Carbs question

If you ate nothing but carbs and it resulted in a calorie deficit you would still lose weight. You would eventually have other health problems but that would be from eating a highly unbalanced diet.

Lack of weight loss according to the scale in a two week time frame: could mean your water weight has fluctuated to mask real results. Water weight fluctuates due to hormones, sodium, carbs, muscle repair from working out, stress, sleep and probably a bunch of other things I'm not thinking of at the moment.

Water weight is temporary, and will continue to fluctuate. It never hurts to increase accuracy in logging if you're not weighing all solids, accounting for all beverages/cooking oils/condiments/etc. But if you're doing that, then keep tracking for another 2-4 weeks. By 4-6 weeks you should be able to see a trend start to form despite water weight fluctuations.

annshandle wrote: »

Thanks for your comments. It's actually been more like a month since I re-started tracking. The first two weeks I saw a loss, but it's plateaued. I just see so much about cutting carbs.
Water weight is an interesting topic as well. How do you know if what you are losing is water weight or not?

Fat is slow gained or lost.

Water can be fast.

Sadly water weight from increased cortisol stress can also be slow and steady.

How to know the difference besides speed of changes?
Does a well logged eating for incoming and daily tracking for outgoing cause the math to match up with measured results on the scale, after a month or more?

The reason you see lots on cutting carbs is because it's a fad.
And any diet plan can have you cut carbs and lose lots of water weight the body wants for stasis.
Boom - diet looks good. Perhaps you stick to it. Perhaps not.
People have gained fat weight eating keto too - if their habit was to eat too much.

Time.

If you're female, logic would say that your monthly fluctuations (based on hormones/ovulation/TOM) would be routine monthly. Meaning that if you tend to hold a couple extra pounds of water for 2-3 days after you ovulate, you'd do so on a regular basis. So in my opinion: comparing your weight on day X of your cycle to day X of your prior cycle would help alleviate water weight from that.

Other things you may be able to judge as you go. Have a very high sodium day when you normally do not each much sodium? Could impact your scales for 2-3 days. Muscles are sore & achy from a new workout routine? They're in repair mode and probably using extra water for the process until you're no longer sore. Super stressed about something at work or got a lousy night's sleep last night? Assume 1-2 days impact.

What that all means: track your weight over time. There are apps for weight tracking or weight trend tracking. They can help you see the trend which would represent real weight loss and help iron out the fluctuations. Or just track your weight daily/weekly/monthly (depends on what works best for you, and your relationship with the scale) and gather enough data points for it to mean something.

And in general, more time with no change in weight is needed for a 'plateau'. 2 weeks (in my nonprofessional opinion) is easily water weight masking real results. You could see a whoosh where the scale drops at any point after a 2-3 week stall.

annshandle wrote: »

Thanks for your comments. It's actually been more like a month since I re-started tracking. The first two weeks I saw a loss, but it's plateaued. I just see so much about cutting carbs.
Water weight is an interesting topic as well. How do you know if what you are losing is water weight or not?

annshandle wrote: »

Thanks for your comments. It's actually been more like a month since I re-started tracking. The first two weeks I saw a loss, but it's plateaued. I just see so much about cutting carbs.
Water weight is an interesting topic as well. How do you know if what you are losing is water weight or not?

When we lose weight, it's going to be a combination of water, fat, and muscle. There's no good way to tell how much you're losing of which, but we can make decisions that increase the amount of fat we're losing (things like choosing a reasonable calorie deficit, doing resistance exercises, and making sure to get enough protein). But so much of our body is water, it's normal for us to lose some water weight as we get smaller. As long as your trend is consistently going downward, that's what counts.