Why Has My Weight Gone Up Today When I've Done Everything PERFECTLY!

So today we're going to talk about weight fluctuations.

The narrative we often here is;

‘I ate perfectly yesterday, hit my steps, did my workout but my weight went up the morning….. what the hell is going on!’

So let's start with clearing up a definition of terms. When you step on the scales, the reading they give you is total weight.

We need to be really clear that this is not the same as body fat. It’s just our total weight of everthing within our body.

It's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that any change in our scale weight is a change in our body fat. It is not!

 It can help give us an idea if we are losing body fat but it does not directly tell us that.

The weight  and number we see on the scales is made up of many things including our muscle, water, food in our stomach, partially digested food,and body fat. So although yes, as our body fat reduces we expect to see our total weight come down, we also have these other variables going on as well which also have an impact.

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This is why we will encourage most of our clients to weigh themselves everyday at the same time, normally first thing in the morning, and look at average trends across a week, as we expect their weight to go up and down and fluctuate day to day, because it’s completely normal.

It’s is also why we will get them to be as consistent as possible and have set targets with things like water intake, exercise per week, calories coming in, timings of food and sleep, as these will increase the extent to which our weight does fluctuate if they aren’t fairly steady.

When fluctuations are larger, it makes it harder to gauge how much of the weight change is actually body fat.  It also tends too unsettle people more, as even with reading articles like this, they still feel uncomfortable and disappointed seeing a number go up when their goal is for it to go down!

So lets look a little deeper at 5 of the main things that will cause daily weight fluctuations.

1.        Timing of your meals- If you  have a day where you eat more of your food in the evening or second half of the day, because of changes in digestion time it’s reasonable to suggest that you would be heavier the next morning compared to if you ate more of your food in the first half of the day.

2.     Bowel Movmements-   If you weight in the morning but haven’t yet gone to the toilet you will absolutely weight more. To put it bluntly there is more poo or feacal matter inside you! We often with clients that their bowl movements can change due to changes in food, but also when there is less food volume coming in when trying to lose body fat. This can reduce the frequency to which you go to the toilet with less volume pushing food through the system showing the importance of tracking this.

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3.        Hydration- This can have a huge impact. If we are dehydrated and have less water in us we will obviously weigh less. I had a client who played high level badminton who would always lose 1-2 KG the morning after, as he’d lost a lot of water through sweat. His weight would then return to normal over the next few days. Again this I why we encourage our clients to drink 2-3 litres of water each day depending on their size and also track it along with their exercise so we can see its links  to fluctuations in weight.

4.        Carbohydrates –  No they do not make you fat! But yes they can increase scale weight. This is simply because of the fact that for every 1g of carb we eat our body holds onto about 2-3 g of water.

When we eat a load of bread or salty chips,our bodies break this down into glucose to be used as energy and some of this is then stored in the liver and muscle as glycogen. When our body does this, it binds the glycogen to water. And if we then add salt to the mix this will further increase the amount of water we retain. So if we had this carb heavy meal in an evening, our weight would more than likely than fluctuate up the next day, but again not because carbs make you fat, they just increase water retention.

5.        Menstraul Cycle- Depending on where you are in your menstrual cycle, will effect levels of different hormones. With most of the women I train I will see a 0.5-1KG increase anywhere between a week or a few days before their cycle followed for the majority by a drop in weight after they start to bleed. This is largely due to increased progesterone causing water retention and why cycle is something we will get clients to track.

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The main take home messages from today are;

1.Scale weight is not a direct measure of body fat!

2.Fluctuations are normal! If you’ve ticked off all the boxes you need to in support of fat loss but your weight has gone up its most probably due to one of the reasons above. Don’t let is derail you, but instead focus on weekly averages and trends.

3.Tracking and collecting as much data as possible helps us understand whats really going on with our weight.

4. Keep your routine as consistent as possible to reduce fluctuations and see a steadier rate of loss(however remember it will never be linear).

I hope you have a great week!

Lizzie

The One Percent Club

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