Why does my weight fluctuate so much? Help please :)

You digest your food all night, so in the morning, you weigh the least. At night you are full of food and water. If you are eating salty things, your body will retain MORE water too.

Your body can fluctuate up to 10 pounds in water weight alone.

I really think it has to be just about fluids and "bulk" in the intestine. Because fat wouldn't be that kind of fluctuation!

As you continue to lose weight and your body gets used to all the new diet and exercise, you will see steady loss, but perhaps will still have fluctuation. I think it is natural.

Just have confidence, you are doing the right things. give it some time.

You can't compare your weight from different times in the day. Remember - what you put into your body (food, water) has mass, and your weight will fluctuate accordingly. Especially if you are hydrating the way you should be (half your body weight in ounces every day). An accurate weigh in not only has to be once a week, but around the same time of day, and in similar clothing. Water is one of the most dense substances, and our bodies are 70% water. Eating too much salt can make you retain water, being constipated can make the scale go up - a bazillion different things. My doctor said our weight fluctuates between 3-7lbs on a daily basis. The only way to really "tell" if what you are doing is working is by the long haul. And by taking your measurements. There are times when the scale won't budge, but you still drop inches. Hang in there!!

Seriously, if you are stressing so much about these daily fluctuations you are a person that needs to stay away from the scale except for a regular weigh in at the same time, same day, whatever.

Everything you are describing is perfectly natural. You eat food during the day, it weighs something until it is digested. Your weight is never going to stay the same throughout the day and night.

Relax, you'll do a lot better than making yourself crazy over something that doesn't matter at all.

Your weight isn't jumping that much from 24 hour period to 24 hour period. The problem is you are weighing yourself in the morning and then again at night.

You weigh more at night because you've eaten all day and that food is not digested and pooped out. When you wake up in the morning, you have been digesting food all night and then you pee out what's turned to liquid and (maybe) you poop out the solid waste and then you are the lowest weight you can possibly be. Then you eat and drink all day and only pee (and maybe poop) out some of it and you are the highest weight you can possibly be.

In addition, your body will retain and release water from day to day based on what you do that day. One day you top off your glycogen stores in your muscles and that causes an extra 4 pounds to be stored. The next day you may use up all your glycogen and that means you release the water. Certain times of the month, you may retain water because of your cycles.

Therefore, it's useless to weigh yourself more than once a day. If you weigh yourself in the morning and you weigh 160 and then you take a dump and weigh 158, its' not like you lost any true weight. It's the same if you weigh yourself and then drink a galloon of water. You'll find your weight to be higher until you pee that water out. But you haven't gained body fat, muscles or bone density. So you haven't changed anything you care about changing.

You need to weigh yourself at the same time and under the same conditions every time. That cuts down on some of this noise. Then, you look for trends. If your weight every morning fluctuates by 4 pound (as mine does), what you look for is that, over time, you never go over your highest weight and you start to go under your lowest weight. That means you are losing. If you weigh once a week, you should almost always see a drop if you are truly losing.

When you weigh every week instead of multiple times a day, you should see a steady downward trend.

I needed to hear this too

This is the most frustrating thing to me too. I had a tough weekend and even though I ate more than my 1200 calories, I tracked them all. Over the weekend I ate about 2300 calories more than the amount I need to eat to maintain my weight. So...I deserved to gain about 3/4 of a pound and I was ok with that. I started right back on 1200 calories again on Monday and today I am still weighing almost a whole pound more than I did last Friday. I keep telling myself that it will even out, but it is the most discouraging feeling in the world. My net calories over the last 7 days should have definitely seen me lose at least 1 pound.

Water weight and sodium intake usually cause it to fluctuate. I always weigh myself once a week on Saturday morning when I first wake up and after using the bathroom. Otherwise weighing yourself even once a week at night could be off due to your water/salt intake during the day before you weighed yourself.

I wouldn't get too wrapped up on weighing yourself multiple times a day or even daily. It takes time to lose weight, and if you see the number jump up that's just more opportunities to get frustrated and possibly get off of your plan that is probably already working for you as it is.