I gained 5lbs in 2 days!!!!!

Lisa1971
Lisa1971 Posts: 3,069 Member
edited September 23 in Health and Weight Loss
Well, actually one day. I didn't go over my calories on Satuday but yesterday I did with the superbowl and everything. But 5lbs worth??????? Can sodium REALLY add 5lbs??????? This is crazy!!!!
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Replies

  • tmarion1538
    tmarion1538 Posts: 3 Member
    I'm feeling your pain. I worked out hard both Sat and Sun....gained 3.5 lbs from yesterday to today!! BOOOO!
    Oh well....hopefully it falls off quickly :)
  • Are you sure you weighed yourself at the same time and first thing in the morning?
  • critter347
    critter347 Posts: 58 Member
    It depends on when you weighed yourself, but to be blunt, it could be because you need to have a bowel movement (gross I know),
    I'd get that out of the way and then maybe weigh yourself again, even so, just get back on track and it'll fall back off quickly. Don't get down over it. I've had days where I ate too much, and gained maybe three lbs, but when I went right back to my routine, it dropped off like in a day or two, atleast for me.
  • daniface
    daniface Posts: 338 Member
    its not 5 pounds of fat! thats impossible
  • This may be TMI but when I'm coming close to "that time of month" I ALWAYS without fail gain 7 pounds and then afterwards I lose it again. For about a week I am half a stone heavier than usual. It can be SO frustrating.
    Sodium can for sure make you retain water and bloat and that will easily add 5lbs. It will be gone again without you needing to worry about it. Just stick to your calorie plan! and drink loads of water.
    Don't stress :)
  • Ben2118
    Ben2118 Posts: 571 Member
    If you had a few drinks too then it is likely drink plenty of water and weigh again in about 4 days. Don't worry unless you consumed 17500 over your BMR calories during superbowl then the scale will most probably just be showing water/food weight.

    Ben.
  • Some of it might be water retention from all the sodium. Don't worry so much about it now, there's no point. Just get back on track. :)
  • sbwood888
    sbwood888 Posts: 953 Member
    It happens...it is not real fat. Water, food still in your intestines (I know..yuck, but true), sodium / water retention. It will come back off pretty quick. No worries. :wink:
  • NatalieWinning
    NatalieWinning Posts: 999 Member
    It's temporary. I did the same thing! Lots of exercise and crappy eating can bloat you up. With poo and water.
  • I refused to weigh myself this morning! I know I've gained weight from yesterday's "eating splurge".....We just have to get back focused!!!
  • farmgirl88
    farmgirl88 Posts: 91 Member
    Your weight can fluctuate several pounds within one day. That's why it's best to weigh yourself the same time of day (i.e. in the morning, before eating breakfast, before getting dressed) every week or two. It helps you see a more consistent set of results.

    But yeah, I got a scale for my birthday that measures body fat, so I was playing with it throughout the day yesterday to get it set up... 5 lbs gained in one day for me too :)
  • luv2ash
    luv2ash Posts: 1,903 Member
    Yes it is possible, but should come off quickly too if you work hard at it.
  • cerysrhi
    cerysrhi Posts: 262
    I would only weigh once a week your body is said to fluctuate from 2lb heavier to 2lb lighter than your actual weight due to tiny changes within your body so you can only get an accurate interpretation of your weight gain/loss over a reasonable period of time in my case 1 week some people leave it longer. yesterday your body could have been at the 2lb under stage and today its the 2lb over when in reality you are still the same weight x
  • crystal_sapphire
    crystal_sapphire Posts: 1,205 Member
    You'd have to consume 3500 calories multiplied by 5 to actually of gained as much as you did. it is just fluctuations and once you're back on track it will disappear quickly
  • johnnya2
    johnnya2 Posts: 40 Member
    Do not look at it as a day to day thing. I suggest weighing yourself weekly at the same time. I tend to do Monday mornings at 7 am. Women in child bearing years will have to look at in more like monthly. Do not confuse the weight number with your health. Look at your waist and other sizes.
    As an example, Tom Brady, a world-class athlete, was about the same height and weight as I was when I started MFP. His body make up was more muscular than mine.
  • could be water, if you are out there doing a lot, you can become dehydrated - catch up with your water and viola!
  • RMinVA
    RMinVA Posts: 1,085 Member
    Yes it is possible, but should come off quickly too if you work hard at it.

    Yes, but no.

    Do the math....to actually gain 5 pounds you would have had to eat an additional 17500 calories in 2 days. Did you really do that? Probably not. It's most likely water, and should come off in a few days.

