By how much weight can the body fluctuates with poor eating?

tinaalisa15

Hello everyone. Been staying strong on my weight loss journey but I must admit I have been eating like a wild hog. I would always weigh myself every morning despite eating bad and the past 2 weeks have always stayed in the 332 and 333 range. Well, today I weighed 328! I know not a large fluctuation but why am I back down after eating junk? Yesterday I ate about 4 cupcakes and some chicken strips with fries and a slice of pizza. I did go down to about 323 before the 2-week I started eating junk. Should I believe my scale?

cmriverside

Here's an often-linked article that explains it much better than I would.

Basically tl;dr = there are a lot of reasons weight goes up and down and most of it can be explained by water weight.

If you stay within calories, you will slowly lose fat but expect ups and downs. Cupcakes, chicken strips, fries and pizza can all be included in the plan, but stay within calories.

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

apullum

Whether or not you consider your food “junk” has no bearing on fat loss. If you are in a calorie deficit, you will lose fat regardless of which specific foods you eat.

Additionally, everyone experiences water weight fluctuations. If you were eating more carbs/sodium than usual and then stopped eating so much of those things, you will likely see the scale drop a bit due to normal water/waste fluctuations.

MikePTY

How many calories did you eat though? "Bad" food doesnt have anything to do with weight loss or gain, the number of calories of calories in the food is what is important. Sometimes "bad" food doesnt have as much as you think.

But the link mentioned above is a good reference for this. There are lots of reasons our weight fluctuates. Especially at the beginning of a weight loss journey or when someone is over 300 pounds, those fluctuations can be quite large. That is why while daily weighing can be helpful to understand a trend, it's good not to get hung up on any one number. The long term movement is what is important, as that will be what shows real weigtht loss progess.

marcvb35

i weigh myself almost every day and have had as much as an 11 pound change in 24 hours. since my scale tells me a lot of information i wait to see my hydration level when i see big changes, a change from 53% down to 47% can mean a big difference on pounds alone.