Water apps I don’t understand

Mandy72CM

I don’t get how this works. How do you see that your going in the right direction if it fluctuates on a daily basis. I think I would self destruct if my weight was going up rather than down 🥺

Strudders67

Worry less about what your weight does on a daily basis and more about what it does on a trending basis such as month-to-month. What you eat / how much you exercise can cause water retention. I only weigh myself monthly. It used to be weekly but now that I'm closer to goal I don't see the scales move very much at all.

ceiswyn

That’s why a lot of people use trending apps. It smooths out the water weight ‘noise’.

MikePTY

With patience. Patience is as important a factor as diet in weight loss. Weight loss progress is not measured in days or weeks but rather months and even years. Over a long period of time, you will see your progress, but it is not detectable overnight and you have to stick with it.

Trending apps can help see the bigger picture, but they can't alone give you patience.

For some people, weighing weekly or even monthly is a better option than daily. That carries its own risks as you ate still subject to fluctuations. But it may be better than daily if the scale is going to constantly freak you out.

manderson27

I am a daily weigher and use Libra to trend my weight. Personally I find this takes the "Self Destruct" element out of it.

For example I know that if I eat pasta for dinner my weight will go up a pound or even two the following day but will drop again over the next couple of days. So gaining a pound here or there is no longer the disheartening event it used to be.

NovusDies

You start by putting your weight loss trust in the food scale not the bathroom scale. Logging accurately will help you know you are hitting your calorie goals and staying in a deficit.

If you are in a calorie deficit your weight will always find its way to a new low.

apullum

Your weight WILL go up sometimes. Everyone’s weight goes up sometimes. It will go up because you exercised a little more, ate a little more sodium, are a bit constipated, are at a particular point in your menstrual cycle, ate a bigger meal, or all sorts of other reasons. None of those reasons have anything to do with fat gain or loss. All of those reasons are normal and expected. The focus in any weight management program is on long term trends rather than individual daily weights. If it’s going to cause you distress every time you experience normal daily weight fluctuation, then you’re going to have a very bad time.

AnnPT77

Arguing with reality doesn't seem like a route to success, to me. Understanding reality, and adapting my thinking to work within it, seems like a better approach . . . and all I need to change is my attitude. That's hard enough, of course, but changing reality is even harder!

You will not see your weight drop every day on your way to goal weight. That's not realistic to expect. You don't want to "self destruct" because real life is not as you'd like it to be: Bad plan, won't help you reach your goals.

This is a good read:

http://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations/

I like to think of current weight as a range, and the pursuit of weight-management goals as being about the long-term (weeks to months) trend of that range. So, in some random week, my weight might be up and down around (picking an arbitrary set of numbers) 135-139 pounds. That's my current weight range. Three weeks later, maybe the range is 133-136 pounds. The range has moved downward, which (in this example) would tell me I'm losing weight. That's what the weight-trending apps help us visualize.

In my weight-trending app (Libra), one chunk of my weight loss looked like the graph below. (The connected down-hill-ish line is the trend; the little upright bars connect each daily weight to the trend. You can see that the daily weights bounce all over: That's the fluctuation. (And that's while in menopause: It'd be more extreme for pre-menopausal women!). But the downhill trend shows that I was losing fat (mostly), over the longer term.)



P.S. I accidentally lost weight too fast for a while during the time period shown in the graph above. Don't do that: It's a Really Bad Plan.

Best wishes!

earlnabby

I weigh every day but only log each time I reach a new low. Yes, weight fluctuates but when I see how often I register a loss it isn't something I concern myself with.

Today was kind of funny. It was the 3rd day in a row I weighed exactly the same. I started worrying that my scale was broken because I NEVER weigh the same from one day to the next. I stepped on it after having my coffee and it showed a small gain so I knew it wasn't broken.

One thing to keep in mind: the smaller bottles of water are typically 16 oz or 1/2 liter. That is a whole pound. If you gain a few tenths of a pound it could easily be that you are retaining 1/2 to 1 cup of water which is not much at all.

lorrpb

Most water apps help you track how much you drink each day, but it seems to be overthinking to try to correlate that with your daily weight. Sometimes drinking more water helps flush out your system, resulting in weight loss.