Posting weight

[Virginia]

I've been wondering about posting my weight on my fast running blog.  I've noticed that some of you have done this.  I go back and forth on the idea. 

Anyone want to "weigh in" on the pros and cons of posting your weights?

The big con is everyone would KNOW how much I weigh!  Yikes, how embarrassing. 

[Chris M]

If you don't want to post your exact weight then take some off and work with that, eg, I weigh 75kg but don't want eople to know so I just subtract 10kg from whatever the real weight is and post that, in my case 65kg, everytime I weigh myself I stubtract 10kg from it. Just don't tell your real weight like I did!

If the weight field can accept negative numbers you could post the change in weight from the start so first entry is 0 and if you lose 1kg post -1.

[Kelli]

I Just started posting my weight this year.  I went back and forth on it as well, but in the end, i decided it would motivate me.  I wanted somewhere to track it, I wanted to see if their was any correlation between my poor sleeping habits and my weight, and I wanted ENCOURAGEMENT!!!  Honestly, not too many people even really look (AND now I seem to talk about my weight in my blog post almost every day, especially when I am gaining!)  For me it has been very helpful.  When I started this blog I weighed about 165, then I got down to 140-145 and was stuck for about two years.  So, this year I decided to make it public how much I weighed and what I wanted to weigh and WHEN I hoped to get there.  I got tons of encouragement and it has helped me.  In fact, it gets me to the gym when want to slack off so that is good, too.

[Sasha Pachev]

I have coded that feature by request of some bloggers, but now I am having second thoughts about it. I really, really do not want people to worry about their weight! Worry about your race performance. If you are able to achieve it with a higher weight, by all means do. Weight is the wrong goal. Two people could be exactly the same height and weight, one could be healthy and the other not. You can cheat with weight by starving yourself and thus killing off the muscle mass and bone density. You cannot do that with race performance. You drop the muscle mass, you will run slower. You drop the bone density and soon you will have stress fractures, and your muscle mass will be replaced with fat because you cannot train.

That said, you should be diligent in doing things that help you reduce the dead portion of your weight. Think if yourself as a car. Bigger engine could be good for performance. Bigger gas tank could be good for performance. A barbell in the trunk, however, is not good for performance. Magnify your engines and gas tanks, but do not carry barbells in your trunk.

[Calvin]

The weight tracker is a nice feature that enhances the usefulness of the blog.  (I'd like to have even more related tools like trending and correlation of running paces vs. weight, etc.)

By and large, I think that most people who are tracking their weight understand the difference between healthy weight loss and unhealthy weight loss.  The number on the scale is just one convenient way to measure progress.  And having that number out posted is indeed a good motivation.

[Matthew Rowley]

I think tracking weight is a good tool to show progress.  I think the real question is can I log my weight and not have it show up on my blog.  Can we have fields on the blog that is not visiable to the public.