Gaining fat/losing muscle overnight?

lmfrischmuth

Hi Everyone! I hope you're all doing as well as can be! I've never posted to the MFP forums before but I'm exceedingly puzzled about something I've seen on my scale and would love input from others.

I have one of the scales that is supposed to send a mild current through your body to get a more accurate reading of your overall composition. Leaving aside for the moment how much I may/may not believe that part, I've been weighing myself every day for awhile on this scale and have been seeing slow, but steady, loss. Recently, I've been ill and haven't had the energy to work out but have been sticking to maintenance calories to keep things even, but when I stepped on the scale this morning, it told me I've gained 2lbs between yesterday and today. Now, I know this can happen (hormones, salty foods, existing while female, etc.) so normally I'd brush it off since the overall arc is trending downward, but the Big, Fancy Scale told me not only have I gained 2 lbs of mostly fat, but I've also lost muscle.

My instinct says this is malarkey, but my pms-laden brain is discouraged and ready to berate myself for not working out on top of a calorie deficit even when ill.

As I said above, I'd love community input on this. If it helps: I'm 35, 155.6lbs (up from 153.6 yesterday...), 5'4", and what is considered very curvy (exagerrated hourglass. there is a 14 inch difference between my waist and my hips/butt). I lift a couple times a week, lower body focused, and I rotate between jogging and walking on my treadmill. When not ill, I workout M-F a minimum of 30 minutes with my heart rate between 140 and 190 in intervals. I take S/S off. My caloric intake with a deficit is 1490, maintenance is 1730.

Thanks, everyone! Stay well!

Dogmom1978

Those scales are notoriously inaccurate as evidenced by the fact that it told you you “lost” muscle overnight. Personally, I try to avoid gimmicky products such as “body fat” scales.

janejellyroll

You don't gain fat or muscle overnight. Those scales are notoriously unreliable.

DancingMoosie

PMS laden brain would also probably mean PMS related to water retention, which would throw off the readings.

sijomial

"I have one of the scales that is supposed to send a mild current through your body to get a more accurate reading of your overall composition"

Except that mild current actually measures your electrical resistance - it can't read your body composition, it just makes a lot of assumptions based on your resistance. And of course water fluctuations change your electrical resistance.

You must know that you didn't eat 7,000 cals over maintenance yesterday to gain 2lbs of fat.
You also know that muscle atrophy isn't an overnight thing.

If you have a decent set of BIA scales (that measure all you body and not half) and use them under consistent conditions you might (just might....) get a believable trend over time. Rapid changes that seem impossible should be ignored.

AnnPT77

What they said.

Handy rule of thumb: Unless you have a major, severe health crisis (you'd know), or have done something massively unusual (eating contest, say - i.e., you'd know), any big overnight change on the scale is not something worth worrying about. Specifically, it's a shift in water weight or digestive contents in transit, not a change in fat or muscle.

Water weight and digestive-contents weight can change in moments. Drink a pint of water, weigh a pound more instantly (and your electrical resistance possibly changes, besides). Eat a half-pound apple, weigh half a pound more instantly.

Unless you massively overate (like that contest I mentioned), fat gain or loss is slow, fractions of a pound per day, at most. Even if you eat 3500 calories over maintenance all at once, that gets shuttled into fat storage over a period of time (hours to a couple of days), not instantly.

Unless you have a sudden severe health crisis, muscle loss is even slower, weeks to months. Muscle gain is also slow, under ideal conditions a pound or two a month at most (and those ideal conditions include calorie surplus, optimal protein specifically and good overall nutrition generally, a good progressive strength program faithfully performed, relative youth, favorable genetics, and maleness may be a plus as well). Sometimes people lose muscle mass surprisingly quickly, but generally only when something terrible happens, like being *completely* immobilized or being unable to absorb nutrients.

It's the scale. Don't worry about it. Trust the process.

lgfrie

I think those kinds of scales are best thought of as "for entertainment purposes only". You can safely ignore anything it tells you about changes in body composition. As to the 2 lb gain, that's well within the tolerance of normal weight fluctuations. I was up 2.6 lbs today after having a great day yesterday of hitting my calorie target, doing 1.5 hrs of workout, and eating healthy & low sodium. There was no reason for my weight to be up, it just does that. Tomorrow it'll probably be down. Best to just ignore the ups and downs.

lmfrischmuth

Thanks, everyone! It’s reassuring to know this is actually a normal fluctuation. I appreciate the advice!

SnifterPug

I have those scales. I wouldn't say they are worse than useless (I have the version which measures through feet and hands) but the only actual value they add is to give a vaguely decent overview of change over a long period of time. I use them once a week. I use normal scales for daily weigh ins and the fluctuations can be pretty alarming. You just have to ride with it.

springlering62

Those scales are laughable.

My favorite is the “metabolic age”. Every once in a while, for a few glorious brief days, I’m metabolically several years younger.

I also dropped a pound of “visceral fat” overnight earlier this week.

You have to learn to get over scale fluctuations. After dinner out with a friend followed by a cookie dough binge, and (socially distanced) bunco last night where I threw caution to the winds, I am about 3500 calories over for the past two days. That should equate to a pound, your non PMSing scientific brain would calculate, right?

I’d put money on it I’m up 3.5-4.5 pounds when I weigh in in a bit.

You can literally drive yourself crazy focusing on the scale and scale-churned data when you should just be focusing on CICO.

springlering62

^^^ 4.1 pounds.

I’d rather know and be confident in this strange vessel that is my body than rely on that there scale of mine, lol.