    All the more reason not to get hung up on the #'s on the scale....just look for an overall downard trend.
  • Zara11
    Zara11 Posts: 1,247 Member
    That's why you weigh in once a week in the morning. Doing so more frequently will just show you that body weight fluctuates constantly. Not something to worry about.
  • clahut
    clahut Posts: 211 Member
    Well, actually one day. I didn't go over my calories on Satuday but yesterday I did with the superbowl and everything. But 5lbs worth??????? Can sodium REALLY add 5lbs??????? This is crazy!!!!

    It will be water retention. Drink loads of water and it'll drop back off, I promise :smile:
  • Someone has posted this before but please read this article 'Why The Scales Lie' - I found it really interesting. I have copied and pasted and link at the bottom of the page:


    Why the Scale Lies

    As a personal trainer I’m constantly warning people that the scales are an evil contraption designed to make us feel bad about ourselves and so “diet clubs” can look down on you and say “have you been cheating” to make you feel even worse!

    I constantly tell people over and over again that daily weighing is unnecessary, yet how many of you cannot break the ritual of hoping on the scales every day. Do your self a favour and throw the scales in the bin or my favorite, give them to someone you don’t like! If you can’t bring yourself to do either of those then you should definitely familiarize yourself with the factors that can influence its readings. When you factor in things like water retention, glycogen storage and changes in lean body mass, fluctuations in your body weight is normal. The bathroom scale should not be looked upon as your sole guide of success or failure. Once you understand more about how the body works, you can free yourself from the daily battle with the bathroom scale.

    Your body is made up of approximately 60% water. Daily fluctuations in the body’s water content can send scale-watchers into a panic if they don’t understand what’s happening. Two things that can influence water retention are water consumption and salt intake. As strange as it may sound, the less water that you drink, the more of it your body retains! If you are even slightly dehydrated your body will hang onto its water supplies, possibly causing the number on the scale to creep upward. So if you are thirsty, drink up as you are already dehydrated!

    Excessive amounts of salt (sodium) in our diet can also play a big role in water retention. A single teaspoon of salt contains over 2,000 mg of sodium. As a guide, we should only eating between 1,000 and 3,000 mg of sodium per day, so it can be easy to go overboard. Sodium is a sneaky substance, its in nearly everything you eat and drink. The more highly processed a food is, the more likely it is to have a high sodium content. That is why, when it comes to nutrition I recommend sticking to the basics: fruits, vegetables, lean meat, beans, and whole grains. Be sure to read the labels on canned foods, frozen meals and anything that comes packaged in a box.

    Women may also retain several pounds of water prior to menstruation. This is very common and the weight will likely disappear as quickly as it arrives. As with general water retention, pre-menstrual water-weight gain can be minimized by drinking lots of water, maintaining an exercise program, and keeping high-sodium processed foods to a minimum.

    The body stores carbohydrates as glycogen. Think of glycogen as the fuel tank for daily living. Some of this glycogen is stored in the liver and some is stored the muscles themselves. This energy reserve weighs more than a pound and for every gram of glycogen stored the body stores approximately 4 grams of water. This can add up to 3-4 pounds of water weight when its stored. Your glycogen supplies, along with the stored water, will shrink during the day if you fail to take in enough carbohydrates. When this happens our weight will drop on the scales but its only temporarily because as soon as we eat a meal containing carbohydrates the body will fill the glycogen fuel tank along with storing water. It’s normal to experience glycogen and water weight fluctuations of up to 2 pounds per day even with no changes in your calorie intake or activity level. These fluctuations have nothing to do with fat loss, however I can imagine they would make the weekly weigh-in at the diet club frustrating, something I’m sure they don’t tell you about!

    People also tend to forget the actual weight of the food that we eat on a daily basis will affect the number on the scale. So eating a big meal along with any drinks before hopping on the scale is only going to result in a higher reading. The 5 pounds you put on right after eating a huge meal with drinks is not fat, it’s the weight of the food and will be gone in several hours when the body has finished digesting it. For this reason, it’s a good idea to weigh yourself first thing in the morning before you’ve had anything to eat or drink.

    In order to store one pound of fat we need to eat 3500 calories above our daily caloric needs. So if you take the above example, to actually store the above dinner as 5 pounds of fat, you would have to eat a massive 17,500 calories. This is highly unlikely, and in fact it’s probably not humanly possible(but please don’t try to prove me wrong!). So if the scale goes up 3 or 4 pounds overnight, relax, as it’s most likely increased water weight, glycogen, and the weight of your dinner. Bear in mind that the 3,500 calorie rule also works in reverse. If our goal is to lose one pound of fat you will need to burn an extra 3,500 calories more than you take eat. Generally, it’s only possible to lose 1-2 pounds of fat per week. So when you follow a severely low calorie diet that causes your weight to drop 10 pounds in 7 days, it’s physically impossible for all of that to be fat. What you’re really losing is water, glycogen, and muscle.

