New Scale Fluctuations?

dpr73

I have dropped calorie counting recently (for my sanity!) for my maintenance stage. I still eat using the same habits and meals for the most part however. I started this recently and I have been maintaining 136 with NO weight fluctuation (I would only fluctuate to like 135.4 at the lowest and 136.4 at the highest- a small range). However, I just returned home from college and I'm seeing some changes. I still eat throughout the day using the same strategies (I eat the same breakfasts and lunches, snack at a max of 200 calories only when I am hungry which isn't that often it seems). However some things have been different: my dinners have more variety (in a healthy way but I am eating many different dishes that my mom cooks) I have also been substituting a beer in for a snack the past few days (just one), and I have on occasion been using a pretzel roll for my ham sandwiches (which is actually slightly lower cal than the breads I used at school), I have also been less anal about my dinners and going out to eat (I just focus on eating according to hunger cues) . Now for my first week home I saw no changes, I had 0 weight fluctuation every day last week. However, so far this week (yesterday and today) I saw quite a bit of weight fluctuation upwar which I haven't seen at all. I am up to around 138-139 these past two days. During the weekend I had some fried food and the pretzel rolls for lunch. Do you think these are the sources of my fluctuation due to water weight? Or do you think my new substitutions are causing weight gain? I don't feel like I'm falling off the wagon-I just wanted to try some slightly new things so I had some variety for the long term.

nxd10

Salt will do that. I suspect your mom cooks in a more varied way than the cafeteria and it sounds like you are switching your food around. All that will lead to fluctuations.

Also, some digital scales average several measurements and don't show fluctuations. Others don't. If you've changed scales, that may be an issue too.

dpr73

Okay. I'm assuming that because the pretzel roll alone was 1370 mg of sodium (looked up nutrition out of curiosity) and I ate this for two days in a row with a pickle on the side and ham for the sandwich...but at what point should I worry about weight gain and reevaluate my diet just for future reference? I don't know when it is premature to assume weight gain and not simple fluctuations...