Body weight
stuarta99
Posts: 93 Member
Hi guys,
So I started this back at the end of February where I weighed 11st 2. Now I didn't have a lot to lose but I just wanted to test it and try and get to the mid 10st. My goal was 1500 calories and although I gained a bit mid-March, I've been on a steady downward trend and with my lowest being 10st 7.2 on the 2nd of May.
At the weekend I weighed in at 10st 7.6 and I've just done a midweek weigh and I'm 10st 8.4. Admittedly I've not concentrated on it much this week but considering my maintain weight figure is 1900 and to gain 1lb a week is 2400 I don't believe I've come anywhere near that. Unless we have dodgy scales.
My wife is also trying this and has the same 1500 to me, but the week that I went down to 10st 7.2, she reported as putting on 4lbs despite eating the same as me.
I know that the 'Not Very Active' level assumes a certain amount of steps which I'm probably not doing so could that be the reason but would it really affect it that much? I know the week I got dropped to my lowest, I had been out gardening, but it does there should be a massive difference between my 1500/1900/2400 and I'd notice if I was hitting my 2400 target.
I'd be grateful for any tips and advice.
So I started this back at the end of February where I weighed 11st 2. Now I didn't have a lot to lose but I just wanted to test it and try and get to the mid 10st. My goal was 1500 calories and although I gained a bit mid-March, I've been on a steady downward trend and with my lowest being 10st 7.2 on the 2nd of May.
At the weekend I weighed in at 10st 7.6 and I've just done a midweek weigh and I'm 10st 8.4. Admittedly I've not concentrated on it much this week but considering my maintain weight figure is 1900 and to gain 1lb a week is 2400 I don't believe I've come anywhere near that. Unless we have dodgy scales.
My wife is also trying this and has the same 1500 to me, but the week that I went down to 10st 7.2, she reported as putting on 4lbs despite eating the same as me.
I know that the 'Not Very Active' level assumes a certain amount of steps which I'm probably not doing so could that be the reason but would it really affect it that much? I know the week I got dropped to my lowest, I had been out gardening, but it does there should be a massive difference between my 1500/1900/2400 and I'd notice if I was hitting my 2400 target.
I'd be grateful for any tips and advice.
1
Replies
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What did you eat over the weekend?
The day before yesterday I ate 40 crackers and woke up the next day with a 5.2lbs weight gain from carbs and sodium causing water weight gain.
It doesnt take much to cause water weight gain, and it goes away after a few days.
Hormones and periods for women can also cause water weight fluctuations3 -
That's just it, I don't think it was that bad, definitely not enough to hit my hold weight figure let alone put on weight. Only days I've missed was Saturday when we had Dominoes, then Sunday I was 123 under, Monday 199 under, Tuesday 312 under but had toad in the hole and I measured the sausages but couldn't measure the batter mix.
Wife did think that could be the case for her. Guess I need to look into water weight a bit more.0 -
Someone on here posted a short while back that weighing yourself is just your bodies relationship with gravity at one point in time. (Sorry I don't remember who posted that it was a gem that totally stuck with me)
Your weight is CONSTANTLY changing all day long, every day. You could weight yourself 10 times a day and get 10 different figures.
" I measured the sausages but couldn't measure the batter mix"
This is probably part of the issue. There are times where if I know I can't measure it accurately and I need to be on point to lose weight, then I don't put it in my mouth. Period. Now, conversely, there are times when I may have a "cheat meal" (I hate that term) and know ahead of time I'm going to go off the reservation that I will bank some calories that day so I know I have leeway when I splurge a bit, but even then I'm doing my best to estimate the calories I'm taking in so I have an idea of how much I'm taking in and can manage it.
As far as the scale, you are looking for trends over weeks, not day to day. Some days you'll be on point with your diet and still go up the next day. No explanation. 2 days later you drop a pound and a half. No explanation. The body does what it wants to do.
Maybe use a weight trend app like Happy Scale or Libra to see overall trends and not each fluctuation? And make sure your tracking and logging is tight. You can lie to the app but you can't lie to your body when it takes in the calories. Since you don't have a lot to lose you are going to need to be more religious about your tracking, measuring and logging. Less room for error means you need to be more on target unfortunately. But that's a good thing, right?
