The Truth behind those Scale Fluctuations

Does this sound familiar?

You wake up in the morning. Sleepy and trying to get the sleep out of your eyes, you walk into the bathroom, and you step onto the scale

YOU’RE FOUR POUNDS HEAVIER?!?!

Furious, your mind starts to race. You’ve been eating so well! You’ve been staying the course with your diet.

They say 3500 calories is one pound of body fat, but there is absolutely NO WAY you ate 14,000 calories yesterday.

HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE?!

How did you gain 4 pounds overnight?

First off, you didn’t gain 4 pounds of body fat overnight.

The truth is short term fluctuations in body weight are caused by a few factors and all are irrelevant to your long term progress. You are not losing muscle nor gaining body fat every time the scale swings. Instead, here is what is really going on:

6 Reasons why your Scale is Lying to you:

1) You ate more carbs than normal

To fully explain this, I’ll need to nerd out for a hot second.

Whenever you eat carbohydrates, they are stored as glycogen in your body. Glycogen is stored energy that our body uses when we are lifting weights or doing anything explosive. Our body stores glycogen both within our liver and muscles. You can store somewhere between 50-100g of glycogen in your liver. However, muscle glycogen capacity is a bit more tricky as glycogen storage varies from person to person. Some studies have shown we can store as much as 15g/kg of bodyweight (6.8g per pound), which ends up being more than 750 grams!

Cool story Bruh, but how does this affect scale weight?

Each gram of carb stored causes your body to retain between 2.7-4 times that amount of water. The combination of increased carbohydrates and the water bound to each carb is what causes our body weight to increase.

For example, let’s assume you are dieting. During your diet, you are eating fewer carbs for a few days/weeks. This causes your muscle glycogen storage to be very low. Then, you have a bunch of carby foods because it’s a social event, happy hour, birthday cake, or one of the other million reasons to get carb binge..

Within your carb binge session, let’s say you have 750 grams. So knowing that glycogen brings betweens 2.7-4 times that amount of water (let’s go with an average of 3)

750 carbs + (750 x 3 water weight) = 3000g

3000g = 6.6 pounds!

So, a high carb day can increase your scale weight by almost 7 pounds!

#2 You had too much salt (Sodium)

This is going to be the last science-based reason (maybe) Let’s say your normal diet is fairly low in sodium ( lean meats, lots of veggies, fruit, and not too much-processed stuff.) Then, you head over for a nice family dinner (grilled salmon, veggies, rice, and a glass or two of wine).

You wake up in the morning and guess what happens? Your weight skyrockets the following morning. This happened because the increased sodium intake caused your body to retain water.

I’ll keep this brief, but your body produces a hormone called aldosterone. Aldosterone’s primary role is to keep as much sodium as possible within the body as it’s important for a healthy metabolism. However, when you’re eating a low sodium diet (like mentioned above) your body wants to keep as much sodium as possible. So, with already high levels of aldosterone within the body with a sudden influx of sodium, this causes your body to hold onto water like a clingy ex-girlfriend.

#3 The Booze Train

You may have noticed, but drinking alcohol can cause your bodyweight to decrease. This is because alcohol causes your body to become dehydrated.

Exactly, how dehydrated do you become? For every 200 milliliters of beer consumed, the average person releases 320 milliliters of urine.

So go ahead and drink if you’d like, but please do it responsibly and be cognizant of the relationship between scale weight and alcohol.

#4 You Need to Take a Dump

We can store a bit of weight within our large intestines. There really isn’t much science needed to support this, but always make sure you weigh yourself after taking a dump. In fact, you can experience a bodyweight swing between 1-3+ pounds simply by taking a 💩💩💩💩💩

#5 Post-Workout

When you are lifting weights, your body is breaking your muscles down in order to build more muscle. During that breaking down phase, your muscles need more nutrients (i.e. glycogen, protein, water) to adequately recover for the next workout. So, your muscles are soaking up all the nutrients like a sponge. So, even though the weight may spike up, it’s because of the additional nutrient within the actual muscle to aid in the recovery process so you can quickly workout again.

#6 You ate later than usual

I’m not saying eating late is bad for you nor it causes you to gain fat. It’s your total calorie intake that dictates your fat loss and fat gain. Let’s say you usually stop eating around 8pm, yet in this situation, you stopped at 10 pm. You wake up and weigh yourself at your usual time in the morning. Because you ate later, you’ll have more food inside you so you weigh more that morning.