Didn’t lose weight this week

Congrats on your weight loss, your doing good.

You have a magic weight number that you do not know.

That magic weight number is obscured by a whole bunch of things: water retention to repair your muscles, depleted glycogen from recent exertion, more sodium or less sodium than the day before, food that is in transit through your body, hormonal cycle related water retention.

There are a lot more reasons over and above those as to why non fat related weight changes can obscure the slower changes to your underlying fat reserve levels.

So if you don't know the value of something are you better off taking few observations once in a blue moon? Or are you better off taking daily observations and plotting a trend line which you can do using a spreadsheet or using any of multiple weight trend apps and websites?

When I went looking 6 years ago I found Libra on Android, happy scale on iPhone and trendweight.com and weightgrapher on the web.

I started using trendweight with a Fitbit account even before I bought my first Fitbit! (You can use the app without a device)

Doing things like that daily under the same conditions tends to reduce the importance of each individual sample and hopefully make it less dramatic and traumatic when one sees unexpected changes...

bigmouthaj wrote: »

Hey guys so I’m a bit bummed. Today I stepped on the scale and I’m at the same weight I was at last week. It’s weird cause I’m in the same deficit and doing the same things I’ve been doing since the beginning. And I’ve lost 7 pounds so far. I workout 3 times a week.

And the weird part is I think I look slimmer this week yet I didn’t lose weight? Could it be muscle mass? I do weight machines as apart of my workout.

If you haven't already read it, I recommend this article:

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

Almost every common reason for temporary stalls in weight is in there somewhere.

It's highly unlikely to be muscle gain, over a short time period. Under ideal conditions (which don't include a calorie deficit, but rather a surplus, among other things), a very good result for a woman would be a pound a month muscle mass gain, maybe twice that for a man. I'm not saying you absolutely can't gain muscle while in a calorie deficit, but it lowers the odds or at least slows things down significantly. (Strength gains and appearance changes can be faster, oddly enough.)

As a rough rule of thumb, under reasonably consistent calorie/activity conditions, an unusual body weight result over a day or few is likely to be water weight (or digestive contents). Fat changes show up more gradually, playing peek-a-boo on the scale with water/waste, over a week or few. Muscle mass changes, absent some horrifying medical condition that leads to fast muscle wasting, is more a matter of many months to years. Another rule of thumb: If you didn't cumulatively eat 3500 calories over your current maintenance calories, or move that much less, or a combination of the two, you didn't gain a pound of fat. (Ditto on the loss side, in reverse. Ditto, in a more complicated way, if your weight holds steady for no obvious reason.)

Like some others above, I'm a devotee of daily weighing under consistent conditions (AM, same lack of clothing, after bathroom before food/drink) and putting the result in a trending app. For me, that has created understanding of when, why and how much my bodyweight randomly fluctuates, which in turn has made me able to take those fluctuations totally calmly. I could pick out weeks, or even months, where if I'd picked just the wrong days, I'd think I'd maintained or even gained weight, when I was actually losing, if I weighed only once a week or once a month.

I do think that if someone has strong, hard to manage emotional reactions to scale fluctuations, they may be better served by weighing infrequently or not at all, but rather may use tape measure, clothing fit, photos, or something like that to evaluate their progress.

Right now, I'm maintaining my weight. (I'm in year 5+ of maintaining a healthy weight, after a significant loss in 2015-16.) Over the last 7 days, my weight has been as low as 123.8 pounds, high as 126.4, just from random variation (more/less sodium or carbs, more fiber, hot weather, you name it, who cares). That's not beginning & end days, just the high/low days in the recent 7.

Bodies are weird. IMO, the best strategy is to try to understand it, get used to the mini roller coaster on the scale.

Hang in there. If you've earned the loss, you'll see it on the scale sooner or later.