I’m losing weight. Nothing fancy. Just being much more active, and cutting way down on the portions, and taking multi-vitamins with extra vitamin D. I’ve lost 50 pounds so far (at a rate of about 5-10 pounds per week).
My question is about the fact that when I weigh just before going to bed, I always weigh a pound or two less than when I weigh the next morning after first waking up. It’s just an ordinary Weight Watcher’s digital scale. I’m always lighter at night.
Does the sleeping process add weight somehow to the body?
Correction: my rate is about 2-5 pounds per week.
Hmm, puzzling. Unless you’re drinking fluid after measuring at night, relieving yourself before your morning weighing, or wearing different clothes, then I’d suggest your scales must be the source of the error. I’d guess this might be due to comparative temperature changes affecting a metal component within the scale mechanism. The human body loses weight during sleep due to water loss and metabolic activity.
That’s a possibility. We do turn off the air conditioning on our mezzanine level at night before going to bed. So, when I weigh at night, the scale would be cooler than when I weigh in the mornings.
That’s strange. When I have weighed myself at night and then in the morning on a triple beam scale, I always weigh a little less in the morning (which I assumed was from getting up to urinate in the middle of the night).
You should weigh your least when you wake up in the morning, since you lose water during the night via breathing. I’d go with the scale being wonky as well.
Is that the way it would go? The cooler the scale, the more biased toward more weight? Or would a warmer scale tend to show more weight? I just want to be sure that your temperature hypothesis is a reasonable one, given the facts as stated (cooler at night - I weigh less — warmer in the morning, I weigh more.)
The that depends on the mechanism inside the scale. The easiest way to reliably tell if temperature is the cause would be to measure a reference weight at opposite ends of the day and see if this result also differs. The difference may also be conceivably due to your position on the scale and the scales’ position on the floor, if this isn’t even or a hard surface. Most bathroom scales have a fairly lax potential error in the reading so don’t be surprised by +/- 5lbs (it may even indicate this on the back of the scales/instruction booklet if this is still in your possession). If it turns out not to be concerned with temperature, put it down to shoddy manufacturing precision and try averaging a few readings to produce a more precise, although not necessarily more accurate, result. The other option is you’re sleepwalking and secretly raiding the fridge, or somehow violating the laws of thermodynamics. I think scale error is the most likely of the three.
ETA: Apparently electronic scales commonly work by using a transducer beam to measure a change in resistance as the beam is deflected and converting this into the equivalent weight. Since at room temperature resistance scales approximately linearly with temperature, it would make sense that the cooler set of scales measure less resistance, and hence weight at the end of the day, having been cooled by the AC.
I must agree with you there. The scale is in our guest bath on the mezzanine level. There is carpet, but not a “pile” carpet. In other words, it is a hard surface. However, we keep the scale pushed back against the wall into a spot where it fits well by the sink cabinet, and then when I weigh, I just pull the thing out with my toes and stand on it. Maybe that process upsets its internals.
And yes, it does make a difference how I stand on it. I try to be consistent, standing as I ordinarily would with roughly equal pressure on my heels and the balls of my feet. (It’s not shoddy mfg, I don’t think. It is one of the best scales of its kind available, which was why we bought it.)
And upon seeing your ETA, that makes a lot of sense also.
You have a mezzanine level?
Yes. It’s a three story house.
I can’t answer, but I have to say that 50 lbs is a huge accomplishment, congratulations!
I know; I was just teasing. That’s not a term I tend to think of for a private home, and I was picturing you living in a department store, like the teddy bear in that old story.
Yeah, we used to just say ground floor or first floor. But then, from the back yard, ground floor or first floor is the library, sewing room, and garage. So we just say basement, mezzanine, and upstairs. (Even upstairs can be confusing if we’re in the library, so for the third floor, we just say “all the way upstairs”.
What is the temperature of the scale in the morning and at night? Does something inanimate weigh the same on your scale morning and night?
If Liberal is like me, he’s probably nearly inanimate first thing in the morning.
The kidneys are actually only the second-most-significant excretory organ in the body. The first, believe it or not, is the lungs. The air you breathe out is heavier than what you breathe in, so you lose weight just by breathing.
