True or false?
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FitnessFreak1821
Posts: 242 Member
Is it true that if your muscles are sore you retain some water and it's not a good time to weigh yourself if you want a true number ?
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Replies
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If you are having DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness), then yes, you will be retaining water that helps with muscle recovery and repair.6
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False. If you weigh yourself, drink a glass of water, and weigh yourself again, they're both true numbers. You haven't gained fat, but water has weight. You're made of mostly water, require hydration to live, and how much you have goes up and down. That's the nature of it.
Better to weigh yourself every morning and use a trending app to show you the overall long term pattern. 🙂13 -
NorthCascades wrote: »False. If you weigh yourself, drink a glass of water, and weigh yourself again, they're both true numbers. You haven't gained fat, but water has weight. You're made of mostly water, require hydration to live, and how much you have goes up and down. That's the nature of it.
Better to weigh yourself every morning and use a trending app to show you the overall long term pattern. 🙂
This is what I do. I have an iphone and use Happy Scale. July has been a weird month, but it's the long term trends that are important. When the monthly trends are bothering me, I just look at the yearly trend, which is great.5 -
It's true that water weight can be added in that situation . . . and many, many others. **
Like some others above, I prefer to weigh daily in the AM (under consistent conditions) no matter what, and learn about how my body handles things like this.
However, I'm not at all stressed by random weight fluctuations. One day's weight is just a data point, a momentary snapshot of my body's relationship with gravity, not a yardstick of my worth as a human being.
People who find fluctuations very stressful might choose to skip weighing under those circumstances, if they know the scale will be high for reasons other than calories.
** I'd suggest reading this, to possibly take a lot of stress out of weight-loss life:
https://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations
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Someone just mentioned this to me. I had no idea it was a thing. But I looked it up, and it is. I don't personally understand weighing ones self daily, or stressing about a pound or two, because fluctuation is normal. My workout partner weighs herself daily and just gets upset if it is a pound up from yesterday...
I weigh myself weekly, and hope to see a trend in loss. Doing this, I never see it go up.. Problem solved... Seemingly at least.. My trend lately has been lower than I want it to be, but I guess I should just be glad it is going down..
I should mention weekly would not work the same if I had less to lose, as loss is slower then. Once I am under 200 lbs, I will probably shift to bi-weekly, and eventually even monthly...4 -
ChaoticMoira wrote: »Someone just mentioned this to me. I had no idea it was a thing. But I looked it up, and it is. I don't personally understand weighing ones self daily, or stressing about a pound or two, because fluctuation is normal. My workout partner weighs herself daily and just gets upset if it is a pound up from yesterday...
I weigh myself weekly, and hope to see a trend in loss. Doing this, I never see it go up.. Problem solved... Seemingly at least.. My trend lately has been lower than I want it to be, but I guess I should just be glad it is going down..
I should mention weekly would not work the same if I had less to lose, as loss is slower then. Once I am under 200 lbs, I will probably shift to bi-weekly, and eventually even monthly...
I weigh daily because more data gives me more information on my weight trend. Weighing weekly, it would take me a lot longer to see which way my weight is trending (especially since I'm at a very small calorie deficit, which means fat loss is even more easily masked by weight fluctuations). Weighing weekly or even monthly, I wouldn't be sure at all.
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Yes, the reason I weigh daily is it helps me understand fluctuations and prevents a weigh in from being a freak unusual date, high or low. I don't use a tracker as I can see trends just from noting daily weights. I also find it helps me not avoid the scale and for me gaining weight and avoiding the scale are linked.6
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It probably sounds silly, but I weight every morning to remind myself to focus. I’m terrible at ‘forgetting’ to think about what I’m eating. It comes with the price of needing to better handle the inevitable fluctuations though….6
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Speaking only for myself personally here, not to be directive to others:
I've weighed myself daily, and noted the result, for well over a decade, starting long before even trying to lose weight. (I'm a data geek in other ways, too, not a weight obsessive.)
From that long experience, I know that there's pretty much no weighing frequency I could adopt that both gives me adequate guidance for managing weight, and absolutely guarantees I'll see a drop in weight every time, even during times when I'm actually steadily losing fat. 🤷♀️
It just seems easier for me to keep weighing daily, noting the results, learn from the fluctuations, be guided by the longer term trend.
But I know that I'm wired in a way that makes it easy not to feel bad or be de-motivated by one day's weight . . . or even by a short-term trend, if I'm pretty sure it's misleading. People differ, not everyone is lucky that way.
Now that I'm in long-term maintenance, I don't see how I could feel actually motivated by watching the scale noodle around in the same few-pound range for months or years. Realistically, it's kind of boring. But if I stop weighing at all, I lose useful feedback (guardrails) on staying at a healthy weight.
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I weigh daily because at this point in the process, I know that this morning's weight change is largely a result of yesterday's CICO; good, bad or indifferent. And seeing that number while I can still remember what I did and ate yesterday is a motivational reinforcement for how I'll act today.0
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Yes, what you're saying is true -- exercise and DOMS can lead to an increase in water retention, which can affect the number on the scale.
But as many people have said... the number on the scale measures weight in the. most. general sense. And only at that specific moment in time. That number is loosely, at best, tied to bodyfat, shape, size, etc. The number on the scale will and should fluctuate -- over the course of the day, over the course of the week, over the course of a month.
The trick is learning how/when and how much fluctuation is normal for you... and then weighing yourself often enough that you can track things, but not so often that it causes you undue stress. IMO, a trending app (or a trendline in Excel if you're a numbers person like me) can be a great tool for taking the edge off the emotional side of weight management.5 -
ChaoticMoira wrote: »Someone just mentioned this to me. I had no idea it was a thing. But I looked it up, and it is. I don't personally understand weighing ones self daily, or stressing about a pound or two, because fluctuation is normal. My workout partner weighs herself daily and just gets upset if it is a pound up from yesterday...
I weigh myself weekly, and hope to see a trend in loss. Doing this, I never see it go up.. Problem solved... Seemingly at least.. My trend lately has been lower than I want it to be, but I guess I should just be glad it is going down..
I should mention weekly would not work the same if I had less to lose, as loss is slower then. Once I am under 200 lbs, I will probably shift to bi-weekly, and eventually even monthly...
I weigh weekly at present but plan to up the frequency as I get closer to goal weight - within 20 lbs or so, probably eventually getting to daily. Right now it's rare that I have my weight actually go up at a weekly weigh in, though it has happened a few times. But I know as I get closer to goal and my deficit shrinks I will probably experience it more often, and at that point I'd rather have the comfort of more data points to identify the trend, rather than being grouchy about a blip all week (or longer, if I were to extend the times between weigh ins). Right now it's still kind of a touchy thing for me emotionally, though it's much better than it was when I started losing. And I am a data nerd too so I think that part of me will win out.2 -
Thanks everyone for clarifying and the tips! I might start daily and log it in go get more of a understanding1
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Funny article about real weight vs scale weight — https://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations/
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