"Without the scale I'd lose control"

This is the fear underneath the habit, and it deserves a straight answer rather than reassurance. You're afraid that if you stop looking, the weight will move without you noticing, and by the time you notice it'll be a stone and not a pound. The scale feels like the thing holding it in place.

There's a finding that seems to confirm this. Elina Helander and colleagues looked at 2,838 weights from 40 people on a health programme and found that weight loss happened during stretches of daily weighing and that gaps longer than a month were associated with gain. That's real, and it's in the notes. But look again at who it is. People in a programme, whose gap in weighing probably meant a gap in the programme, which the authors themselves say. It doesn't show that the step was what held the weight down. It shows that when people stopped doing the whole thing, the whole thing stopped working.

Madigan's meta-analysis from chapter 6 is the more useful fact here. Weighing on its own, with nothing else changed, had no evidence of doing anything. That's the closest the research comes to testing your belief directly, and it doesn't support it. The scale doesn't hold anything. What holds weight where it is, or moves it, is what you eat and do over weeks, and you'll be doing that with or without a number in the morning.

Here's what I think the scale actually is for you, and it's an interpretation. It's an alarm, not a brake. An alarm tells you something's happening. It doesn't stop it. And an alarm that goes off every morning for reasons that have nothing to do with fire is one you stop being able to hear, which is the state you're in. The bad mornings aren't warnings, they're Saturday's rice, and because they come so often you've no way of picking out the one that would matter.

If what you actually want is to notice a real change in time to do something about it, a weekly weigh day and a line, chapters 16 and 18, will catch a real change within a month and will never once mistake a curry for one. If what you want is the feeling of control, I'd look at whether the daily step is giving you that or the opposite. A control that has to be checked every morning and that sets your mood each time isn't control. It's the thing being controlled.

If the fear is bigger than this, if it's tied to a diet you're always about to start or have just failed at, Breakfast isn't the problem, in this series, is about that cycle and is a better book for it than this one.