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Maybe this is crazy thinking....

donjtomasco
donjtomasco Posts: 790 Member
edited November 2024 in Health and Weight Loss
I was tracking along pretty well. I had read here in the last week or so about the "Whoosh Effect" which not only do I personally believe to be true, but experienced a week ago. This great few days on the scale was followed by a predictable plateau, since I don't believe sustained weight loss for days in perpetuity is sustainable or logical. The body (my body) needs to catch up at some point.

So Friday night we ate out, I had sushi and low sodium soy sauce. I thought I did okay. Saturday, we made an unplanned stop at a seafood restaurant for a quick lunch, and my thinking was that seafood gumbo 'might be' high in sodium, but I was not sure, and dove in on a blow, only to find out later on MFP that it was a mountain of sodium in the dish. Sunday my wife cooked chicken something-or-other that sounded healthy but was sodium rich. I have just recently been adding to my areas to watch to include not just CICO, but also my sodium, tracking historical weight gaines and losses compared to my food diary, and could see clearly how sodium caused me to retain so much water (I know duh?).

So, yesterday, I had added 3.6 pounds from Thursday, so I knew it must be the sodium, what I did not know was how long it would take to flush it all out. Well, not long it turns out. This morning I weighed in tying my lowest weight so far, losing all of the 3.6 pounds in one night. In fact, I lost 4.6 pounds from midnight to 7:30 this morning. So, I think this was another "Whoosh" even though it was so predictable. Well, having eaten breakfast and consuming my normal large intake of water through the morning, before lunch I had dropped another 1.4 pounds, or 5 pounds since yesterday (I know I know, weight fluctuates throughout the day), but this was so inspiring, that despite the weight gain from the meals that calorically were in my daily calorie budget, my high sodium meals bloated me. But counting Friday as day 1, Saturday as day 2 and Sunday as day 3 of sodium intakes, well, today is Tuesday, and I am not sure how to count it, but if Saturday and Sunday's sodium is still flushing it's way out, then the artificial weight gain from water retention is giving way to revealing what my true weight loss would have been had I not had those three days of water retention.

The obvious difficulty in the sudden weight loss, is obviously getting bummed out and thinking I am failing, while knowing that this 'should' be only a temporary gain, then to keep the blinders on and continue on my plan of CICO and wait to see what happens. Well, I am almost saying that this might be a fun (sadistic) thing to do again in a few weeks, since coming off the water retention is a nice surprise, in fact, it is very motivational.

Maybe this sounds half way psychotic too......

Replies

  • donjtomasco
    donjtomasco Posts: 790 Member
    It is one of the healthiest things to occupy my slight OCD-ness....other outlets in the past had not been as healthy an option.
  • lulalacroix
    lulalacroix Posts: 1,082 Member
    I actually enjoy paying attention to the scale and trying to understand the gains. I had a 10 day period recently that I lost no weight. During this time I had some constipation so I understood the lack of loss. Since I resolved the constipation I'm down 3 pounds. Yay!

    I think realizing that CICO is a mathematical equation and that if I'm eating at a deficit, the weight will eventually come off regardless of sodium or poo really helps me not freak out if I'm up on the scale. :smiley:
  • donjtomasco
    donjtomasco Posts: 790 Member
    Agreed lula! Plus, the more data that I have, like daily weigh in's (and each evening before bed), I have that data to look back on to see things that I would not have known then to look for. And it is all there in the data and then numbers, as long as I have been as accurate as possible with logging my CICO.
  • codename_steve
    codename_steve Posts: 255 Member
    I agree, I love the numbers!! Understanding fluctuations helps me not freak out over them. If I don't weigh every morning, I'm constantly wondering about it all day.
  • donjtomasco
    donjtomasco Posts: 790 Member
    Good for you Catt! I mean that too. My daily and nightly weigh in's, and actually plotting each morning weight on a real piece of graph paper (I know, there is Microsoft Excel), then using a ruler to connect the dots to create lines, and adding more detail to my graph as I see it is interesting and meaningful to me, is for me Zen-like! We all have our 'things', no one thing is right or wrong. It would be an act in frustration for me NOT to be doing it this way! :)
  • JeromeBarry1
    JeromeBarry1 Posts: 10,179 Member
    It's not crazy thinking. It's actually helpful to understand the impact of high sodium intake one day and water retention weight gain the next day. It's just as helpful to realize that if you have a high day of sodium after a salty dinner, you can drink a couple of liters of water after dinner and let your kidneys dump all the extra sodium before your morning weight check.
  • PAV8888
    PAV8888 Posts: 14,612 Member
    If it works for you, excellent!

    I am more with @CattOfTheGarage : measure it, plonk it into the trending weight app (trendweight in my case), make sure it all is more or less on track.

    I admit that down the road I do plug the numbers from MFP, Fitbit, trendweight, and my dexa body composition results into a spreadsheet to see how close my CICO logs are to reality.

    But even that (done in increments of several months) has an appreciable degree of measurement uncertainty.

    Your intra day observations are bound to have a high degree of noise... but maybe YOUR math and stats work better than my rudimentary abilities to cut through noise!
  • TimothyFish
    TimothyFish Posts: 4,925 Member
    How is sustained weight loss not logical? If you had a water bucket with holes in the bottom, would you consider it to be illogical for it to continue losing weight if you were replacing the water more slowly than it is leaking out?

    Every time you exhale you are losing a small amount of weight. As odd as it may seem, most of your fat leaves the body in the form of carbon dioxide. So, literally, every time you exhale a little of your weight leaks out. If you do nothing but breath all day every day, you will lose weight. The thing that keeps you from losing weight is that you eat food more quickly than you can exhale your fat.

    We talk about calories in/calories out because it is convenient, but we could talk in terms of the weight of food going in and the weight of carbon dioxide and water going out. The equivalent to reducing calories in would be reducing the weight of the food and water going in. The equivalent to increasing calories out is by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide we exhale and the amount of water we lose. How do we increase those? By exercise. The more we do things that cause us to get out of breath the more carbon dioxide we exhale. The more we do things that make us sweat the more water we lose.
  • donjtomasco
    donjtomasco Posts: 790 Member
    Good point Tim! Better for me to say that my personal pattern is for the weight to come off in chunks on the scale, then flat for days, rinse and repeat. Pav, I don't think my math and stats work better then your way, or others, I just kind of enjoy the data and the process. The more the merrier.
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