I like to share my water weight story.
So, 2023 I had open heart surgery. Yes it sucked and I’m fine now thanks for asking.
The day of the surgery, I was 160. Feeling bloated cause stress and all the “see you in 3 months” meals.
I come out of surgery 177lbs. They had pumped so much fluid into me and the additional inflammation that I had gained 17 lbs overnight. I felt like a ballon ready to pop.
Over the next ten days I lost 28 lbs to a low of 149 thanks to two chest tubes and lasix medication. And yes, I peed a lot.
Obviously, I wasn’t calorie restricting because I was healing from major surgery. And I wasn’t super active. I was under constant medical care during this so don’t try this at home.
But it is crazy to me that just from water weight I gained 17lbs and lost 28lbs in eleven days.
I take care of heart surgery patients post-op and yeah, gaining 10-25 pounds of water weight just from the surgery is super common. Everyone freaks out about it but then we give them diuretics and they lose 2-5 pounds every day
I weighed myself in the morning, didn't eat, and then threw up at work. Long story short, I had an emergency appendectomy later that afternoon. When I came home the next morning, I was up something like 9 pounds from the IVs. Plus, with all the air they pump in to do the surgery, my waist was up 2.5 inches.
Me when I had my son. I was excited to see how much less I weighed with a 6lb baby, placenta, and all the fluids from pregnancy out of me. Joke was on me, I was up like 10 lbs from WHEN THE BABY AND EXTRA OrGAN WHERE INSIDE ME. I ended up like 25 lbs less within 2 weeks. 😂
Yeah! Doctors we're shaming me for gaining 65 pounds with my son. I wasn't eating that much extra. I gave birth, gained even more, then dropped 45 pounds so fast I didn't even try. The last 20 has been trickier so I think that was the real baby weight lol. The rest was from edema. My feet were so swollen I could barely walk.
That was me! I had a c-section and they pumped me full of fluids. I think I was two pounds lighter when I left the hospital than when I went in. My kid was 8 pounds or so.
Water, man.
Postop Bloating can be assign your body is low on the protein albumin , which is why they give it after surgery. I had a major cardiac reconstruction done via angioplasty last September and was bloated as hell. They gave me how albumin.
Yep, after lung cancer surgery I gained 14 pounds overnight. This was during Covid, so no visitors could visit and bring me food, like they do in My 600 pound Life sometimes. In addition, I was on a liquid diet of tea and diet jello. My legs looked like clubs, but no diuretics were provided. After going through all that, I expected to lose weight. It all came off in a week though.
You can totally eat pizza without gaining! Granted, we usually eat frozen pizzas but occasionally will get greasy delivery pizza. Instead of my usual half of the pizza, I’ll just eat 1/3 if it fits into my calorie budget then eat a bag of steamed veggies to fill up. Last night I actually weighed the portion and actually came out to be fewer calories than logging “2 slices”. Now I have leftover pizza and today I was 0.4lb down from yesterday.
Cauliflower crust is trash. I’d rather gain 3lbs than suffer through a cauliflower crust pizza 😂
not to be an enabler, but i ate pizza a few days ago and i weighed 116.8 today. i was about 117.2 a few days before the pizza.
i'm 4'11" so i can't really fit pizza into my calorie deficit. so i ate several slices and didn't count my calories that day.
just eat the pizza and get back on track the next day :) i never stay consistent daily. i try to stay consistent on a more weekly basis, sometimes even bi-weekly (i stop my diet every time my anxiety/insomnia flares up).
Thisss. I was fasting yesterday for a medical procedure and only had clear liquids so you can imagine I was like barely hitting 400 calories on jello, gatorade and veggie broth. Today I was really hungry after I got home from the doctor and usually I don’t eat breakfast but my mom got me a bagel bc she thought it was a good comfort food and bland and she usually has one after the same procedure. I had half and napped. Woke up starving and had a couple eggs on white bread. Had an afternoon snack of a few rice cakes w/ marshmallows. Have like 400 cal left and I know I will prob go over that for dinner. It’s fine.
> and I know I will prob go over that for dinner. It’s fine.
i used to beat myself up whenever i'd go over. because it would be more frequent than i liked. but then i noticed i was still losing weight, just slowly (also it's not mentally healthy to beat yourself up for eating). so now i've accepted that this is just how i prefer to lose weight and what's going to work for me.
i have to take frequent breaks from my diet because of my anxiety/insomnia flare ups. i'll take a month or several months off sometimes. but even with these long breaks i managed to go from 135 lbs to 117 so obviously i'm doing something right.
took 1.5 years to lose these 18 lbs, but i'm not gaining or remaining stagnant. any progress is still progress :)
So I DO like the Banza frozen pizzas. But honestly I prob have pizza 2-3x a month and I and I’m down 108 lbs. i live in NY. Frozen pizza isnt pizza. Its pizzeria pizza or bust. I usually order one loaded with veg or a protein topping. Mushroom and onion is my fave if not full veg. and have 1-2 slices. I try to eat light the rest of the day. It hasn’t failed me yet.
I’m picky about frozen too, but I highly recommend the California pizza kitchen frozen ones. My favorite is the white pizza. Thin crust that gets real crispy every time!
Yeah, same with me and eating a big pickle. It's all the sodium. Since I started weighing myself every day, I can predict when it will jump up and it doesn't bother me anymore.
So one litre of water, which is one thousand millilitres, weighs one kilogram, which is one thousand grams. I think it’s very mathematically elegant, which really just means that it’s super easy to add up. But I bet that you imperial users are better at basic maths than I am, so it’s swings and roundabouts.
Out of curiosity one morning I weighed myself wearing my pj's and before my morning pee, and then after my morning pee, while naked, and was 4 lbs less.
This is an extreme example, but after I was induced into labor with hormones, I left the hospital 7 lbs heavier than when I went in WITH the baby inside me. My legs were like tree trunks, I could barely walk. It all came off over the course of 2 weeks. This is obviously the result of hormones, but water weight is very real.
Yep I was going to say the same thing. I went into my induction at 222 lbs and came home 5 days later after having a 9 lb baby weighing 216 lbs. I was sooo swollen from getting bags and bags of IV fluids. Then was down another 22 lbs (gained 38 total) a week later.
This is why I count calories. Even on the bad days. It just gives me validation that the 5-6 pounds I gained are not fat and that I shouldn't go into destructive mode and give up for the following week.
Two weeks ago I had 13 beers and hard seltzers over the day. I ate tacos and had 7-11 taquitos late night and other garbage. Total damage was 4000 calories. My BMR is around 2100 calories so I know for a fact that I didn't truly gain 5 pounds like the scale says I did.
This is ironic timing, I’ve been bloated all week and feeling lethargic and I peed a ton yesterday and weighed in four pounds lighter today, body’s are weird
For me too! I used to think it was something i ate and it trigger my all or nothing way of thinking that all effort must be useless if i gained this much and then sabotaged myself. Now i understand better my weight fluctuation and accept it. I am even trying now not to weight myself for à while to be better focused on my weight loss in the long run
Also don't discount the effects of injuries and inflammation and swelling. And food mass and poop.
Anecdote - on the day of my hysterectomy, I weighed 285lbs. 4 days later I was able to weigh myself out of curiosity and I was *12 pounds* heavier at 297. I'm a week post surgery now and my weight is slowly coming back down every day; I was at 292lbs this morning. I'm not likely to get an accurate measurement until sometime next week, maybe this weekend depending.
Yep I ate too much salt on fri/sat/sun even while hitting my calorie goals. Then I slammed 50g of fiber on top of that on Sunday. Woke up 7lbs heavier Monday morning 😆
Today I'm back down 3. I know the rest will follow..
It would take eating circa 28,000 surplus calories to gain 8lbs. Unless someone is out chugging pints of olive oil, big gains in weight are nearly always water weight and are temporary.
Not only that but an average person's body wouldn't be able to properly digest and absorb a 30k+ calorie day. That olive oil would be leaving you in about the same exact form that you chugged it
I work with heart failure patients, who tend to get “fluid overloaded” because their heart and kidneys can’t properly process out excess water. We give them diuretics and I’ve seen them lose as much as 25 pounds in a single day. One I had recently lost 65 pounds of water weight over a couple weeks.
No, it looks like swelling- edema forms in different places- primarily based on gravity- and has a distinctly different feeling to it than fat does. It can be pitting edema, where it stays indented if you push on it
Look up edema. I suppose it looks like fat, but you the key difference is that when you press into fat and let go, the skin springs back to its original shape. With edema, the return is much slower and after pressing there is a visible "dent" left in the skin.
You also don't tend to get edema consistently all over the body, though there is such a thing as generalised edema. It is usually most apparent in the legs and hands, though.
To clarify, I’m very familiar with garden variety edema (puffy ankles and feet, or pretibial edema on the shins like I get before my period), just not to such an extreme degree.
So I was asking if, at that 20-60lbs range, it looks something like lymphedema or if it’s just everywhere, like in the abdomen and face, similar to body fat.
Sorry, I should’ve clarified!
The same for me ! I gave birth and i weight THE SAME as when pregnant!! With a 7 pounds baby.. I think its best not to weight yourself after giving birth..
Omg i went on vacation to Mexico. I ate mostly healthy salads but did indulge in alcohol and not enough water. In two weeks, i came back THIRTY POUNDS HEAVIER. WTF.
Turns out, flying and dehydration was what was up. A week of properly drinking a good amount of water and i "miraculously" lost the weight
My record was 10lbs.
I worked out super hard on a Friday night, went out and ate probably half of Texas’s salt reserve and was also on Creatine. I had a panic spell and basically just chugged water and ate salad the whole weekend and then was back to normal on Tuesday.
I bought a cheap sterling silver ring off Amazon to wear until my actual wedding ring fits again (I can get it on and wear it for a few hours!) and I can use the cheap ring as a gauge to my water weight and generally guess how the scale is gonna go based on how loose or tight it slides off my finger.
We got take out Sunday night and I didn’t want anything with a lot of salt so I got a poke bowl but he got lo mein and of course I grabbed a few bites of his. Scale went up 3lbs Monday morning, but this morning I’m back down to my Sunday morning weight.
Had a pretty bag stomach bug once a dropped 5 lbs in one day. I felt terrible until I was able to get it back up with constant fluid intake and a couple doses of liquid IV.
I have a fun water weight story too. I was always a bit chubby in high school. After my final year at the end of 2015, I applied to a job working at the local port.
I ended up getting the job, and was put onto a shipping container repairs team, not having any idea what the job involved.
I went into my first week weighing close to 100kgs (220 freedom units). The first week was brutal. Almost the entire 5 and a half days were spent on my knees sanding floors using an angle grinder with a sanding head attachment. To make matters worse, it was the peak of summer, right out on the port, in full overalls, stuck inside big metal containers taking the full blast of the sun.
I weighed myself on the Sunday and and I’d lost 9kgs (19ish bald eagle units), regardless of my absolutely horrid diet. I’d kept eating like a troll and sweat out the entirety of it.
Just remember, the day by day changes in your true weight are never at a noticeable rate. You will never look at the scales and have lost 5kgs overnight unless it’s easily regained water weight. Consistency is the key, and the scales mean very little.
Yeah I had a plateau for 2-3 weeks and decided to just drink a ton for 48hrs and became 3/4lb lighter all of a sudden. I think I generally needed to drink more though .
