Would this have caused a weight fluctuation?

Losingthedamnweight

this is the sodium levels for my meal yesterday. I was supposed to be a pound down, but instead I’m a pound up today!

Lietchi

Weight fluctuations aren't an exact science. Sodium has an impact, but so do carbs, food waste in your digestive tract, the weather, stress,...

How did you arrive at this idea that you should have lost 1lb? Weight loss is best tracked looking at your weight trend over 4 weeks at least, not looking at daily fluctuations.

AnnPT77

You might want to read this, especially the article linked in the first post:

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10683010/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-fluctuations

Might was well say that anything or nothing at all can cause water or waste fluctuations. Expect them.

A person who gets stressed and over-reacts to scale weight may rationally choose to weigh in weekly or even less. For those who can take it as a mere snapshot of one's temporary relationship with gravity - not as a measure of their personal human worth - weighing daily can be more insight-provoking, IME. (I mean weighing at the same time under as close as possible to the same conditions, like first thing in the AM, after the bathroom, before eating/drinking, same state of (un-)dress every time.)

Weighing less often, a person may catch an especially low day one week, an unusually high one the next week, and think they're gaining when they're actually losing. It's not useful.

I've had as much as a 6-pound change on the scale from one day to the next. It wasn't fat gain, and I knew it, so I didn't fret about it. For me, 2 or 3 pounds up or down is completely normal. If a small-ish person like me can see that big a jump/dip, a heavier person could see a bigger one.

I hope you're not expecting to lose a pound a day? That would be bad, unless like 500+ pounds to start. Even then, medical supervision would be a good plan, if shooting for loss that fast.

If a person is logging with even reasonable accuracy and completeness, has been losing reasonably well recently, and there's been no meaningful major change in calories or activity, a pound up on the scale isn't fat gain. Specifically, it's going to take roughly a cumulative 3500 calories over and above maintenance calories - not just over weight-loss calorie goal - to gain a pound. If that didn't happen, the scale jump isn't fat.

Best wishes!

csplatt

you’re over thinking the scale. lots of things inside our body have fluctuating weight, so scale up and down isn’t always related to amount of fat in the body.

neanderthin

Maybe, but there's actually dozens of metabolic reasons which will and do interact with factors lik lifestyle, genetics, and hormonal systems which not only cause fluctuation from day to day but also intra-day as well. It's a forest and tree thingy going on, zoom out and chill. 😁