On How Incredibly Noisy Any One Reading on the Scale is as a Gauge of Long-Run Weight Gain or Loss
Out of curiosity I weight myself almost every day right between coming back from my daily walk and taking a shower. The exact time of day varies as does whether it is before or after my eating window. I am often surprised by the huge swings in weight over periods of time much to short for any calories-in/calories-out effect working through the burning of body fat to have an effect greater than a fraction of a pound. Sometimes the fluctuation in one days time can be as high as 7 pounds. Theoretically, there are many likely components to these mass-in/mass-out effects. For example:
The sheer weight of food in my gut can vary a lot depending on exactly when I ate and how ‘regular’ or ‘irregular’ I am. This effect is the larger because of the large amounts of roughage I eat (a lot of cabbage, spinach, broccoli and cauliflower, for example).
Water weighs quite a bit. And water retention can easily vary quite a bit on exactly how much sodium I have consumed lately.
Glycogen amounts to about 2 pounds at its maximum; it goes down rapidly going into a fast and is reconstituted quickly after a fast.
The bottom line is that there are huge fluctuations in my weight that I know are not from body fat burning or build up. It all makes me worry about people who either cheer or beat themselves up about short-run weight measurements. It takes me many, many scale readings before I am confident of anything about whether I am burning body fat or building it up. (The exception is when I am eating nothing for a substantial length of time. Then I am pretty sure I am burning body fat on theoretical grounds. I figure that when I am not eating anything for a long time, body fat burned will eventually be about 3/5 of a pound every 24 hours.)
When I read about people talking about weight loss, I don’t see much recognition of the huge, huge amount of noise in any given reading on the scale. That makes me worried about what notions people have.
Related posts:
For annotated links to other posts on diet and health, see: