Water weight or muscle ?

neanderthin

XoXashleighXoX wrote: »

Ok so during my period i was 158 pounds to almost 159 pounds(sept 23-september 27). September 29th went down to 157. I work out 4-5 days a week. I have been feeling sore all over for few days and it's not letting up. It's not extreme just alittle stiff and sore all over more so in the mornings. I seem to be staying at 158 pounds last 2 days. So i went up a pound and there is no way its fat. I have been keeping myself at a deficiency , eating pretty healthy(eat put once to twice a week but stay in my calorie limit) My calorie deficit should lead to pound to pound and half weight loss by now. I eat 1500-1700 cals and I burn usually 300-400 cals during my workouts (including after burn). I stop my fit bit once I have been relaxing and my heart rate goes down to resting.

How long does water weight stay after a work out ? Are there ways to get rid of it? Could it be muscle? My scale isn't saying I'm gaining fat but I know these scales are just an estimate.

Water weight is considered muscle mass for all intense and purposes, so no you didn't gain fat over night.

heybales

Perhaps you meant Lean Body Mass (LBM) which people incorrectly think is only muscle, but is rather everything not Fat Mass (FM) actually, which includes water weight.

So LBM includes water weight.
And muscle weight.
And bones.
And other fluids.
And ligaments.

Deviette

XoXashleighXoX wrote: »

nanastaci2020 wrote: »

Fitbit calculates all day burn - and can help to track exercise stats. What do you mean by turning it off? Do you take it off? Do you have it linked to MFP? Keep in mind even if it is 100% accurate (best to assume it is off by at least 10% until you have a few months of weight loss data to back it up) the 300-400 burned during exercise also includes what you would have burned if you were not exercising.

But for the question at hand: changes in scale readouts in the course of a day or even a week are more likely water shifting than anything else. Compare weight data points over time to see your overall weight loss trend.

Turning off meaning like I turn off the work out setting on my fitbit. (I don't have it connected to my Fitnesspal) I hope that make sense because I know there's different fitbits. Mine is the old fitbit2.

I have a fitbit charge 2. I strongly recommend connecting it to MFP so then you don't need to worry about adding in your exercise separately. Although I would set up the weight loss section on fitbit to have the same goal loss as on MFP (eg. to lose 1lb a week), I think it's fixed now, but certainly at one point if they weren't the same then it did funky things, so I always set them to be the same. However, I've had my fitbit linked to my MFP for years now and it's just so much easier than needing to add in exercise separately.

The way fitbits work is that they estimate the amount of calories you burn during the time that you are doing a certain activity. It counts the calories which you get from just being alive during the time that you did the exercise as well as the extra calories you get. So if you turned your fitbit on a workout and then went to bed (leaving the workout running), then in the morning when you realise and turn it off again it will say congratulations you burnt ~500kcals for that workout, good job. But that's just the calories you've burnt by being alive during the night. This is why it's problematic if you wait a bit and then stop your workout because you'll actually be double counting the calories (because MFP is set up to take the "just being alive" calorie burn into account). This is one of the reasons that people tend to say that fitbits and similar over estimate calorie burn because it's not actually showing what most people ~think~ it's showing. They ~think~ it's showing how much extra calories they've burnt, but it's not extra, it's total.


Edit: I'm also going to say that a fitbit isn't 100% accurate whatever. It's a tool to estimate calorie burn and it's not too bad, but it's better at some things than others. Running, walking and cycling it's pretty good at estimating burn. Weights and HIIT less so. But the thing to remember is that it is only a tool. The best way of working out how much it works for you is by sitting down, calculating what your weight loss "should" be according to the numbers in your fitbit/food logging. And then working out how much you're actually losing. I did this exercise once and discovered that it's estimates combined with my logging style is pretty much spot on. But this will vary, and I do sport that I cannot wear my fitbit for and have to estimate calorie burn separately. So it's very individual in how much it is correct. With this I know that I can eat back those extra calories I get from exercising, but if yours comes out that you're looking at it over estimates your daily calories by around 100kcals a day (for example), then it's just something you need to mentally adjust for.