2nd week and no loss

If you are a woman who is cycling, your weight will fluctuate a lot as your hormones fluctuate. You probably didn't lose 5 pounds of fat in a week. Some of it was water. As you continued to eat at a deficit for calories, you probably lost some fat but were maintaining more water for one reason or another. Weight loss is not linear. It leaps around, seemingly more so for menstruating women, those who exercise differently on differently days, based on salty and unsalty meals, those who work night shift some days, etc.

janejellyroll wrote: »

roger00022000 wrote: »

Most weight loss experts and dietitians will tell you to NEVER weigh yourself daily. First off, the standard bathroom scale isn't really very accurate and is more for a general idea of how much a person weighs. The scales in a gym, if they are a "bar scale" is much more accurate but even those can be off by a pound or more. The scales at a doctor's office or dietitians office are accurate as long as they receive periodic calibrations. Finally, the fluctuations that occur not just throughout the day, but also day to day, can become very disheartening and zap your motivation. I weigh myself 3 or 4 times a week, but my "official weight loss log" is once a week, on the same day, first thing when I get out of bed. Consistency is better, or so I've been told. Reducing the modifying factors tends to make things more accurate, and less disheartening. Also, weight loss is a very gradual thing, whereas weight gain is instantaneous. Keep working at it, and the rewards will come.

Daily fluctuations are only disheartening if you don't look at them in context. I weigh daily and just plug my weight into a weight trending app. Focus on the trend, not the daily weight. Nothing wrong with collecting more data if that works for an individual.

I can totally predict my weight throughout the week. I know it will be lowest on Sundays and Mondays, and then rise slowly throughout the week until Saturday morning because of office job and a bit fluid retention associated with that. As such I do weigh every morning and put my weight in a weight trending app. This truly shows me that I'm maintaining.

roger00022000 wrote: »

Most weight loss experts and dietitians will tell you to NEVER weigh yourself daily. First off, the standard bathroom scale isn't really very accurate and is more for a general idea of how much a person weighs. The scales in a gym, if they are a "bar scale" is much more accurate but even those can be off by a pound or more. The scales at a doctor's office or dietitians office are accurate as long as they receive periodic calibrations. Finally, the fluctuations that occur not just throughout the day, but also day to day, can become very disheartening and zap your motivation. I weigh myself 3 or 4 times a week, but my "official weight loss log" is once a week, on the same day, first thing when I get out of bed. Consistency is better, or so I've been told. Reducing the modifying factors tends to make things more accurate, and less disheartening. Also, weight loss is a very gradual thing, whereas weight gain is instantaneous. Keep working at it, and the rewards will come.

Others have commented on the daily weighing issue, saying it's personal and can be helpful if it doesn't cause undue stress, with which I agree. (I've been calmly weighing daily for over a decade. Data geek that I am, I could tell you what I weighed 6 years ago last Tuesday. )

I agree with you about keeping the manageable factors consistent when weighing, for cleanest data.

But I want to comment on the thing I bolded: I think that's a persistent and potentially very damaging myth.

Oversimplifying somewhat, bodyweight on the scale consists primarily of muscle and other lean tissue, bones, fat, water (most of the weight is water), and food in transit (some of which is or will be food waste). Generally, when we want to lose weight, we actually want to lose fat.

Water can change our weight instantly. It weighs just as much in my stomach and bladder as it does in a glass in my hand. Under the right circumstances, it can deplete pretty quickly via urination or sweat, among other things. It isn't fat, so why care?

Food in transit can our change weight instantly. It's like the water. An apple in my stomach and beyond weighs just as much as it did in my hand. Similarly, food waste can deplete quite quickly in the right circumstances. It isn't fat, so why care?

Muscle and other lean tissue (excluding the portion of water weight that technically counts as part of lean tissue) can change weight very, very slowly. A woman in ideal circumstances (including a calorie surplus) would be making very good progress if she gained a quarter-pound of new muscle mass a week (half a pound for men). Unless there's an extreme medical condition (or relative starvation), we lose it quite slowly, too. Since muscle is good, we should care, but it's not a major influence on scale weight in anything short of months to years, in healthy people.

Skeletal weight change, again absent major health problems, is usually something that happens over years. Growing children add it faster. Aging adults may lose it slowly. Building stronger muscles tends build stronger (heavier) bones, too, but very slowly. Strong bones are a good thing, so we should care, but it's not a major influence on scale weight except over years.

Fat gain or loss, the thing we mostly really care about, isn't normally all that fast, either. We have to eat around 3500 calories over our maintenance calories to gain about a pound of fat, either all at once or cumulatively. When people do those "10,000 calories in a day" challenge things, they don't usually gain the whole 2+ commensurate fat pounds (for a variety of physiological reasons).

So, the more normal way of gaining fat is to eat a few hundred or a thousand calories over maintenance on a regular, recurring basis. (Most people do it by, say, something like averaging a mere 100 calories above maintenance calories daily for a year, so gaining around 10 pounds; or eating at maintenance on weekdays but indulging more on weekends.)

But until food is digested and metabolized, it isn't part of body fat. Full digestive transit, per research, can take more than 50 hours (2+ days). You don't gain fat weight from food you eat at the moment you put it in your mouth, or the moment it hits your stomach. It's slower.

Fat gain can be pretty quick, if someone really works at it, but it certainly isn't "instantaneous". (Losing it is technically/theoretically only maybe a little slower, but losing fat literally as fast as possible is a major health risk, and unpleasant to do besides, so most people don't/won't lose at the maximum theoretical speed if they aren't forced by starvation conditions.) In a practical sense, in healthy people, fat gain (or loss) is usually something that happens over days to weeks.

Summarizing, among healthy people: Weight gain from water or food-in-transit can be instaneous. Fat gain is typically a days to weeks kind of thing. Muscle gain is months to years. Skeletal change is years. It's useful to understand all of that, because the part most of us care about is fat, if weight loss is the goal.

Why am I ranting about this (and I admit I am ):

We often see people around here who go to maintenance calories and "instantly gain weight", then say "I can't go over 1200/1500 or I gain weight!". Sometimes, they freak out and keep going back to a calorie deficit, getting lighter and lighter, beyond a sensible goal weight. That's not healthy. Yes, their scale weight went up, "instantaneously" (or close). They're not gaining fat. They're gaining water and digestive contents in transit. It's not a big deal.

This plays into a other freak-outs we see here, too: People who won't increase calories to lose at a sensibly slower weight as they get lighter (not necessary for all, but necessary for some). People who think that if they go off their low-carb eating method for a day, they've gained fat. And more.

Absent medical crises, fat gain/loss is not instantaneous. Instantaneous significant scale-weight gain/loss is not fat. Fat is the part we really care about, for weight loss.

OP and others who haven't read the article at the link below, I highly recommend it.

https://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations

It will help you.

Best wishes!

This is why I weigh first thing in the morning (same time every day). The first photo is first thing in the morning, the second photo, is same day in the evening. The next morning, my weight was right back at 115 lbs. This is how it goes every day (I don't weigh multiple times a day normally but I was writing a blog article on weight fluctuations and as part of the experiment weighed myself every hour throughout the day under different circumstances. It was interesting, and extremely annoying, weighing and taking pictures all day.