Water weight vs fat weight

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xxzenabxx
xxzenabxx Posts: 935 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
I was looking in the mirror analysing my body as usual and noticed that the skin on my stomach and hips was sooooo jiggly. How can I tell if it’s water weight vs fat weight? Is there even a difference cause I’ve always wondered this! Has anyone else experienced this too?

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  • ninerbuff
    ninerbuff Posts: 48,529 Member
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    It's fat weight.

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  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,178 Member
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    xxzenabxx wrote: »
    I was looking in the mirror analysing my body as usual and noticed that the skin on my stomach and hips was sooooo jiggly. How can I tell if it’s water weight vs fat weight? Is there even a difference cause I’ve always wondered this! Has anyone else experienced this too?

    Of course there's a difference between fat weight and water weight. I'm not convinced that difference is relevant in this case. There are counter-examples, but IME water weight tends to be more like a general puffiness or plumpness either in a particular body area, or sort of a little bit all over. Jiggle is probably some combination of fat and skin.

    Have you been losing weight? If so, it's normal for fat to deplete unevenly from areas where we have fat, so it can get sort of squishy/jiggly. That tends to be temporary, resolving as more fat is lost, or skin shrinks (which can't really happen until the remaining fat stops conspiring with gravity to keep the skin stretched, and even after that it's slooooow). (<== I have experienced those things.)

    I feel like you may be overthinking or overfocusing on this, maybe? Over-criticizing yourself, maybe?

    Just keep working on whatever your goals are (weight management or fitness or both), and I'm betting things will work out fine long term. Meanwhile, maybe appreciate all the cool things your body can do** rather than analyzing its perceived flaws ("as usual"?!?!) that probably no one else even notices?

    ** Bodies: What would we do without one? Nothing! 😉
  • Xellercin
    Xellercin Posts: 924 Member
    edited November 2021
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    You can tell the difference if the jiggles fluctuate over short periods of time depending on your hydration level.

    I take a huge amount of salt daily to raise my blood pressure and it makes me retain a few extra pounds of water. It *definitely* makes my stomach look like it has a layer of fat on it that it doesn't. So if I have an event to go to, or know I'll be around people in a bathing suit, I skip the salt for a day and get back to having a nice flat stomach with slightly visible abs. I just suck up feeling a little more light headed and lethargic for the sake of vanity, lol.

    If you have no medical reason to be retaining water, then if you have a day where you are active and well hydrated and not retaining water due to hormones or anything, then you should get a pretty good sense of what your body looks like without a bunch of excess water.

    For my body, I see water retention mostly in my belly, hands and face, but that may just be because those are the areas on me with the least fat, so it's most obvious when they puff up a bit. My hips have plenty fat, so a little extra puff might just be going unnoticed.

    That said, just to be totally clear, you will always have a lot of water weight. Most of your body is made up of water. So what a lot of us are talking about when we talk about water weight, is when the body is retaining excess water than it normally does.

    So even if your soft parts have plenty of fat in them, they will also always contain water as well.

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