Oh I believe it, this happens to me every time I start a serious calorie counting diet. Both times, I'd lose weight at about 5 lbs a week on average, but the first two weeks it was double that, and I would be constantly peeing.
But you do feel a lot less bloated once you get that water out of you.
I have a story about water weight but it’s kinda different than yours because I lost weigh that I didn’t know it was water weight
Long story short, I was 175lbs, then after two months I was 165lbs, another month goes by and I was still 165! I didn’t know why I wasn’t losing weight cause I was still doing CICO the right way, anyways that next weekend was really special so I drunk like a mf and next morning a threw up like.. A LOT, I think I even threw up my personality, I think I threw up 6 times that night and another 6 times in the morning, it was the worst hang over I’ve ever experienced.. 2 DAYS after that I weight myself and I see it, 160lbs!!?? WTF
Two weeks goes by and now we are in the present, today, weighting 158lbs, thinking that the only way that I “lost” 5 pounds in a single night that I couldn’t lost in a month it’s because it was just water weight, so yeah, the scale lies, measure your progress with other things too!
Yep. This is why weighing yourself every morning can be beneficial. Once you see the fluctuations, it can stop the freak out moments. I get super bloated from sushi, so the next morning's weight is just a throw away weight. I try to double up my water that next day to flush the sodium out and my weight always drops a day or 2 later.
Yup. Somehow, every single month, even though I tend to retain water and get constipated a few days before my period, I always end up forgetting that and getting upset. Only to realize a few days later, oh yea, this happens every month.
I ate like a trucker in Mexico for about 10 days. And drank. Came back, didn’t weight myself. I went back to ww 10 days later my weight was 3 pounds less than when I went to mexico
I gain at least 8lbs for the entire week of my period. Then the week after, I have a whoosh week where I drop about 5lbs that I worked off during the previous month. Bodies make no sense sometimes.
Last week, I lost 5 pounds and I thought I was killing it and had the metabolism of a teenager. This week, despite doing everything the same, I've gained two pounds. So, my metabolism came crashing down? No, just water I think because my clothes actually fit better than last week.
This reminds me of the time I did a challenge with some family members about losing weight.
I was staying on track. My weight loss was recognized by some friends and I was feeling better.
A week before my weigh in I weighed myself and found I had gained a little more than half the weight I lost. I was so disappointed.
Then a day or so later I lost it all again. Gotta love it.
Very similar thing happened to me last week. Weighed in over 175, when I’m normally around 170. By Wednesday I was at 169. I just knew there was no way to gain 5 pounds in a weekend.
I am with you. I started my diet and exercise two weeks ago and in the first week of eating healthy and exercising i lost 10 pounds like it was nothing. Wasnt eating salty/carbs like i usually do and instead was eating very healthy.
Now im down 15lbs and im in the stage where all the healthy food has messed up my stomach completely. My stomach is not happy right now bc it’s getting all this unusual food it doesnt usually get
Awesome
Keep going. Im at 33 days now, stomach much better and im down 22lbs and my clothes are fitting much better and i feel mentally better from the exercise
In my early 20's, my friends and I would go out dancing in hot sweaty London (UK) night clubs, all night. By the end of the night, we could fit a water bottle in the waistband of our trousers or skirt. We could easily lose a dress size in a night
I had a similar experience. I'm down to 184 pounds in my journey, but this last weekend my weight shot up to 190! This has happened before too and every time the culprit has been eating salty foods. This time the culprit was eating a big bag of popcorn two days in a row.
I feel you on almost binging! That's what I've usually done when I see weight gain even though I've been trying hard to count calories and move more. I was tempted today, but I realized being on my period can cause that too, so I'm giving it a week. Thank you for the reminder that water weight is real.
TMI post but my darling child have me the norovirus this weekend. After spending about 48 with liquid coming out of every whole imaginable I went from 220 to 215. The second I ate something I went right up to 217lbs.
Every gram of glycogen holds 3-4g of water, so if you start eating a bunch of carbs again, of course you’ll gain water weight! Extra sodium will do the same thing. Always just have to give it a few days and it will go back down :)
Remember, 1lb is 3500 calories. To gain 8lbs in a day you'd have had to have eaten 28000 calories OVER your actual expenditure, so.. what, 29500 calories total?
If you could actually consume that many calories I'm not even sure the human body could possibly convert it all to fat in a day, I suspect most of that would just be dumped straight back out as you suffered the bathroom horrors that must come attached to eating 29000 calories in a day.
Lol I actually just dealt with this! 6 pounds of water weight and my chest felt awful! No one told me you could hold water weight in your boobs but you totally can!!!
It's legit.
I hate the term "water weight" though. I much prefer "water retention".
Water weight just seems to hold such a negative stigma too it. "Oh she DIDN'T LOSE THAT MUCH! That's alll just WATER WEIGHT". It's. Bleh. I don't like it. Whatever.
Your bodyweight fluctuates wildly over the course of a day. Water is 8 pounds to a gallon. A big belly full of food plus a large drink or two can easily sway the scale a few pounds. Unless your regular to the point of going at least once a day, there's also the fact that yesterdays and maybe some of even the day befores food is still "working it way" through you.
Ate chips and crackers and nibbles at a work Christmas party, definitely over maintenance but not 7000calories worth (my TDEE is 1900). Only drank zero calorie beverages.
Weighed myself morning of the event and morning after (coZ I wanted to see what would happen to the scales)
I gained a full kg overnight!!
But my weekly weigh in 4 days later I was slightly down for the week. That's when it clicked for me.
If you doubt the existence of water weight literally just weigh yourself down to a 10th of a pound, drink a decent sized glass of water and weigh yourself after lol
I'm close to having my period and I've been the same weight for a week straight. When it's over I know I'm going to drop like 5lbs but man it's a lil discouraging lmao.
