WTF?!

Water weight. :ohwell: It's not fun.

No, home made. Lean ground beef, tomato salsa, lettuce and a small pinch of cheese in a flour tortilla....and just 1! I've eaten chicken strip dinners and not had this trouble! AND I deliberately ate super clean that whole day because i wanted one! Grrrrrr i'm so frustrated! 1 step forward and 3 steps back!

Did you weigh yourself after you ate????

I went from 156.6 yesterday to 155.2 today (no exercise except taking the dog for a walk)... but then I realized I'd eaten at my friends house sunday night. She'd made butternut squash turkey chili.. very healthy and tasty, but seeing as we didn't use low sodium stuff and it was canned beans, etc.. I have to assume while it was pretty low cal it was packed with sodium. Next time we make it we plan to use low sodium tomato sauce and chicken broth. I've never seen such a huge jump personally, but it's VERY rare that I even come close to my sodium amount that MFP gives me.
Don't let it discourage you. Everyone varies from day to day, some more than others.

Come on people-- these are just numbers-- brush it off and move on--

Onward and upward-- make wise choices, count your calories, move your booty-- the number on the scale is less important than what you're doing for your body--

Mind over matter, my friends--

Signed,
Marla
The girl who's been on a plateau for a year--

Ground beef takes longer for your body to digest then chicken. I once heard ground beef takes up to 3 days!

no, this morning.

you can't gain 3lbs overnight thats 10,500 calories

this is why I weigh once a week, dont need for the added stress of seeing those numbers everyday. No point in putting yourself threw that.

I weigh myself every to every other day.. it all depends on your personality. If you're the kind of person that's gonna stress if you have a day or two were it appears you've gained weight then it's not the way to go for you. I on the other hand don't stress or do anything different if I have a day or two (or even a week) where it's higher than the last. I like getting on almost daily when I'm dieting and trying to loose... it keeps me motivated, but I don't stress about it. I DON'T get on if I can't get on first thing in the morning after using the bathroom.. preferably close to naked.

Talk yourself down.

things to remember:

to gain 3 lbs of fat (or muscle, or bone...etc) you need to eat the equivalent amount of food, 1 taco does not 3 lbs make, EVER!

The human body fluctuates EVERY SINGLE DAY, up to 5 lbs. This is a relatively arbitrary number, there are a lot of factors that cause this, predicting it is pretty much impossible.

If you really want to weigh yourself multiple times a week, fine, but do it this way:
Weigh yourself every day, on the same scale, naked, at the same time of day, for 3 days. Add the 3 weights and divide by 3, that's a much more realistic weight than 1 time. The more days you add to the average, the more accurate that number will be.

And NO it doesn't take ground beef 3 days to pass through your system. Sometimes, with steaks, some small part of the steak can take a long time to FINISH the process, but that doesn't mean the whole thing sits in your stomach for 3 days, just that it takes longer from start to finish.

The moral of the story is, weight is a MACRO-metric. This means weight is a way to judge progress in the broad sense, but too much fluctuation to look that carefully at it.

-Banks