Major weight fluctuations within a few days
emmarn19
Posts: 2 Member
So it seems like every weekend I have this weird occurrence. I also know it’s not healthy to weight yourself more than once a week, but sometimes it’s just hard not to. On mondays I weight myself, and the scale will say 5lbs more than it weighed on Monday. I don’t always eat the best foods on the weekend, but I tend to stay moderate with my calories still. Then 4 days later I weight myself and the scale is 5lbs less. It goes from 245.6 to 241.4 from Monday through Thursday, and I’m not eating THAT large of a calorie deficit that would cause it to do it. I always weigh myself after a morning bathroom use. I’m just confused because I never know what my true weight is. This is a problem I feel like just started occurring over the last 3 weeks. It is just really frustrating and confusing and was wondering if anyone had the same problem or could provide insight?
Thank you in advance!
Thank you in advance!
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Replies
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How often you weigh yourself is personal preference
I weigh daily so I can see the fluctuations. And understand them.
It sounds to me like your food choices on the weekends despite calories consumed have higher carbs and sodium which is causing water retention, its dropping by Thursday and then you repeat for the weekend.
Water retention has no effect on weight loss but it can often mask loss, so it's up to the person to figure out what causes retention for them.
For me I can eat tons of sodium with no issue, but if I eat crackers and other carbs in excess, despite calories, ill gain 5lbs of water weight so that my body can metabolize those carbs.7 -
Use a trending weight app and over time you'll see what your average weight is..
Fluctuations happen for everyone for a variety of reasons and are completely normal.3 -
It’s not unhealthy to weigh more than once a week. Weighing daily and using an app that tracks my moving average is a million times better for my mental and emotional health while losing weight than weighing once a week. It’s helped me understand my weight fluctuations more and gives a way more accurate picture of your weight loss than weighing less often.
I use the app Happy Scale. Libra is the android version.7 -
I agree that scale weight is frustrating. You can put a lot of focus on measuring food and exercise with accuracy, but there's not much you can do to pin down all the components of scale weight -- lean mass, fat, water, food in transit. It just fluctuates. Getting a trend app or making your own trending algorithm in a spreadsheet helps smooth out the curve to reveal -big picture- if you're moving in the right direction. Lots of people bank calories for the weekend, and I bet lots of people have the same kind of scale fluctuation you described. The best thing you can do is, as Kriss said, understand your own fluctuation pattern.2
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OP, this article would be a good read, for you:
https://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations
Bodies are weird.
Healthy bodies retain more or less water at different times, in order to keep themselves healthy. They know what they're doing, mostly, and we're best served if we try to understand rather than fight this reality.
Moreover, think about this: Weigh yourself. Now, immediately drink a 16-oz (about 454ml) glass of water. Weigh yourself again. If your scale is accurate, your weight will have increased by about a pound. Did you gain fat? No.
What you put in your digestive system has weight, until you eliminate some of it (via urination, sweating, other excretion). If you stand on a scale with a big ol' juicy apple in your hand, and eat the apple, your scale weight doesn't change, because the apple weighs just as much in your digestive tract (for a while) as it did in your hand.
It's fine to weigh yourself daily, if you can do so without getting overly stressed about it - I've done it for years. It's a good way to develop personal knowledge of how your personal random/meaningless weight fluctuations work. Consider using a weight trending app**, and paying more attention to the trend than the daily values.
(** I use Libra for Android. There's also Happy Scale for the Apple folks, Trendweight with a free Fitbit account (don't need to buy a device), Weightgrapher, and probably others. Keep in mind it's just a statistical projection, not a magical crystal ball.;)).6 -
What the others said. For me it works the other way around: My weight is lowest on Monday morning and highest on Saturday morning. Why? Because I'm blessed with poor connective tissue and store a bit more water weight in my legs on office days. That goes away during weekends.2
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So it seems like every weekend I have this weird occurrence. I also know it’s not healthy to weight yourself more than once a week, but sometimes it’s just hard not to. On mondays I weight myself, and the scale will say 5lbs more than it weighed on Monday. I don’t always eat the best foods on the weekend, but I tend to stay moderate with my calories still. Then 4 days later I weight myself and the scale is 5lbs less. It goes from 245.6 to 241.4 from Monday through Thursday, and I’m not eating THAT large of a calorie deficit that would cause it to do it. I always weigh myself after a morning bathroom use. I’m just confused because I never know what my true weight is. This is a problem I feel like just started occurring over the last 3 weeks. It is just really frustrating and confusing and was wondering if anyone had the same problem or could provide insight?
Thank you in advance!