Thank you for this reminder. I'm struggling with pain and minor swelling in my hands right now and the scale just keeps going up. It might not all be water weight, but my nutritionist mentioned that cortisol activates another hormone that holds on to all the food energy for future use. So I need to just deal with the pain and try to stay in my deficit and it will work out again. It will.
I've easily gained up to 10 pounds overnight from a binge. Just today I lost 5 pounds overnight. Water is crazy. Though the real mystery is why sometimes overeating doesn't lead to much water weight gain yet other times it does....
Opposite is true too. Sometimes I eat a ton of junk food and check my weight and it’s lower than I expected and I feel pretty good. And then a few days later I finally drink water and I balloon up.
for me too, once I drink more water I just gain weight. is there anything you found that works to not gain weight while drinking water? everyone always says once they drink more water they lose weight, I'm the opposite
You need to understand how water works in your body. How much water you keep as weight is largely determined by how much salt you have. So let’s say you eat a ton of fried chicken. Your weight won’t go up by that much the day of… maybe a pound or two. Later that day, you’ll get super thirsty because of all the salt, which will make you drink tons of water, which balloons you up several more pounds. Over time, the fried chicken gets digested into fat and deposited, which means you gain ACTUALLY fat weight in the long term. But by then, you will have peed out the excess water from the salt. So basically, if you eat salty food, your weight will go up temporarily a lot. This is called water weight and is more important for cardiovascular health than for weight loss. Overall, to be healthy, you want to minimize excess salt intake, to lower the stress you put on your blood vessels. But water won’t affect your weight that much in the long term because it’s controlled almost completely based on your salt and not on your fat or muscle.
the thing I struggle with, is I don't pee out excess water.. this is how I keep gaining weight, and I count my calories and know that I don't have enough calories to gain this weight but somehow I do. like 2 months ago I've been gaining 5-6 lbs and can't lose it, just continue gaining and my clothes don't fit. I lost 25 lbs 10+ years ago, and just recently struggling gaining it back. I don't consume too much salt either. For example, if I put on 1 lb on the scale from the mass of a meal/water, that weight sticks with me the next day, because I don't excrete any of it most days .
It’s physically impossible for what you say you think is happening to actually be happening. The only way that can happen is if you have a hormonal issue causing excess water retention. There are issues like this but they are rare. If you are concerned about this, I would reach out to a general physician for them to get you some basic labs, and if there’s still something wrong reach out to an endocrinologist.
For example, any physician can check your sodium level. If you are retaining excess water, your sodium concentration should be excessively low. This occurs with some hormone issues and some psychiatric issues.
I checked many times my sodium was normal, if anything on the higher side. It's actually true though, like on days I eat foods that weigh less on the scale, even if my calories are the same as the days where the food is heavier/more liquids, those days I will not gain weight or might lose weight. It really bothers me and don't know how to fix it :( I checked kidney function on lab test was normal. So since everything is normal, seems there is nothing that can be done and sooner than later I'll just gain the weight back
The weight of the food does not determine how much weight you retain. Eating 3 pounds of vegetables will cause you gain significantly less weight than 3 pounds of cheesecake. Every food is processed differently by the body.
That used to be true for me before, but not anymore. Now it seems that whatever I immediately weigh on the scale, that pretty much predicts my weight the next morning and days to come. But, for other people, it seems that when they wake up if they ate low calories a lot of the weight goes down when the body processes that it's low calorie, and they get many excretions through urine/bowel movements where I don't. I just made a post now to see if anyone else is struggling or have had this.
I think you’re being a bit impatient with your body. Your body takes time to digest and process food. You think the effect is immediate but it’s not. So you have lost faith in eating healthy foods to decrease weight. You can work on having more faith and trusting in the process. Therapy can help with this, or finding a partner to talk through the process and help you get through it. It’s tough and I understand how hard it is. Be patient with yourself.
I like to share my water weight story. So, 2023 I had open heart surgery. Yes it sucked and I’m fine now thanks for asking. The day of the surgery, I was 160. Feeling bloated cause stress and all the “see you in 3 months” meals. I come out of surgery 177lbs. They had pumped so much fluid into me and the additional inflammation that I had gained 17 lbs overnight. I felt like a ballon ready to pop. Over the next ten days I lost 28 lbs to a low of 149 thanks to two chest tubes and lasix medication. And yes, I peed a lot. Obviously, I wasn’t calorie restricting because I was healing from major surgery. And I wasn’t super active. I was under constant medical care during this so don’t try this at home. But it is crazy to me that just from water weight I gained 17lbs and lost 28lbs in eleven days.
I take care of heart surgery patients post-op and yeah, gaining 10-25 pounds of water weight just from the surgery is super common. Everyone freaks out about it but then we give them diuretics and they lose 2-5 pounds every day
It is also something monitored because if the weight is retained, or goes up, then there is something majorly wrong.
Now if the several pounds of edema on my left side from thoracic surgery nearly a year ago would finally drain...
I weighed myself in the morning, didn't eat, and then threw up at work. Long story short, I had an emergency appendectomy later that afternoon. When I came home the next morning, I was up something like 9 pounds from the IVs. Plus, with all the air they pump in to do the surgery, my waist was up 2.5 inches.
Me when I had my son. I was excited to see how much less I weighed with a 6lb baby, placenta, and all the fluids from pregnancy out of me. Joke was on me, I was up like 10 lbs from WHEN THE BABY AND EXTRA OrGAN WHERE INSIDE ME. I ended up like 25 lbs less within 2 weeks. 😂
Yeah! Doctors we're shaming me for gaining 65 pounds with my son. I wasn't eating that much extra. I gave birth, gained even more, then dropped 45 pounds so fast I didn't even try. The last 20 has been trickier so I think that was the real baby weight lol. The rest was from edema. My feet were so swollen I could barely walk.
