Can someone please explain to me.......

Good morning,

Ok I have been wondering something for awhile now and thought I would put it out there and maybe someone can explain this to me....  I am someone that gets on the scale daily, each morning.
There are days when I am "perfect" and the scale the next day goes up.  Then there are days that I am not so perfect...perhaps cheated alittle  (like popcorn at the movies) and the next day I lose.  It is like there is a delay between what you eat and the scale!  IS it just me...or does that happen to you too......  I just don't get it..does anyone?
Please enlighten me...

Patty

Hi Patty,

From my experience daily fluctations occur depending on salt intake, whether or not you've had a bm, etc.  If you are building muscle, they can hold on to extra water as well.  I can go up and down 4-5 lbs.  I also seem to find that good days and bad days usually only show up 5-6 days after with no explanation.

This seems to happen to all of us. I posted a few days ago that  i was worried about being too low and now in two days i am up 2.5 lbs with really no changes in what I am eating! I think what goes into making our weight go up or down on a given day is not necessarily dictated by what we did in the immediate past 24 hours but what we have done over a number of days or weeks before. That and just the amount of salt and water (and waste or lack thereof).

So it can be so annoying to be up a pound and yet have there be no way we ate 3500 extra calories the day before. In our minds or our tracking we do an " audit" at the end of each day and record what we have done but our bodies are ongoing systems that don't stop to make a "debit" or "credit" every night at midnight. Its the effect of what we have consumed and burned over a period of days. I too get flipped out when I gain a pound for no discernable reason but we have to remember its all relative over a period of time. Thats why I set maintenance goals of six months at a time to not weigh over 125 at each interval.

I asked my surgeon recently at support group about daily fluctuations and at what point it should become enough of a concern to change habits. He said five pounds in either direction. Thats a pretty big amount of leeway. I don't know if I could merrily gain five pounds without getting worried at pound two or three but I guess I will learn.

Anyway, thats my unscientific explanation. We have to remember we are complex systems affected by many factors. I am not even sure the 3500 calorie per pound rule is exactly right since I sort of suspect it may be a different number for different people and that some types of calories like carbs may have more impact than protein calories. But thats purely my own spectulation.

So try not to wig out about those days fluctuations (have to remind myself of this too)  Diane

I have been up as much as 10 pounds in water weight. Fluctuations are so annoying! What I try to keep in mind is science: 3,500 calories above or below maintenance to gain or lose a pound of actual fat (roughly).

All sorts of things come into play regarding water weight/fluctuations: carbs, glycogen stores, hormones, time of month, sodium, bowel movements, etc.

I don't worry about the scale nearly as much anymore. I go by the mirror and how my clothing fits...though I still weigh myself every day! lol I just don't freak out if I have a gain.

I've experimented with this alot....I've noticed that I have a two day lag. If I eat bad then the next day I can still loose. On that day if I'm perfect with the plan I'll still gain the next day. Same happens when I go back on plan it takes two days before I see a loss.

I've come to accept that this is just the way my body works.

Well, the thing is, scales don't measure how perfect you are. They measure your absolute mass -- how much pull there is on your body from gravity.

That is impacted by so many things and not just how much fat we carry on our body. It's impacted by how much water our body is holding, how much poop, how much undigested food, how much muscle mass we have.

So, as an example, you can weigh yourself and be a certain weight, then go drink a gallon of water, come back and you should weigh a pound more. Obviously that pound is just the water that hasn't been incorporated into your body and the excess peed out and it doesn't mean anything in terms of our body fat.

"We have to remember we are complex systems affected by many factors. I am not even sure the 3500 calorie per pound rule is exactly right since I sort of suspect it may be a different number for different people and that some types of calories like carbs may have more impact than protein calories. But thats purely my own spectulation. "

It doesn't really work like that.

Calories are calories by definition. A calorie is a unit of energy so saying 1 calorie of carbs has a different amount of energy than 1 calorie of fat is like saying a gallon of gasoline has more volume than a gallon of milk. It's not true by definition because a gallon is a gallon. A calorie has X amount of energy by definition.

The reason why it doesn't seem like that is because the foods we eat don't just provide energy. They also impact how much energy we burn. So it's still calories in = calories out, but certain calories in make the calories out be smaller or bigger by triggering other biological changes in our bodies. For example, carbs slow down the metabolism so we burn less calories in a day than if we eat protein.