One of the biggest mistakes people make when trying to lose weight is allowing the scale to determine whether yesterday was a success or a failure. You ate well. You stayed within your calories. You exercised. You drank your water. Then you step on the scale the next morning and you’re up two pounds.

And immediately you think: What the heck?

Here’s the problem: weight loss is not linear. Your body doesn’t know or care that you were “good” yesterday.

Your weight can fluctuate because of hydration, sodium, carbohydrates, inflammation from a hard workout, digestion, hormones and about a dozen other things. You can do everything right and weigh more tomorrow. You can also eat like garbage and somehow weigh less. Neither number tells the whole story.

I’ve talked before about losing 92 pounds, but even during that process, the scale didn’t politely drop a little bit every morning. There were plateaus. There were increases. There were days the number made absolutely no sense.

What mattered was the trend.

And once you’ve been doing this long enough, you start realizing there are other measurements that matter just as much—or sometimes more.

How do your clothes fit?
How is your energy?
Are you getting stronger?
Can you walk or run farther?
Is your waist getting smaller?
Are you sleeping better?
Are the habits getting easier?

Those are wins.

This is also why I think we need to separate weight loss from fat loss. If you’re strength training while losing weight—and I believe you absolutely should be—you’re trying to preserve or build lean muscle while losing body fat. The goal shouldn’t simply be to make the number on the scale as small as possible.

The goal is to build a healthier body you can actually maintain.

I still believe weighing yourself can be useful. Data is valuable. I weigh myself regularly because I want the information. But there’s a huge difference between using the scale as data and using the scale as a judgment.

Look at weeks and months, not Tuesday versus Wednesday.

If your habits are right, your nutrition is right, you’re moving your body and you’re consistently consuming fewer calories than your body needs, give the process time to work.

Don’t let one morning’s number convince you to abandon something that’s working.

The scale is one measurement of progress. It isn’t the definition of progress.