Why your bathroom scales are lying to you and how to find your true weight

I weighed myself every hour for the entire bank holiday weekend. Here's what I found out.

For a long time now I've been weighing myself daily, but I realised early on that the numbers you see when you step on the scales are almost always nonsense. Weight measurements are like opinion polls - individual results don't tell you anything because there's just too much random noise, error and variation. It's only when you have a few dozen that you can start to reliably pick out a trend.

But that noise made me curious. It's easy to chalk up weight gains and losses to hidden forces or semi-scientific concepts like 'starvation mode', but when you do that you lose a sense of control. Understanding is power, and I wanted to understand what my body did over the course of a single day that caused my weight to vary so much from one morning to the next.