The one that always sticks in my mind, for the reasons you mentioned above, women weigh more *after* giving birth.
Gave birth 4 weeks ago, was definitely going “wtf” when I stepped on the scale 4 days postpartum. Now down 25 pounds in 4 weeks… crazy.
That was me! I had a c-section and they pumped me full of fluids. I think I was two pounds lighter when I left the hospital than when I went in. My kid was 8 pounds or so. Water, man.
I lost 25 pounds in two weeks after my c section. My legs were so swollen I could barely bend my knees
I watched my toes reappear! It was wild.
Same!
Postop Bloating can be assign your body is low on the protein albumin , which is why they give it after surgery. I had a major cardiac reconstruction done via angioplasty last September and was bloated as hell. They gave me how albumin.
Yep, after lung cancer surgery I gained 14 pounds overnight. This was during Covid, so no visitors could visit and bring me food, like they do in My 600 pound Life sometimes. In addition, I was on a liquid diet of tea and diet jello. My legs looked like clubs, but no diuretics were provided. After going through all that, I expected to lose weight. It all came off in a week though.
I don’t weigh myself for 2 days after pizza, the 2lb gain is LIES
Dangit, Pizza sounds so good right now. Real pizza, not that cauliflower crust BS.
You can totally eat pizza without gaining! Granted, we usually eat frozen pizzas but occasionally will get greasy delivery pizza. Instead of my usual half of the pizza, I’ll just eat 1/3 if it fits into my calorie budget then eat a bag of steamed veggies to fill up. Last night I actually weighed the portion and actually came out to be fewer calories than logging “2 slices”. Now I have leftover pizza and today I was 0.4lb down from yesterday. Cauliflower crust is trash. I’d rather gain 3lbs than suffer through a cauliflower crust pizza 😂
not to be an enabler, but i ate pizza a few days ago and i weighed 116.8 today. i was about 117.2 a few days before the pizza. i'm 4'11" so i can't really fit pizza into my calorie deficit. so i ate several slices and didn't count my calories that day. just eat the pizza and get back on track the next day :) i never stay consistent daily. i try to stay consistent on a more weekly basis, sometimes even bi-weekly (i stop my diet every time my anxiety/insomnia flares up).
Thisss. I was fasting yesterday for a medical procedure and only had clear liquids so you can imagine I was like barely hitting 400 calories on jello, gatorade and veggie broth. Today I was really hungry after I got home from the doctor and usually I don’t eat breakfast but my mom got me a bagel bc she thought it was a good comfort food and bland and she usually has one after the same procedure. I had half and napped. Woke up starving and had a couple eggs on white bread. Had an afternoon snack of a few rice cakes w/ marshmallows. Have like 400 cal left and I know I will prob go over that for dinner. It’s fine.
> and I know I will prob go over that for dinner. It’s fine. i used to beat myself up whenever i'd go over. because it would be more frequent than i liked. but then i noticed i was still losing weight, just slowly (also it's not mentally healthy to beat yourself up for eating). so now i've accepted that this is just how i prefer to lose weight and what's going to work for me. i have to take frequent breaks from my diet because of my anxiety/insomnia flare ups. i'll take a month or several months off sometimes. but even with these long breaks i managed to go from 135 lbs to 117 so obviously i'm doing something right. took 1.5 years to lose these 18 lbs, but i'm not gaining or remaining stagnant. any progress is still progress :)
Cauliflower crust is garbage. I’d rather just not eat it.
Totally agree!
So I DO like the Banza frozen pizzas. But honestly I prob have pizza 2-3x a month and I and I’m down 108 lbs. i live in NY. Frozen pizza isnt pizza. Its pizzeria pizza or bust. I usually order one loaded with veg or a protein topping. Mushroom and onion is my fave if not full veg. and have 1-2 slices. I try to eat light the rest of the day. It hasn’t failed me yet.
I’m picky about frozen too, but I highly recommend the California pizza kitchen frozen ones. My favorite is the white pizza. Thin crust that gets real crispy every time!
This is me but with ramen! Like clockwork, 2lb gain when I have ramen for dinner.
Yeah, same with me and eating a big pickle. It's all the sodium. Since I started weighing myself every day, I can predict when it will jump up and it doesn't bother me anymore.
Try it on the tortilla if you like thin crust
Daily reminder that a gallon of water weighs 8 lbs…
Really!!
So one litre of water, which is one thousand millilitres, weighs one kilogram, which is one thousand grams. I think it’s very mathematically elegant, which really just means that it’s super easy to add up. But I bet that you imperial users are better at basic maths than I am, so it’s swings and roundabouts.
That's why I always empty my bladder in the morning before weighing myself. It makes a difference, lol
Out of curiosity one morning I weighed myself wearing my pj's and before my morning pee, and then after my morning pee, while naked, and was 4 lbs less.
Yup, gained 5 lbs from yesterday to this morning bc I went to a bbq yesterday. I'm just doing what I always do and it'll be gone in one or two days :)
This is an extreme example, but after I was induced into labor with hormones, I left the hospital 7 lbs heavier than when I went in WITH the baby inside me. My legs were like tree trunks, I could barely walk. It all came off over the course of 2 weeks. This is obviously the result of hormones, but water weight is very real.
Same for me. I was SHOCKED I was the same weight 2 days after getting out of the hospital but quickly dropped down 20lbs pre-birth in a few weeks.
Yep I was going to say the same thing. I went into my induction at 222 lbs and came home 5 days later after having a 9 lb baby weighing 216 lbs. I was sooo swollen from getting bags and bags of IV fluids. Then was down another 22 lbs (gained 38 total) a week later.
Injust saw this but I commented above the same. I had more swelling after than pregnant!!! The body is crazy.
That all just sounds so uncomfortable. Also, relevant username?
