My young son thought a temporary weight loss is a great progress. I told him about water weight and said what matters is long-term (if not permanent) weight loss.

When I think about it now, it starts looking overly depressing. Permanent is way too hard. If we really focus on long-term weight loss then 95 out of 100 of us would not feel hopeful and most of us would not feel motivated to try. Some would feel like giving up at the thought of “long-term”.

This long-term thing is a reasonable idea on paper but simply doesn’t work in practice.

In practice, temporary weight loss can be an achievement if it’s not due to inherent variance in measurement hardware. It can be the result of a serious effort, and therefore better than no progress.

Suppose you use the same machine and weigh yourself at the same time on two recent days, you see a 2 kg improvement and you know it’s due to some real change in exercise or diet … all short-term effort. This is probably fairly rare improvement. We know the weight could go back up soon, but still this is a worthwhile effort. Don’t think too much about long-term if too depressing. Don’t think too much about “back up soon”. Instead, focus on the achievement, and celebrate it but without binge.