is the settling up. Skipped breakfast, bigger four o'clock, the good morning's cake. Orsama's weekly pattern from chapter 4 is worth looking at again here. The people whose weight came down or held over months were the ones with the strongest fall through the week after the weekend rise. The authors call that compensation, and they say it's normal. But the compensation in that study wasn't mood-driven. It was people going back to eating normally after a weekend, and the scale following.

The settling up is different. It's a reaction to the swing, and it produces its own swing, because the skipped breakfast makes the four o'clock bigger and the four o'clock makes tomorrow's number worse. Neumark-Sztainer's five-year finding, that frequent weighing in younger girls predicted weight gain rather than loss, is at least consistent with that, though it's a study of adolescents and I wouldn't lean on it harder than that.

So here's my honest answer. If you want the scale's help with your weight, use it the way the trials did, as a line over weeks, chapters 16 to 18. Used that way it may help, modestly, and it won't set your mood. Used as a daily mark with a settling up attached, I think it's more likely to move your weight around than down, and it's certainly moving your mornings.

And if you don't want to change your weight at all, and just want the mornings back, the break in chapter 19 is for you, and nothing in the research suggests you'll come to harm in a month without a number.