Is it Possible to Gain 4 lbs in 1 Weekend???

sammys1girly

I've learned to just step away from the scale after a week away or a long weekend of extra food. It makes me feel down and unmotivated if the scale has gone up. I get right back to working out and staying under my calories for a few days before weighing myself.

Mawskittykat

I gained 6 pounds in 2 days about 2 months ago. I totally freaked out when I saw the scale. But after the 4th day I lost 3 of it and on the 5th day I was back down to normal, plus the 6th day I had lost 3 more. Dont panic just continue on doing all the right things and it will take care of it self.

Deev79

I've learned to just step away from the scale after a week away or a long weekend of extra food. It makes me feel down and unmotivated if the scale has gone up. I get right back to working out and staying under my calories for a few days before weighing myself.

Amen!! Walk away from the scale!!!

RhondaKay21

You asked what the point is? The point is you want better for yourself. If you have a weekend full of fun and blow it a bit. You get back on track on Monday. It's not the end of the world. It's a lesson. It's just water weight and you can't let a weekend end your trip. You can do it. You will do it. No one but you can make it to the finish line. It's your mind. keep it possitive. Think of where you what to be and get there. Think of someone that you know that never gave up on something. I had Cancer and I never let the thought of dying stop me from living and laughing at myself when my hair fell out. I don't know why I beat it. Some say the good additude. Who know's, but you need to stay possitive and don't think you can't cross this finish line. You have only just begun. So do it!!!

rat70

I have read about this recently in a newsletter from Dr Amanda Sainsbury-Salis, an Australian Weight-Loss Scientist. To sum up, your body has stored Glycogen which acts like a sponge and stores water. Once you return to your normal eating behaviour it will go away.

Quote:

Diet Disaster Recovery
OK, so you step on the scales and are dismayed to realize that your recent eating or drinking patterns have led you to gain far more weight than you ever imagined they would. What to do?

The first and most important thing to do is to remember that it's almost impossible to gain a significant amount of fat in just a few days.

Let's take Emily's example. Imagine that she really was "doing something very wrong" as she suggested in her e-mail, and that she really did overeat for five days solid.

In order to gain 2.5 kilos of fat in five days, and knowing that you need to consume approximately 29,300 more kilojoules (or 7,000 more calories) than your body needs in order to gain a kilo of fat, Emily would needed to have over-consumed 2.5 times that amount (73,250 kilojoules or 17,500 calories) over the course of five days.

This means that on top of everything she normally eats and drinks in order to maintain her weight, Emily would needed to have consumed an additional 14,650 kilojoules (or 3,500) calories per day for five days straight. That's equivalent to eating your normal meals plus 36 chocolate Tim Tam biscuits...or 10 McDonald's Hot Fudge Sundaes...or 14 packets of Cheezels...every single day for five days in a row. Can you see that even to gain just one kilo of fat, Emily would needed to have eaten an enormous amount of excess food? Knowing Emily's recent eating patterns from her Success Diary, this was clearly not the case.

So if the majority of the weight you may gain from short periods of overeating is not fat, where is the weight coming from?

The answer is water.

Whenever you eat or drink more than your immediate needs, your body converts some of that excess into glucose (a simple sugar) and then into glycogen, and this is stored in your muscles and liver to tide you over until your next meal.

When you're losing weight (as Emily had been before she went to stay with her daughter), your body doesn't store much glycogen because you're using up all of the kilojoules you put into your body. However, when you eat more than you need your body accumulates up to about half a kilo of glucose as glycogen. Glycogen is a bit like a sponge in that it holds roughly three times its weight in water. So if you gain half a kilo of glucose as glycogen from a period of temporary turbulence, you'll likely weigh about 2 kilos more on the scales due to the weight of the water that is stored with that glycogen. Add to this weight the water retention that often comes from eating salty party foods or meals outside the home, and it's quite easy to see disproportionately large ('unfair') weight gains in response to what seems like relatively small slip-ups.

In response to Emily's e-mail, I reassured her that her sudden weight gain would most likely right itself if she simply continued to do what she had done to lose those 2.5 kilos in the first place, as you'll see in my e-mail below;

"I would fathom a bet that if you were to get back to eating your fruits and veggies and to scoring all 2s and 3s in your Success Diary for the whole day today, then if you weighed yourself tomorrow morning you would see a significant loss on the scales, taking you quickly back towards the weight you were before your trip. This would also be an opportunity to see your Fat Brake in action. If you ate a bit more than usual at your daughters' place, then you will likely find that you are not very hungry today, and it may take just the fruit and veg and hardly anything else to satisfy your hunger today. You may also notice that you need to go to the toilet more often than usual today, as your body breaks down excess sugar that has been stored in your muscles and liver as glycogen, releasing the water that was stored with that glycogen. If you're going to the toilet a lot today, it's a good sign that your body is eliminating the fluid that was stored with any excesses you may have eaten while away. I look forward to hearing of your experiences."

Sure enough, within four days of that initial shocking weigh-in result, Emily had not only lost those 2.5 kilos (a sure sign that her sudden weight gain was mostly water weight, after all), as well as realizing an additional half a kilo loss, taking her total weight loss to 3 kilos in eight weeks.

In all this time, including her time away with her daughter, Emily had obviously been on the right track, because for the same reasons I've explained above it's simply not possible to lose 3 kilos of fat in just four days. However, if Emily had freaked out and given up after seeing that shockingly sudden weight gain, as many people are apt to do, she never would have seen the fruits of her ongoing attentiveness to listening to her body.

End Quote by - Dr Amanda Sainsbury-Salis, PhD