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That's just it, I don't think it was that bad, definitely not enough to hit my hold weight figure let alone put on weight. Only days I've missed was Saturday when we had Dominoes, then Sunday I was 123 under, Monday 199 under, Tuesday 312 under but had toad in the hole and I measured the sausages but couldn't measure the batter mix.
Wife did think that could be the case for her. Guess I need to look into water weight a bit more.
You had dominoes... it's high carb AND salty, of course it was enough to hold water weight.
If I can hold 5.2lbs of water weight with 40 crackers then of course you can with a carb heavy salt filled take out food3 -
ok thanks, so effectively then it's water weight that I've gained and I somehow need to lose that1
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You drop water weight on your own, you dont need to do anything besides just eat normally, I lost 2lbs of my water weight yesterday, more will drop today and probably some more tomorrow, you just gotta wait it out3
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ok thanks, so effectively then it's water weight that I've gained and I somehow need to lose that
Since you've have now seen scale weight is only 1 measurement for fat loss - and for short term not the best for reasons discussed - time to start measuring several body parts.
Since the water weight is almost always spread around the whole body - measurements can show losses during times of weight showing no changes.
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KrissFlavored wrote: »You drop water weight on your own, you dont need to do anything besides just eat normally, I lost 2lbs of my water weight yesterday, more will drop today and probably some more tomorrow, you just gotta wait it out
ok thanks, so basically too much carb like that and I'll put on water weight but then it will go on it's own and I'll get back down to where I was........hopefully. I'm back on it and measuring today, I guess I need to start looking at the individual levels rather than just overall cal intake. I obviously incorrectly assumed that because a couple of days afterwards I was under my intake, it would balance out.2 -
My suggestion would be to change your relationship with the scale, stop seeing it as you as a weight and use it as a tool to understand you as a whole, people always go to such great lengths to avoid water weight fluctuations, but why make the journey that much harder when it's not even real weight.4
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Yep that's true, just good to get an idea of what might be causing it and all a learning game. Accept that it will go up some weeks and won't always have a loss. I know I need to get out and get the steps that I'm not doing since being furloughed and wasn't sure if that was the case mainly.1
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Fat is not fast lost or gained.
If weight change is fast - water weight is reason for sure.
Like the weight increase with carbs - that is merely your body having the extra carbs to put back in storage where it would like to have it for energy use during intense activity. But carbs store with water, so ....
But certain types of workouts are just asking the body to store more, so when it gets the chance.
And it's why you can expect the same or more water weight gain when you go into maintenance, that you lost going into a diet.1 -
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KrissFlavored wrote: »You drop water weight on your own, you dont need to do anything besides just eat normally, I lost 2lbs of my water weight yesterday, more will drop today and probably some more tomorrow, you just gotta wait it out
ok thanks, so basically too much carb like that and I'll put on water weight but then it will go on it's own and I'll get back down to where I was........hopefully. I'm back on it and measuring today, I guess I need to start looking at the individual levels rather than just overall cal intake. I obviously incorrectly assumed that because a couple of days afterwards I was under my intake, it would balance out.
No. Not necessarily "too much carb".
Normal healthy bodies retain and release water weight all the time. It's part of the definition of "normal, healthy". Read that link!
Let me spell out the carb thing: Let's say you routinely eat 100g carbs, or thereabouts, most days. your body hangs on to something in the area of 3g water while metabolizing each gram of those carbs, so there's roughly 300g of water weight just from that, that you're routinely seeing in your scale weight. You're used to seeing it, you don't know it's there.
Suddenly, one day, you eat 200g carbs. Boom: Your body needs an extra 300g of water - the usual 300 plus this new 300 - just to metabolize those carbs. It's not necessarily "to much carb", it's just more carb than usual. On top of that, if you ate in an unusual way, you might have eaten more sodium than usual (still not necessarily "too much", just more than usual). If so, your body's going to need some retained water to balance out your electrolytes.
Since you ate in an unusual way, you may've eaten more physical weight of food than normal (regardless of it potentially being still within your maintenance calories). If you step on the scale, then pick up a good-sized apple and weigh again, a sensitive scale will register more weight. (You're thinking, "well, sure!"). Now, eat the apple, and weigh again. The weight, with a sensitive scale, will be exactly as much with the apple in your stomach as it was with the apple in your hand. Why would it be different?
