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Why weight fluctuations happen

Posted on Aug 30th 2008 6:00PM by Bethany Sanders

Filed Under: Diet & Weight Loss

Last year, a friend and I were working on a weight loss plan together. She would call me some mornings utterly frustrated by her never-budging scale, despite her hard workouts and careful eating. Then, two or three days later, she'd suddenly drop 5 pounds.

It's one of the most difficult parts of weight loss or even weight maintenance. Even when you're trying really hard, sometimes that scale just seems to have a mind of its own. It's called weight fluctuation, and it usually happens for very normal reasons. Diet-Blog does a great job explaining three of those reasons -- water retention, glycogen stores, and how much you've eaten -- and ways to avoid feeling frustrated on the scale if you're trying to lose weight. Including:

Weigh yourself at the same time every day, preferably in the morning (and without clothing).
Though it's tempting to weigh yourself daily, if weight fluctuations frustrate you, try weighing in once a week instead.
Pay more attention to your weight loss trends over weeks or months, rather than daily.
Skip the scale altogether and feel good about your success in other ways.

I love to get on the scale every day when I'm losing weight. It's very motivating to see even a quarter of a pound gone. But weighing in each day also puts me into a mental trap of feeling like weight loss is a temporary arrangement, that there's an "end point," when really, I'd rather just make healthy habits a part of my every day life. So there are pros and cons to weighing in. How do you handle the scale if you're losing or trying to maintain your weight?

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Tags: diet, gain five pounds in a day, GainFivePoundsInADay, scale, weigh fluctuations, WeighFluctuations, weighing in, WeighingIn, weight loss, weight retention, WeightLoss, WeightRetention

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

NightPrincess 8-30-2008 @ 7:31PM

I weigh myself every time I pass the restrooms, a minimum of four times per day. I think seeing the changes throughout the day helped me understand what's normal for my body. I now understand how diets can claim "lose weight while you sleep" and such because I'm usually five lbs lighter when I wake up than before I go to sleep. I think weighing myself so often helped raise my awareness of my body and helped me listen to my body better when it tells me what it wants and needs. I've been weighing myself many times per day for the last three years. For the first year, there wasn't much difference, but over the last two years, my BMI has dropped from 34 to 23.

I think people weighing themselves less often would only provide temporary "symptom relief" for weight fluctuation frustration rather than any real cure. I think the underlying cause for weight fluctuation frustrations is just insufficient data for people to understand what's normal for their body. To achieve understanding, I think people should weigh themselves more often rather than less. I think more frequent weighings is more likely to result in a real cure for weight fluctuation frustration.