Weight swings from day to day, is that normal?

You step on the scales and once again you notice those weight swings. Yesterday morning the homemade low carb crunchy granola, at lunch you deliberately skipped the delicious wedges, in the afternoon you went to sport and in the evening you had zoodles with prawns. What a successful day for finally letting the kilos drop.

The next morning you step on the scales full of anticipation to check your weight. You think: “Today I get the reward for my hard work.”

But… it is 1 kilogram more. Great.

First of all: no panic. Good news. Weight swings of around 2 kilos a day are entirely normal. They are part of our metabolism and do not always have anything to do with the success or failure of a change in diet.

There are many reasons why the scales seem to trick us now and then.

Water can influence your weight a great deal, especially when you consider that our body is about 60 % water.

This water is influenced by the nutrients you take in, for example. If you are switching your body from a carbohydrate rich diet to low carb or keto, you quickly lose larger amounts of water, which comes from cutting the carbohydrates in your body. That usually means you lose weight faster in the first days and weeks. This loss levels out after a while and can even turn into a slight increase.

Your water balance can also be influenced by your hormones. Sorry chaps, this paragraph leaves you out. Hormonal swings, which are entirely natural across the cycle in women, have a big influence on how much water is held in the tissue. Changes on the scales are therefore the result of factors we do not control ourselves.

One of the most banal reasons, and one people like to overlook, is the content of our digestive organs.
Did you drink or eat something before you weighed yourself? Then it is no surprise that your weight has shifted since the last reading. A glass of water weighs around 250 grams. Were you thirsty in the night, or did you already have a cup of coffee or tea in the morning? Have you been to the toilet yet? Both drinks and food have a direct influence on our weight. Depending on when you ate or drank, or when you last visited the bathroom, the scales show different numbers.

Did you know that muscles are rather heavy? They consist largely of water and are therefore heavier than the same volume of fat. So if you train a little more than usual, to build muscle, that can well show up on the scales. You gain a little because you trained successfully. No reason at all to worry about it.

Daily weight swings are entirely natural. Please do not let the bare numbers on the scales drive you mad.

Do you want to make your progress visible? Try this instead.

While you are changing the way you eat, pay attention to changes in your body. Measurements often change faster than the number on the scales. Reach for a tape measure now and then and track how your hip, waist or arm circumference changes. You will be amazed at what happens there.

If you still want to use the scales regularly, make sure you use a kind of “standard”. Always weigh yourself in the morning right after getting up, for example, before you have had breakfast.

At Foodpunk, by the way, we aim for a long term change in eating that has nothing to do with a crash diet. It matters to us that every customer holds their goal long term without falling into the trap of the yoyo effect. When someone wants to lose weight, we build plans that bring healthy weight loss with them.