I’m going to share with you some really sound advice that often gets ignored, typically out of fear or because of misconceptions about dieting. Providing you are following the right kind of advice then my number one rule would be: Don’t give up when you aren’t getting results.

If you’ve followed tips on this blog or in my book Photo Diet: How To Diet Using Your Smartphone on how to lose weight fast, you will sometimes feel like you want to give up. Especially at times when you feel like you are hardly losing any weight on the weighing scales. This is a moment everyone who is trying to lose weight will face. After a day of hard “losing weight work” you will look on the weighing scale and see hardly any results and feel like you are doing this all for nothing. You are wrong. These are normal weight fluctuations.

I had an email last Friday from a client who was in distress because she had put weight on. There are many factors why weight can fluctuate from day-to-day and even hour-by-hour. This is the reason why I don’t recommend getting weighed daily and obsessing about the scales. A much more effective method of measuring progress for your body composition would be to take body measurements with a good old-fashioned tape measure. No gadgets or phone apps can compete with what a tape measure will tell you.

If someone is putting all of their success down to a number it is easy to understand why someone would want to give up if the scales didn’t tell them what they wanted. Unfortunately this is common even amongst those that feel and look better as a result of what they have been doing.

I wonder how many dieters have made the mistake of quitting because they were obsessing about numbers whilst in actual fact they were making progress. Rejecting any sign that tells you what you are doing is working for the sake of the numbers not adding up is bonkers.

Back to my client, I did a follow-up email after the weekend and guess what? She got weighed on the Monday (just three days later) and she had lost six pounds. Luckily my coaching skills had paid off and she didn’t revert to her previous diet in an attempt to coup the negative reading, can you imagine? The consequences would have been disastrous.

Weighing scales may tell you you’re not making progress but how will you know if you don’t take any other measurements into consideration? It could mean the difference between quitting and achieving results. If you feel like you are making progress but the scales tell you differently stick it out! Or you will end up going around in circles and never get anywhere.