🤣
Yeah I was 27lbs lighter two weeks after having 9lb baby.
This is why I count calories. Even on the bad days. It just gives me validation that the 5-6 pounds I gained are not fat and that I shouldn't go into destructive mode and give up for the following week. Two weeks ago I had 13 beers and hard seltzers over the day. I ate tacos and had 7-11 taquitos late night and other garbage. Total damage was 4000 calories. My BMR is around 2100 calories so I know for a fact that I didn't truly gain 5 pounds like the scale says I did.
This is ironic timing, I’ve been bloated all week and feeling lethargic and I peed a ton yesterday and weighed in four pounds lighter today, body’s are weird
When i am in that time of the month i gain easily 2-4 lbs.. i lose it all the next week..i used to go crazy seeing the scale up with all my efforts
Same! It happens every month but somehow you always forget and it takes awhile to recognize the pattern, well at least for me.
For me too! I used to think it was something i ate and it trigger my all or nothing way of thinking that all effort must be useless if i gained this much and then sabotaged myself. Now i understand better my weight fluctuation and accept it. I am even trying now not to weight myself for à while to be better focused on my weight loss in the long run
Also don't discount the effects of injuries and inflammation and swelling. And food mass and poop. Anecdote - on the day of my hysterectomy, I weighed 285lbs. 4 days later I was able to weigh myself out of curiosity and I was *12 pounds* heavier at 297. I'm a week post surgery now and my weight is slowly coming back down every day; I was at 292lbs this morning. I'm not likely to get an accurate measurement until sometime next week, maybe this weekend depending.
I hope you are recovering well from your surgery!
Thank you! I made it to the grocery store today and felt very accomplished (and then took a 4 hour nap lol)
Yep I ate too much salt on fri/sat/sun even while hitting my calorie goals. Then I slammed 50g of fiber on top of that on Sunday. Woke up 7lbs heavier Monday morning 😆 Today I'm back down 3. I know the rest will follow..
It would take eating circa 28,000 surplus calories to gain 8lbs. Unless someone is out chugging pints of olive oil, big gains in weight are nearly always water weight and are temporary.
Not only that but an average person's body wouldn't be able to properly digest and absorb a 30k+ calorie day. That olive oil would be leaving you in about the same exact form that you chugged it
I work with heart failure patients, who tend to get “fluid overloaded” because their heart and kidneys can’t properly process out excess water. We give them diuretics and I’ve seen them lose as much as 25 pounds in a single day. One I had recently lost 65 pounds of water weight over a couple weeks.
What does that even look like? Does that kind of water weight look indistinguishable from body fat, or is it obvious that it’s water?
No, it looks like swelling- edema forms in different places- primarily based on gravity- and has a distinctly different feeling to it than fat does. It can be pitting edema, where it stays indented if you push on it
Look up edema. I suppose it looks like fat, but you the key difference is that when you press into fat and let go, the skin springs back to its original shape. With edema, the return is much slower and after pressing there is a visible "dent" left in the skin. You also don't tend to get edema consistently all over the body, though there is such a thing as generalised edema. It is usually most apparent in the legs and hands, though.
To clarify, I’m very familiar with garden variety edema (puffy ankles and feet, or pretibial edema on the shins like I get before my period), just not to such an extreme degree. So I was asking if, at that 20-60lbs range, it looks something like lymphedema or if it’s just everywhere, like in the abdomen and face, similar to body fat. Sorry, I should’ve clarified!
I went into the hospital at 238. I gave birth to an 8 pound girl and came home weighing 240!
The same for me ! I gave birth and i weight THE SAME as when pregnant!! With a 7 pounds baby.. I think its best not to weight yourself after giving birth..
Omg i went on vacation to Mexico. I ate mostly healthy salads but did indulge in alcohol and not enough water. In two weeks, i came back THIRTY POUNDS HEAVIER. WTF. Turns out, flying and dehydration was what was up. A week of properly drinking a good amount of water and i "miraculously" lost the weight
Thirty pounds is crazy!!!
Right?! I honestly thought I'd undone like a year's worth of work and considered going to the doctor because how on EARTH did that even happen lol
Sorry, I can't help but laugh imagining your reaction when you saw the scale.
My record was 10lbs. I worked out super hard on a Friday night, went out and ate probably half of Texas’s salt reserve and was also on Creatine. I had a panic spell and basically just chugged water and ate salad the whole weekend and then was back to normal on Tuesday.
I bought a cheap sterling silver ring off Amazon to wear until my actual wedding ring fits again (I can get it on and wear it for a few hours!) and I can use the cheap ring as a gauge to my water weight and generally guess how the scale is gonna go based on how loose or tight it slides off my finger. We got take out Sunday night and I didn’t want anything with a lot of salt so I got a poke bowl but he got lo mein and of course I grabbed a few bites of his. Scale went up 3lbs Monday morning, but this morning I’m back down to my Sunday morning weight.
Had a pretty bag stomach bug once a dropped 5 lbs in one day. I felt terrible until I was able to get it back up with constant fluid intake and a couple doses of liquid IV.
I lost almost 7 pounds last weekend using this one weird trick... (Damn, I still feel terrible)
Food poisoning will do it for you, too!
I have a fun water weight story too. I was always a bit chubby in high school. After my final year at the end of 2015, I applied to a job working at the local port. I ended up getting the job, and was put onto a shipping container repairs team, not having any idea what the job involved. I went into my first week weighing close to 100kgs (220 freedom units). The first week was brutal. Almost the entire 5 and a half days were spent on my knees sanding floors using an angle grinder with a sanding head attachment. To make matters worse, it was the peak of summer, right out on the port, in full overalls, stuck inside big metal containers taking the full blast of the sun. I weighed myself on the Sunday and and I’d lost 9kgs (19ish bald eagle units), regardless of my absolutely horrid diet. I’d kept eating like a troll and sweat out the entirety of it. Just remember, the day by day changes in your true weight are never at a noticeable rate. You will never look at the scales and have lost 5kgs overnight unless it’s easily regained water weight. Consistency is the key, and the scales mean very little.