Now, your body is continuously and dynamically doing a bunch of complicated things: Using water to balance electrolytes, making you urinate a bit extra when it's done doing that; digesting the apple, distributing the glycogen to your body to store in muscles/liver for your next exercise session, passing the undigested apple fiber down to your intestines, maybe having your gut microbiome (a whole non-you set of intestinal creatures) digest some the fiber to create good chemicals for your immune system and what-not, burning some of the calories from the apple right now to let you type your post, exhaling the products of that calorie-burning (roughly 80% of your lost fat is exhaled, did you know that - and exhaled chemicals and moisture have a weight), and so forth. Eventually, you'll excrete or exhale the un-needed parts of your food, or the waste products of using the foods to keep the body going.
All of that "being alive" side-effects nonsense affects your body weight in small ways, and adds up or offsets based on random circumstances at the time. If you let those perfectly normal things mess with your head, it's unnecessary stress. 100% optional.
If you want to lose weight, what you should care about is fat loss. Fat loss, especially in the short run**, is all about calorie levels, calories in and out. If you want to stay healthy, you would also want to care about maintaining as much useful lean mass as possible, and getting good nutrition, while you're doing that fat loss.
** In the long run, nutrition (the protein and fats and micronutrients you eat) can affect your energy level (poor nutrition can cause fatigue, fatigue makes you do less in daily life and rest more, doing less burns fewer calories), and can affect your hunger/appetite (poor nutrition causes hunger/cravings, increases risk of exceeding calorie goal). In that sense, nutrition can have an indirect effect on weight management. But in a direct sense, weight management is a matter of calories, pure and simple.
So, worry about the calories, worry about the nutrition (because of indirect effects & health), trust the process.
Your weight (on the scale) is going to noodle up and down randomly over a few days to a couple of weeks or so. If you're on the right track, the range through which your weight randomly wanders will get gradually lower, but over many weeks to months.
A month ago, my daily weights in my Libra weight-trending app tell me that my body weight was meandering up and down in the 132-136 range (not steadily down: up and down, with those as randomly placed extremes, not beginning and end points). This past week, it's wandering randomly between 131 and 133 (also intermediate points, not end points). Conclusion: In the past month, I've probably slowly lost a couple of pounds of fat (which was my intention). That's how it works.
Best wishes!6 -
Wow thank you for the comprehensive reply. I'm obviously doing something right in that I've dropped from 11st 2 to 10st 7 in about 2 months. I've not really made any changes so it's been almost natural, just a case of watching what I eat in order to get the process right. No dramatic and sudden loss but then I guess that's the best way so that it becomes the norm.
So from the carbs theory and it being a shock by eating more, maybe I should eat Dominos more often
Just wanted to be sure that it wasn't a case of somehow me hitting my maintenance figure or putting on weight figure but I guess both of those would take more than a week to kick in.
I'm going to go for a nice long walk tomorrow so hopefully that will help and get me back on track.5 -
We'll just weighed again and now reading an increase from 10st 7.6 to 10st 9.4 in a week albeit I weighed after eating tonight whereas I normally weigh before1
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KrissFlavored wrote: »You drop water weight on your own, you dont need to do anything besides just eat normally, I lost 2lbs of my water weight yesterday, more will drop today and probably some more tomorrow, you just gotta wait it out
ok thanks, so basically too much carb like that and I'll put on water weight but then it will go on it's own and I'll get back down to where I was........hopefully. I'm back on it and measuring today, I guess I need to start looking at the individual levels rather than just overall cal intake. I obviously incorrectly assumed that because a couple of days afterwards I was under my intake, it would balance out.
Water weight fluctuation is just a part of live, really. You gain water weight from a bit more salt, from a bit more carbs than usual, from sitting more, higher temperature, bit of dehydration if you don't refill it, travelling and especially flights, a new workout, a stronger workout, and if you're a woman then during one or two periods within your cycle. It's normal. Nothing to worry about. And it will happen again and again. If you are worried you miss weight loss then maybe look for a weight app that averages weight data over several days. For iOS there's Happy Scale.0 -
We'll just weighed again and now reading an increase from 10st 7.6 to 10st 9.4 in a week albeit I weighed after eating tonight whereas I normally weigh before
Sure, my weight changes by that much (1.8lb) within a day, and more, and I'm a pretty small li'l ol' lady, around 131 pounds (9st 5).