It’s possible that the foods you are eating on the weekend are causing you to retain fluids and then throughout the week you are losing those same fluids.
How often you weigh in is a personal preference. I weigh in once a week on Saturday mornings before breakfast and measure myself on wednesdays.
It is unhealthy if you are obsessing over the number on the scale, but you could weigh in every other day, once a week, or daily and in the end, again, it’s just personal preference.3 -
You can never determine what your exact weight is because your weight varies during the day, from day to day, at different times in any hormonal cycles, with exercise, depending on salt consumption, etc. It is always an estimate. Your weight may vary several pounds in any 24 hour period. So, the important thing if you are trying to lose, gain or maintain weight is to look at it over time. Pick a time and condition and weigh regularly at the time in that condition and watch the trend. I weigh every morning after peeing while wearing my nightie. I will gain a bit when I switch to my heaviest winter nightie and lose a bit when I am in my skimpiest summer nightie but that's immaterial. I do know that this morning the scale said 23 pounds less than it did 90 days ago. That means I've lost somewhere around 23 pounds. How cool is that? Only another 100 or so to go!7
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My husband’s weight does this big time. Like 10 lbs up and down. It’s very frustrating for him.
He has been weighing on Monday mornings but he’s going to try weighing on Friday mornings for awhile to see if it changes. We do eat out a lot on the weekends.0 -
Leah_62803 wrote: »My husband’s weight does this big time. Like 10 lbs up and down. It’s very frustrating for him.
He has been weighing on Monday mornings but he’s going to try weighing on Friday mornings for awhile to see if it changes. We do eat out a lot on the weekends.
That's the smart thing to do. If I know I've eaten more than usual or take out, I don't even bother stepping on the scale for a few days lol0 -
HeidiCooksSupper wrote: »You can never determine what your exact weight
The concept of "exact weight" is interesting, when you really think about it... Which parts of what stands on a scale are part of "you" that should be counted? Bones, muscles, skin, internal organs - sure.
The bacteria living in our digestive systems that we need for health? Food and drink we have consumed and that's in digestive transit? These live, die and leave our bodies frequently, and the usual advice is to weigh in after using the bathroom?
Body hair? Do you consider you lost weight if you go from a full flowy mane to a buzzcut?
The bloody tissue women lose during menstruation? What about blood in general, if you get into an accident or donate blood?
Yeah, it's more important to focus on overall trends than any single day. It doesn't make things any less annoying, though - I'm currently riding a 3-pound bloat wave and it's not fun. I'd rather be hitting new motivating record lows.0 -
We don't have a "true weight." Our body is always in the process of processing food and liquids, eliminating waste, repairing from various activities, and responding to our environment in other ways. This is why I recommend focusing on the overall trend rather than any one specific weight. This morning I was four pounds more than I was yesterday. Why? I have no idea! And I don't really worry about it because my trend is right where I like it to be.2
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janejellyroll wrote: »We don't have a "true weight." Our body is always in the process of processing food and liquids, eliminating waste, repairing from various activities, and responding to our environment in other ways. This is why I recommend focusing on the overall trend rather than any one specific weight. This morning I was four pounds more than I was yesterday. Why? I have no idea! And I don't really worry about it because my trend is right where I like it to be.
Exactly. I figure I have a current weight range (of a few pounds, more or less), and a long-term weight trend (lose/maintain/gain).
Over a week or few, the daily (or whatever short-term) scale-weight readings noodle around meaninglessly up and down within those few pounds: That's the current range.
Over weeks to months, that range itself tends to move downward (weight loss), stay about the same (weight maintenance), or move upward (weight gain): That's the long-term trend.
So, over the last couple of weeks, my range has been 128.6 to 129.6lb (remarkably narrow for me - note that those are not begining and ending weights of the time period, they're the random highest & lowest weights that showed up along the way). Back in two weeks at the end of April, my current range was 129.4 to 132.4. Conclusion: I'm losing weight. (Veerrrryyy slowly, as planned.
).
The current range is mostly determined by a combination of water fluctuations and changes in digestive contents in transit. Neither of those is fat, so why worry about them?
The long-term trend is where fat gain/maintenance/loss shows up. That's what I care about.
Daily scale weights are meaningless, except as data points to sketch out the direction of fat levels over time.
(Over many months to years, muscle-mass changes could have an effect on the very long term trend. Over the time-scales most of us care about for fat-related gain or loss goals, muscle changes are a minor factor. Obviously, if someone's working on increasing muscle mass, they care about that . . . but they're typically looking much longer terms than the daily/weekly stuff.)1
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