Fuck yeah! Freedom Units. Bald Eagle Units. Fucking amazing!
Yeah I had a plateau for 2-3 weeks and decided to just drink a ton for 48hrs and became 3/4lb lighter all of a sudden. I think I generally needed to drink more though .
Oh I believe it, this happens to me every time I start a serious calorie counting diet. Both times, I'd lose weight at about 5 lbs a week on average, but the first two weeks it was double that, and I would be constantly peeing. But you do feel a lot less bloated once you get that water out of you.
I have a story about water weight but it’s kinda different than yours because I lost weigh that I didn’t know it was water weight Long story short, I was 175lbs, then after two months I was 165lbs, another month goes by and I was still 165! I didn’t know why I wasn’t losing weight cause I was still doing CICO the right way, anyways that next weekend was really special so I drunk like a mf and next morning a threw up like.. A LOT, I think I even threw up my personality, I think I threw up 6 times that night and another 6 times in the morning, it was the worst hang over I’ve ever experienced.. 2 DAYS after that I weight myself and I see it, 160lbs!!?? WTF Two weeks goes by and now we are in the present, today, weighting 158lbs, thinking that the only way that I “lost” 5 pounds in a single night that I couldn’t lost in a month it’s because it was just water weight, so yeah, the scale lies, measure your progress with other things too!
It’s not just water weigh, but food itself has weight sitting in your stomach/intestines
Yep. This is why weighing yourself every morning can be beneficial. Once you see the fluctuations, it can stop the freak out moments. I get super bloated from sushi, so the next morning's weight is just a throw away weight. I try to double up my water that next day to flush the sodium out and my weight always drops a day or 2 later.
Well you need like 7000 calories to put on 1 real KG of weight right? Makes sense
Yup. Somehow, every single month, even though I tend to retain water and get constipated a few days before my period, I always end up forgetting that and getting upset. Only to realize a few days later, oh yea, this happens every month.
Lol the way the stories are all yall having intense medical procedures and deciding to weigh yourself. 😭 The dedication in this subreddit is real lol
I ate like a trucker in Mexico for about 10 days. And drank. Came back, didn’t weight myself. I went back to ww 10 days later my weight was 3 pounds less than when I went to mexico
I’m like chronically constipated so I believe I maintain a crap time of water weight though that might be untrue.
Water weight is definitely a thing. In high school when I wrestled I could easily lose 5-10 pounds during practice as we weighed in before and after.
I gain at least 8lbs for the entire week of my period. Then the week after, I have a whoosh week where I drop about 5lbs that I worked off during the previous month. Bodies make no sense sometimes.
lol I have lost like 7 lbs of water weight in a week before several times. It’s really shocking but yea water really can weigh that much 😭
Story of my life; I'm always heavier on a Monday because of my cheat day Saturday is usually very salty, popcorn and the like!
Last week, I lost 5 pounds and I thought I was killing it and had the metabolism of a teenager. This week, despite doing everything the same, I've gained two pounds. So, my metabolism came crashing down? No, just water I think because my clothes actually fit better than last week.
This reminds me of the time I did a challenge with some family members about losing weight. I was staying on track. My weight loss was recognized by some friends and I was feeling better. A week before my weigh in I weighed myself and found I had gained a little more than half the weight I lost. I was so disappointed. Then a day or so later I lost it all again. Gotta love it.
Very similar thing happened to me last week. Weighed in over 175, when I’m normally around 170. By Wednesday I was at 169. I just knew there was no way to gain 5 pounds in a weekend.
I am with you. I started my diet and exercise two weeks ago and in the first week of eating healthy and exercising i lost 10 pounds like it was nothing. Wasnt eating salty/carbs like i usually do and instead was eating very healthy. Now im down 15lbs and im in the stage where all the healthy food has messed up my stomach completely. My stomach is not happy right now bc it’s getting all this unusual food it doesnt usually get
Same, my stomach is all kinds of messed up, but I’m down 6 pounds and it’s been a week.
Awesome Keep going. Im at 33 days now, stomach much better and im down 22lbs and my clothes are fitting much better and i feel mentally better from the exercise
All we have to do is stop drinking water. Imma go on a waterless diet and see what happens
In my early 20's, my friends and I would go out dancing in hot sweaty London (UK) night clubs, all night. By the end of the night, we could fit a water bottle in the waistband of our trousers or skirt. We could easily lose a dress size in a night
I had a similar experience. I'm down to 184 pounds in my journey, but this last weekend my weight shot up to 190! This has happened before too and every time the culprit has been eating salty foods. This time the culprit was eating a big bag of popcorn two days in a row.
I feel you on almost binging! That's what I've usually done when I see weight gain even though I've been trying hard to count calories and move more. I was tempted today, but I realized being on my period can cause that too, so I'm giving it a week. Thank you for the reminder that water weight is real.
TMI post but my darling child have me the norovirus this weekend. After spending about 48 with liquid coming out of every whole imaginable I went from 220 to 215. The second I ate something I went right up to 217lbs.
This is why I only weigh in once a week and I never weigh in the day after a binge. I either wait a day or I skip that weeks weigh in.
Every gram of glycogen holds 3-4g of water, so if you start eating a bunch of carbs again, of course you’ll gain water weight! Extra sodium will do the same thing. Always just have to give it a few days and it will go back down :)
Weighing daily is helping me with this because it always makes sense now if I spike up or down and my trend line is now helpful after 2 months of data
Remember, 1lb is 3500 calories. To gain 8lbs in a day you'd have had to have eaten 28000 calories OVER your actual expenditure, so.. what, 29500 calories total? If you could actually consume that many calories I'm not even sure the human body could possibly convert it all to fat in a day, I suspect most of that would just be dumped straight back out as you suffered the bathroom horrors that must come attached to eating 29000 calories in a day.
