Weight log: your morning weigh-in, kept on your own device

How to weigh in

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) gives these steps in its patient guide for people with heart failure, so that one morning can be compared with the next:

• Weigh yourself every morning, after you urinate and before you eat breakfast.
• Wear the same type of clothing each time.
• Use the same scale every day.
• Place the scale on a hard, flat surface.
• Record your weight every day in a notebook or calendar.

Why it matters: the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), a federal institute, says that weight gain, ankle swelling or increasing shortness of breath may mean that fluids are building up in your body. We read the steps in the VA guide Living with Heart Failure (a PDF, publication IB 10-1163, dated May 2019) on October 9, 2026. The guide was written for veterans in VA care; the steps are not special to veterans. How often to weigh yourself is for you and your provider to settle; NHLBI says to ask your provider how often to check your weight and when to report weight changes (Living with heart failure, read October 8, 2026).

The two changes this page watches for

The same VA guide puts this on its list of reasons to call your healthcare team: a weight gain of 3 or more pounds in one day, or 5 pounds in a week. Here is exactly how the page applies that:

• In a day: the first weight of a day is 3 pounds or more (or 1.4 kilograms or more) above the first weight of the day before.
• In a week: the first weight of a day is 5 pounds or more (or 2.3 kilograms or more) above the lowest first-of-the-day weight in the 7 days before it.
• Kilograms: the VA guide gives pounds only. The kilogram figures are our conversion of its pounds, rounded to one decimal place.
• Missing days: if no weight was kept for the day before, the page cannot make the one-day comparison and says so.

The VA guide counts the one-day gain from the weight your provider gives you as your own when your body is holding neither too much fluid nor too little. This page does not know that weight, so it compares each morning with the morning before; that reading is ours. The guide also says to watch for your weight going down as well as up, and its “all is well” list is a weight that has not gone up or down by 3 pounds in one day; its list of reasons to call names only the gain, so the page does not speak up about a loss. It shows the change and leaves it to you. If your own provider gave you different numbers, theirs come first. The pound figures are the VA’s; apart from converting them to kilograms, we added no numbers of our own.

Changed on October 9, 2026. Until then this page spoke up at more than 2 pounds (1 kilogram) in a day, and at 2 kilograms in a week. Those figures came from a page whose publisher does not allow its text to be reused this way, so we stopped relying on it and took the numbers from the VA guide instead. Nothing in your log was changed; only when the page speaks up.

How it works

• A weigh-in asks for the weight, pounds or kilograms, the day and the time. The ticks and a note are optional.
• My weights lists them, newest first, each with how it differs from the day before. Change puts one back in the boxes; Remove takes it out.
• Looking back gives the last weigh-in, the lowest and highest of the last 7 and 30 days, and a bar for each recent day.
• Print my sheet makes a table of your last 24 weights with empty rows to fill in by hand.

What this page can’t do

• It measures nothing. It only knows the numbers you type, and a typing slip looks the same to it as a real weight.
• It cannot tell fluid from anything else that moves a scale: a meal, heavier clothes, a different scale, a different time of day.
• It does not diagnose heart failure or anything else, and it is not treatment.
• It is not for losing weight. It sets no goal, counts nothing you eat, and never says what you ought to weigh. If weighing yourself, or thoughts about food or your body, are taking over your days, this is the wrong page; see When eating has become a fight instead.
• It is no reason to change a medicine, or how much you drink, on your own. Call the person who prescribed it.
• The two changes it watches for were written for heart failure. If you weigh in for another reason, such as kidney disease or a pregnancy, the notebook still works, but ask your own care team which changes matter for you.
• It cannot remind you. It has no alarm and sends no message.
• The log does not move to another phone or computer by itself. Print it, download it, or use My data on this device to carry a backup across.

Where the idea comes from

A daily weight chart is ordinary advice for heart failure: the VA guide says to record your weight every day in a notebook or calendar, and NHLBI says to ask your provider when to report weight changes. If your clinic gave you its own chart, or a device that sends your numbers in for you, use that. This page is the paper chart with the subtraction done. It keeps nothing anywhere but here. It is not any clinic’s official form, it is not a VA page, and no doctor or nurse has looked at it.