frustrated! Questions, advice

Does she measure herself? I have noticed I have not lost a lot of weight but am losing inches. Maybe she should not weigh so much and depend on the scale so much. Just a thought.

I agree...I have only lost 7lb but I Have already lost 2 inches in my waist.

Good Luck....:drinker:

first things first. Any time you take scale measurements from one week to the next you need to understand and realize that they are going to be wildly inaccurate. Normal bathroom scales just aren't precise enough to really count on them. Additionally, yes, the human body can fluctuate anywhere from five pounds above your "real" weight to five pounds below in any given 24 hour period. that's a ten pound swing. The body is a complex machine, there can be any number of reasons for a very small (3 lb) swing one way or another. If you're eating right, exercising, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, forget the scale, concentrate on how she feels, maybe take some tape measurements once a month or so, get a body fat % test done every 2 or 3 months to gauge your progress (a professional one, not one of those mickey mouse "electrical impedance" scales, they're very inaccurate as well).

In other words, don't micro manage, macro manage. That's my HO anyway.

Good luck.

I found this article on another site which I thought made sense:

Explanation for the 'whoosh' effect

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Here is a post from another board which is an explanation of the ‘whoosh’ effect. I had read something similar a few years ago. This was written by Lyle McDonald, who has written several books about body-building, fat loss, ketogenic diets, etc.
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Fat cell water content and fat loss

Ok, finally stickying this stupid post with some very minor modifications.

It's something I've mentioned over the years, an assertion that my exercise physiology professor had made wrt: fat loss.

Note that under normal conditions, fat cells contain ~90% triglycerides and ~10% other stuff where other stuff includes some water, the cellular machinery that makes all the stuff that fat cells make and a couple of other things that I'm forgetting right now. Basically, fat cells do not normally contain much water.

He told us that, after triglycerides were removed from the cell, that the fat cells refilled with water in the short-term, eventually the body dropped that water and the fat loss 'became evident' (a goofy way for me to try to describe when the fat loss actually shows up on calipers, one of those dumb Tanita scales, or visually).

If nothing else, this gives a plausible mechanism for the non-linear fat loss that is so often seen. Folks will do everything right for weeks with no results. then overnight, something happens and the scale drops a bunch. Many diet newsgroups and forums refer to this as a 'whoosh' which often follows a stall.

A couple of empirical data points in support of this: people who use tanita scales have often reported that it will tell them that their BF has gone up right before a 'whoosh' occurs and a big drop. This suggests something goofy is going on with water balance.

Another is that fat often gets squishy (suggesting a change in what's in there) prior to a drop in skinfolds/ improvement in appearance.

I looked for research on the topic for a decade to no success. I made up my own plausible mechanism having to do with glycerol levels in the fat cell (glycerol is hydrophilic); if fatty acids were being lost at a greater proportion than glycerol, this mght explain how water is attracted into the fat cell. Except that, usually, glycerol and fatty acid are released in about the proportion you'd expect (3:1 FFA:glycerol).

edit: For what very little it's worth, Colgan mentions something similar in OPtimum Sports Nutrition, something about the body 'tracking' glycerol to keep track of fat stores. It's possible that the research on this is just pre-medline. Or he and my teacher just pulled it out of the old *kitten*.

A couple of years back, a paper came out showing an increase in water content of visceral fat with dieting. First semi-direct data I've seen. I don't recall the mechanism being mentioned but I may not have ever read the full paper.