I weigh myself most every morning: same time, same schedule, as to maintain consistency. My weight tends to vary day to day about a pound or two within a 5-odd pound range… one day I’ll be 200, the next 198.7, a couple of days later 201.8, etc.
So last Friday I weighed myself and it was normal - 200.6.
Monday morning I weighed myself… 213.7!
WTF?
And it’s not a scale error… over the past week the weight has been slowly decreasing back to my norms: this morning I came in at 205.2, down from yesterday’s 206.2.
A couple of things that made last weekend different from other weekends:
A lot of job-related stress. I worked on a $6 million RFQ until 2am on Thursday night, 2am Friday night, 1am Saturday night, and for 4 hours on Sunday - probably about 35 hours in all.
When I work I swill Diet Coke, especially if I’m working on a large extensive project.
Saturday day I worked about 5-6 hours in the yard, mowing and edging the lawn, clearing out some overgrown brush, stuff like that.
By Monday morning I was exhausted, possibly had a touch of a cold - I don’t really remember as I was so tired.
Not a lot of big eating - I cooked fried chicken on Saturday night for a guest but only had 2 pieces. Rest of the time I ate my usual diet.
Any ideas? Anybody else have such a wide gain/loss in such a short time?
Yep, fluid retention probably because of the yard work, and sodium intake (Diet Coke). Your muscles will hold onto water to help heal themselves after exercise. There are other factors that contribute to your weight on a daily basis as well, but unless you had 45,500 extra calories in your intake for the week, there is no way you gained 13 lbs of fat.
If you were me, my period would have started on Tuesday after a mystery gain like that. But assuming you’re a man, I would agree with the previous posters that it was water retention from the diet coke and stress. I’ve found I tend to gain water when my job takes a turn for the worse, I’m not sure if it’s that I’m too busy/stressed to drink enough water to flush the system, or if there’s some weird mechanism that happens when I’m not sleeping well.
Do you keep a food log? Under job stress you might have been eating things you don’t remember. Perhaps some salty snacks snuck into your usual diet?
Fluid retention was my thought before I even opened the thread, as it’s the most common cause of “crap! where did all this sudden weight come from?” I know, and after reading your post it definitely seems likely.
This could be fluid retention, and, I would be more concerned about it than not, if I were you. Since you did the outside exercies (IANAD) I would suspect that most of the drinks had left the body, in the normal course of things.
Are your ankles swollen? Thirteen pounds is a lot of liquid to retain.
Might be the start of Congestive Heart Failure.
Might not be, tho.
Best wishes
Except that he’s losing it again, roughly 3/4ths of it in just a few days. Sudden onset of CHF or Nephrotic Syndrome or such seems unlikely when the weight drops back off that quickly without any intervention (of course no health care diagnosis or treatment plan is implied!)
It does seem like a lot though for normal fluid retention although the combination of the sleep deprivation and both physical and emotional stress (leading to high cortisol, which can contribute to greater fluid retention) along with high sodium intake would be a pretty potent fluid retention trigger.
I dropped a lot of weight awhile back and part of my process was daily weigh ins and calculating a moving average of my weight. This was basically so I had a clearer picture of what was actually happening, I disagree with weekly or even more infrequent weigh ins precisely because random variations can be quite large.
When I started losing weight I weighed 265 lb, and while my weight as it went down normally fluxed +/- 2 lb with a steady downward trend, it wasn’t totally out of the ordinary for events to conspire to show very large single day upward or downward trends. I learned over time to just ignore them and keep my eye on the calculated moving average which smoothed out any strange spikes.
I definitely found weird spikes happened when I did atypical things. At one point I decided to make my diet low sodium (I don’t have any medical issue that would require me to restrict my sodium intake under 1500 mg, I just wanted to do it) and after a few days of that I noticed a very large downward spike. Based on my research at the time I was pretty convinced it is because decreased sodium in my diet made my natural amount of water in my body lower so my weight dropped on the scale. Later on when I quit monitoring sodium I noticed a day where it spiked back up. Sodium and water intake can cause very large spikes. Impossible to say for you, but your experience isn’t inconsistent with mine in a similar situation.
What I can assure you of (and I assume you know this) there is absolutely no way you gained 13 pounds of fat in that one day, so rest assured it was almost certainly water.
Are you absolutely certain it wasn’t the scales? Unusual humidity or a minor flood in the bathroom (do you have a teenager?) if these are bathroom scales on the floor?