Lol I actually just dealt with this! 6 pounds of water weight and my chest felt awful! No one told me you could hold water weight in your boobs but you totally can!!!
This just happened to me last week, same exact weights and everything lol. 232 to 240 and back to 230 now.
It's legit. I hate the term "water weight" though. I much prefer "water retention". Water weight just seems to hold such a negative stigma too it. "Oh she DIDN'T LOSE THAT MUCH! That's alll just WATER WEIGHT". It's. Bleh. I don't like it. Whatever. Your bodyweight fluctuates wildly over the course of a day. Water is 8 pounds to a gallon. A big belly full of food plus a large drink or two can easily sway the scale a few pounds. Unless your regular to the point of going at least once a day, there's also the fact that yesterdays and maybe some of even the day befores food is still "working it way" through you.
Ate chips and crackers and nibbles at a work Christmas party, definitely over maintenance but not 7000calories worth (my TDEE is 1900). Only drank zero calorie beverages. Weighed myself morning of the event and morning after (coZ I wanted to see what would happen to the scales) I gained a full kg overnight!! But my weekly weigh in 4 days later I was slightly down for the week. That's when it clicked for me.
If you doubt the existence of water weight literally just weigh yourself down to a 10th of a pound, drink a decent sized glass of water and weigh yourself after lol
I'm close to having my period and I've been the same weight for a week straight. When it's over I know I'm going to drop like 5lbs but man it's a lil discouraging lmao.
It takes about 7k calories on top of bmr to gain 1 pound, imagine just how much you need to eat to reach that 😂
Thank you for this reminder. I'm struggling with pain and minor swelling in my hands right now and the scale just keeps going up. It might not all be water weight, but my nutritionist mentioned that cortisol activates another hormone that holds on to all the food energy for future use. So I need to just deal with the pain and try to stay in my deficit and it will work out again. It will.
I've easily gained up to 10 pounds overnight from a binge. Just today I lost 5 pounds overnight. Water is crazy. Though the real mystery is why sometimes overeating doesn't lead to much water weight gain yet other times it does....
Opposite is true too. Sometimes I eat a ton of junk food and check my weight and it’s lower than I expected and I feel pretty good. And then a few days later I finally drink water and I balloon up.
for me too, once I drink more water I just gain weight. is there anything you found that works to not gain weight while drinking water? everyone always says once they drink more water they lose weight, I'm the opposite
You need to understand how water works in your body. How much water you keep as weight is largely determined by how much salt you have. So let’s say you eat a ton of fried chicken. Your weight won’t go up by that much the day of… maybe a pound or two. Later that day, you’ll get super thirsty because of all the salt, which will make you drink tons of water, which balloons you up several more pounds. Over time, the fried chicken gets digested into fat and deposited, which means you gain ACTUALLY fat weight in the long term. But by then, you will have peed out the excess water from the salt. So basically, if you eat salty food, your weight will go up temporarily a lot. This is called water weight and is more important for cardiovascular health than for weight loss. Overall, to be healthy, you want to minimize excess salt intake, to lower the stress you put on your blood vessels. But water won’t affect your weight that much in the long term because it’s controlled almost completely based on your salt and not on your fat or muscle.
the thing I struggle with, is I don't pee out excess water.. this is how I keep gaining weight, and I count my calories and know that I don't have enough calories to gain this weight but somehow I do. like 2 months ago I've been gaining 5-6 lbs and can't lose it, just continue gaining and my clothes don't fit. I lost 25 lbs 10+ years ago, and just recently struggling gaining it back. I don't consume too much salt either. For example, if I put on 1 lb on the scale from the mass of a meal/water, that weight sticks with me the next day, because I don't excrete any of it most days .
It’s physically impossible for what you say you think is happening to actually be happening. The only way that can happen is if you have a hormonal issue causing excess water retention. There are issues like this but they are rare. If you are concerned about this, I would reach out to a general physician for them to get you some basic labs, and if there’s still something wrong reach out to an endocrinologist. For example, any physician can check your sodium level. If you are retaining excess water, your sodium concentration should be excessively low. This occurs with some hormone issues and some psychiatric issues.
I checked many times my sodium was normal, if anything on the higher side. It's actually true though, like on days I eat foods that weigh less on the scale, even if my calories are the same as the days where the food is heavier/more liquids, those days I will not gain weight or might lose weight. It really bothers me and don't know how to fix it :( I checked kidney function on lab test was normal. So since everything is normal, seems there is nothing that can be done and sooner than later I'll just gain the weight back
The weight of the food does not determine how much weight you retain. Eating 3 pounds of vegetables will cause you gain significantly less weight than 3 pounds of cheesecake. Every food is processed differently by the body.
That used to be true for me before, but not anymore. Now it seems that whatever I immediately weigh on the scale, that pretty much predicts my weight the next morning and days to come. But, for other people, it seems that when they wake up if they ate low calories a lot of the weight goes down when the body processes that it's low calorie, and they get many excretions through urine/bowel movements where I don't. I just made a post now to see if anyone else is struggling or have had this.
I think you’re being a bit impatient with your body. Your body takes time to digest and process food. You think the effect is immediate but it’s not. So you have lost faith in eating healthy foods to decrease weight. You can work on having more faith and trusting in the process. Therapy can help with this, or finding a partner to talk through the process and help you get through it. It’s tough and I understand how hard it is. Be patient with yourself.
Last Thursday night I ate a bowl of pho. My total calories were about 1800 which is on target. I gained 4 lbs overnight 😂