I have been eating at a calorie deficit for a few months with successful weight loss, but I’ll have random weeks where it is very inconsistent day to day. Past three days I see very small or no changes to weight, sometimes even increase. Then this morning I am 4 lbs lighter than I was yesterday. If anything I ate MORE than usual yesterday, and I don’t think I used the bathroom more than normal nor was I exceptionally sweaty. Where did those 4 lbs go?
In: Biology
In addition to what the others said, imaging eating a bag of chips or salt sticks on your cheat day.
All that salt will cause your body to retain several pounds of water.
For me, this normally disappears after two to three days.
A gallon of water weighs ~8 lbs. The food you eat might be 1-4 lbs, depending. Your clothes might weigh 1-6 lbs. There’s a lot of margin of error.
My guess is that it’s just water weight. The trick to getting a consistent reading is to have a consistent routine. Weighing yourself first thing in morning after urinating is ideal, I also try to avoid drinking too much water before a weigh-in day. Believe it or not you still perspire and respirate when you sleep, so you’re constantly losing weight asleep.
There’s just so much variability weighing yourself daily, people pee anywhere from 800-2000mls daily and that’s up to 4.4lbs (2kg).
from what I’ve heard, it’s usually because the weight was taken at different parts of the day, being lighter in the morning, or difference in clothing, try to minimize all variables, wear the same amount of clothes, measure at the same time of day, ect.
Three things.
How hydrated you are: Remember, a gallon (128 oz) is 8.33 lbs. So if you drink a 15 oz bottle of water you just gained a lb until your body uses it.
When you last ate/pooped: Eat a 16 oz steak, a baked potato, and some veggies for dinner? That could be 2 lbs right there until you poop.
Similar to the first point but, how much sodium you’ve been consuming. A big salty meal will make your body try to retain more and more water which could throw your weight off the next day or two.
If you’re eating in a caloric deficit, you will lose **fat**. However your **weight** may not go down due to the 3 notes above. But in the long run you will lose more fat than those water/salt/food fluctuations can outgain so your weight *will* go down.
The key to tracking your weight is just weighing yourself at the same time every day, wake up, pee, weigh yourself. Precision is more important than accuracy for tracking weight loss
Water weight plays a role, as do other factors that change from day to day (the weight of your clothing that day, the time of day you weighed, etc). Try to keep the variables as consistent as possible. Chances are, you didn’t actually lose 4 pounds – more likely there was a measurement error of a pound or so in one direction on the first day and a measurement error of a pound or so in the opposite direction on the second day. Those two errors, coupled with the actual weight change, resulted in the four pound difference you saw.
I’ve been using an app to record my weight. Rather than keeping my focus on the daily measurements, it smooths the graph and uses a rolling average. This is the one I use: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/happy-scale/id532430574
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