You need to compare weights that are from the same conditions, as consistent as possible. For most people, it's ideal to weigh first thing in the morning, naked (or dressed in exactly the same clothing), after using the bathroom, before eating or drinking anything. Even then, water weight fluctuations will confuse things in the short term (within a day for sure, but up to a couple of weeks, even a month sometimes).
If you use inconsistent weighing times, you literally have no idea what's going on: You're making fluctuating numbers into nearly random numbers.
Did you read what I wrote about an apple in your stomach adding to your weight in exactly the same way an apple in your hand would? You will always weigh more after eating, by at least the physical weight of what you just ate/drank, because it's still sitting there in your stomach.
You really, really need to read this article that we've posted, and take it on board:
https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10683010/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-fluctuations/p13 -
We'll just weighed again and now reading an increase from 10st 7.6 to 10st 9.4 in a week albeit I weighed after eating tonight whereas I normally weigh before
Don't weigh at night, least valid time.
Valid weigh-in.
Morning after rest day eating normal sodium levels, not sore from last workout.2 -
Same weight again this morning pre shower so must be right. Gotta get *kitten* in gear to shift the 2lb0
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You are not understanding how fluctuations work. Please go back and read the advice and especially the link above: this is not a day to day thing but a week to week trend. You can't conclude anything from this morning's weight being the same as last night.0
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No that's ok I do, just commenting it's still the same, will wait now until the weekend and weigh as normal1
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Just a thought, does drinking less water effect water weight? I know I'm not drinking as much as I used to while at home and feel hungrier than what I used to when I started this so need to get back on track1
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Drinking less can certainly cause the body to hold on to water, carbs need water to metabolize, so drinking more water helps flush the water its holding.
Also understand tho that you may have to wait long periods for water weight to go.
Last tuesday I ate 40 crackers and gained 5.2lbs of water weight over night. As of this morning I'm still not back to where I was and the reason for that could also be because I start my period next week and the body is holding more water weight for that too.
Waking up every day like a kid waiting for santa, hoping the scale is down, isnt realistic, you should only be standing on the scale to observe trends over a long period of time.3 -
Ok ta, just checking that I'm doing the right things and conscious I'm not drinking enough which I'll sort2
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Well after 2nd run today I thought I'd check again before hitting the shower, finally lost the 2lbs again so will take that as a win
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Well after 2nd run today I thought I'd check again before hitting the shower, finally lost the 2lbs again so will take that as a win
You weighed after a run?
I can tell you right now that if you think these total water weight fluctuated weigh-ins is meaningful - you are going to drive yourself batty as you think there is meaning behind these numbers.
I've seen it before many times - just use trend weight and don't give a 2nd thought to any individual weigh-in.
You might say you are giving more "weight" to those weigh-ins then is warranted.
ETA - my own example of weigh-ins.
I'll weigh before and after a long bike ride - merely to see how much water weight lost in sweat.
So I'll know I drank 3 lbs in water during 2 hr ride, and still have lost 8 lbs total.
But I'm not about to log that 2nd weigh-in, nor the 1st frankly.
That 2nd weigh-in is ONLY useful to know how much water weight I lost, which I'll need to make up prior to my next ride in the heat - or performance will suffer.
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Well after 2nd run today I thought I'd check again before hitting the shower, finally lost the 2lbs again so will take that as a win
The only validity of that weigh in would be to check your hydration level - not to zone in on your actual weight trend.
I was down 3lbs today after a long, hot cycle ride - is that really a huge win in your terms?
After rehydrating I'm probably back to square one - is that a defeat or just me getting my fluid levels back to normal?
You really need to break this emotional hold that a number on a dumb measuring device seems to have over you.3 -
Well after 2nd run today I thought I'd check again before hitting the shower, finally lost the 2lbs again so will take that as a win
A two pound drop after a run is going to give you relevant information about your hydration levels, not your overall weight trend. It may be time to either 1) take a break from tracking so closely or 2) attaching so much importance to individual weigh-ins.
It's your long-term trend you want to focus on, not the hourly fluctuations. The danger of looking too closely at each hour's weight is that you can get lost in the noise and not have what you need to make practical adjustments.1
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