    This brings me to the scale’s sneakiest lie. The scale doesn’t just weigh fat; in fact it only tells you how heavy you are under gravity at that moment. So when you hope on the scale what it collectively weighs your muscles, bones, water, internal organs, in fact everything that is you. Losing weight and losing fat are two different things and in fact, the scale has no way of telling you what you’ve lost (or gained). With that in mind, if you have been on a restrictive diet and lost a lot of weight in a short period of time then you have probably lost a lot of muscle tissue. Losing muscle is nothing to celebrate. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue, the more muscle you have the more calories your body burns on a daily basis, even while you are sat reading this. That’s one of the reasons why a fit, active person is able to eat considerably more food than the dieter who is painfully counting points and who is unwittingly destroying muscle tissue. Also if you are losing a lot of weight by crash dieting and not exercising and therefore by sacrificing muscle tissue you will not get the body transformation results you desire. You will just end up a smaller version of yourself. Or as one of my clients recently put it, a smaller fat person!

    If you were to compare your muscles and fat to gold and feathers with one pound of fat being a big lumpy bag of feathers, and one pound of muscle as a small but extremely valuable piece of gold. Our goal would then be to get rid of the lumpy feathers and replace it with as much gold as possible. So in effect we would weigh exactly the same the only problem with the scale is that it doesn’t differentiate between the two. It can’t tell you how much of your total body weight is lean tissue (gold) and how much is fat (feathers).

    Skin-fold calipers, hydrostatic (or underwater) weighing and bioelectrical impedance are all methods we can use to measure our body composition to discern whether we are losing (or gaining) fat and muscle and while none of these methods are 100% accurate, they offer a better way of measuring our bodies changes than the scale.

    Now if the thought of being pinched, dunked, or gently electrocuted doesn’t appeal to you, don’t worry, one of the best measurement tool of all is a simple tape measure and your very own eyes. If the tape is showing that you have lost inches, your clothes fit better and the person looking back at you in the mirror is a leaner, fitter more confident person who isn’t bound by different coloured days then surly that is a better judge of your success than the lies from the bathroom scale.

    Do yourself a favour and buy yourself a big hammer and introduce it to the springy, beady eyed lying menace, not only will you release a lot of built up tension but you will feel better for it, (just be sure to wear the correct safety clothing)!

    Train Hard, Eat Smart!

    http://marckent.com/288/why-the-scale-lies/
  • Don't stress--it's probably bloating from sodium and water! It happens to me all the time! Chin up!
  • Try taking the 10 cans of soda from your pockets that could be the problem ?
  • phreddie
    phreddie Posts: 10 Member
    Same here! A little frustrated... Hit a new low and then spiked back up. I did snack more through the weekend but did not think it was that bad. I am starting to exercise more (for the first time in a long time) and I am starting to crave more food. Just need to focus on the plan. :ohwell:
  • The same thing happened to me this weekend! A few drinks and dinner out and it all goes wrong :( Tried to be really good yesterday but still no change this morning. All of last week's work undone - feeling rather down about the whole thing :(
  • ashley0616
    ashley0616 Posts: 579 Member
    What everyone else said x 2! I was 4 lbs heavier today than I was on Saturday morning. I had Hubs hide the scale and I'm not getting back on till next Sunday. Between beer, queso, chili, and salami that I had yesterday and the BLT from Saturday, I'm sure a LOT of it is fluid/sodium retention, food weight, and probably a BM somewhere in there. It's SO frustrating, but just do what I did and keep off the scale for a few days, work hard and eat well this week and you'll see it come off fast. Good luck to you! (Well, to all of us it seems!!)
  • cynthiaj777
    cynthiaj777 Posts: 787 Member
    Yesterday 130. Today 135. Yeh, stupid salt!!!!!!!!
  • pyro13g
    pyro13g Posts: 1,127 Member
    It's mostly water unless you truly ate 17,500 calories too much yesterday.
  • i feel your pain :( unfortunately tho it's not just about the extra 5lbs - you should see my stomach swell. :( i wouldnt mind but my period only lasts 3 days but i have two weeks prior of painless cramps etc - so frustrating
  • Lisa1971
    Lisa1971 Posts: 3,069 Member
    Try taking the 10 cans of soda from your pockets that could be the problem ?

    :laugh:
  • rose1617
    rose1617 Posts: 469 Member
    Thanksgiving weekend, I'd gained 11 lbs. in 2 days.
    Luckily 3 days after that, it all came back off again.
    Unfortunately, after Christmas, I'd gained more than just sodium LOL.
    If it is just water weight, you should see it all gone within a week or two (at most).
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