Logging

boatn53

So when you log food and drinks. How long do you think it takes to show up on the scale?, like if you a scale that measures muscle mass, protein ,water, etc. scales that measure everything? How long do you think it takes to show up if you eat it for example, on a Monday? Would it show up the next day or two days later.

tomcustombuilder

It depends however it isn't a next day thing, anecdotally it's about 1-2 weeks.

mtaratoot

If I weigh myself and then drink a pint of water and weigh myself again, I weigh one pound more.

Your scale weight doesn't always tell the whole story. Your scale weight at one moment in time includes your lean mass and your fat mass. That includes muscles, bones, and fat. It also includes any food in transit. It includes water stored with glycogen. It includes water retained in muscles during repair from exercise.

Best thing to do is weigh at the same time of day and track over time. I like to weigh daily and kind of ignore the number but instead use a spreadsheet that shows me a simple ten-day moving average as well as a weighted moving average. The only difference is the weighted average gives more importance to today's weight than yesterdays, yesterdays more importance than the day before, etc. The numbers are usually very close.

Weight loss isn't linear. It is up and down. Check out The Hacker's Diet, especially the section on Signal and Noise for detailed explanations.

AnnPT77

boatn53 wrote: »

So when you log food and drinks. How long do you think it takes to show up on the scale?, like if you a scale that measures muscle mass, protein ,water, etc. scales that measure everything? How long do you think it takes to show up if you eat it for example, on a Monday? Would it show up the next day or two days later.

It's going to vary depending on a lot of factors, honestly.

According to research, it can take up to 50+ hours for full digestive transit, i.e., the trip from mouth to *kitten*. Different people will have different transit times under different circumstances, foods don't necessarily transit in the same order we chewed them, etc. Different nutrients are fully metabolized at different rates, besides.

My advice: Don't worry about it. If you're trying to manage weight, look at the trend of your weight over multiple weeks, like 4-6 weeks, or whole menstrual cycles if you have those (so you can compare body weight at the same relative point in at least two different cycles).

Consider using a free weight trending app, such as Happy Scale for Apple iOS, Libra for Android, Trendweight (requires a free Fitbit account, but don't need a device), Weightgrapher and others. They're not magically accurate, either, but use fancy statistical averages to try to suss out the overall direction of bodyweight from the day-to-day fluctuations. That can be helpful insight.

Some rules of thumb:

* Multi-pound (or kg) changes from one day to the next on the scale are mostly about water retention shifts and different amounts of food waste in transit in the digestive tract. They're not about body fat, generally - certainly not if calorie intake and activity are consistent and in line with personal goals.

* Even when losing/gaining fat "fast", those fat-weight changes are small and gradual. For example, losing two pounds a week of fat (fast loss for most people), that would be about 4.5 ounces of fat on average per day (about a quarter pound, or around 0.13 kg).

* Muscle gain is even slower: A pound of muscle mass gain per month would be a really good result for a woman, two pounds a month for a man. That's mainly possible under ideal conditions: Relative youth, relative newness to strength training, a good progressive strength training program faithfully performed, excellent nutrition (especially but not exclusively ample protein), favorable genetics, a calorie surplus (i.e., weight gain overall), and probably some other things I'm forgetting. That doesn't mean a person can't gain muscle under other conditions, but it would be expected to be even slower. Also, strength gains usually come faster than muscle mass gain (from neuromuscular adaptation, better recruiting and using already-existing muscle fibers).

If a person does the right things for their goals: Calories, nutrition, exercise, etc., they will get the results they earn . . . not necessarily quickly, but eventually with patience and persistence.

Also, let's get this out of the way: No scale - especially no home scale - "measures" muscle mass, protein, water, skeletal mass, etc. They measure bodyweight, period . . . and that not exactly precisely, just close enough to be useful. Those other measures are just estimates based on what we told the scale about ourselves (like age, height, activity level, etc.), plus what it learns by sending a weak electric current through our body to feed its estimating algorithm. Don't put much stock in those estimates.

Best wishes!