Weight Fluctuation: Fitness Coach Reveals Why It Happens

"Once you understand that it's perfectly normal for weight to fluctuate a lot, you... understand why weighing yourself only once a week is often not very useful.⁣"

Weight Fluctuation: Fitness Coach Reveals Why It Happens

Image: @brunosantos

We’d all like to come out of lockdown ‘prison fit.’ But if you’ve recently dedicated yourself to a home fitness program and are not seeing the consistent results the trim-tummied instructor claimed you would, you might find yourself wondering: why the hell is my weight loss journey less consistent than a bi-polar yoyo?

Or is that just us?

In any case, if you can relate, online body transformation coach and founder of The Transformation Academy James Kew is here to set the record straight: weight loss isn’t meant to be linear, even if you’re doing everything right.

Why? James recently took to Instagram to explain: “Bodyweight can fluctuate a LOT from one day to the next,” James wrote on Saturday, which “often leads people to advise you to ‘ditch the scales.'”

 

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“Whilst I agree that focussing too much on the scales is a mistake, they CAN be a helpful tool for tracking your progress if you understand their limitations, and how to interpret the numbers,” James added.

James then wrote: “To lose one pound of fat requires you to create a calorie deficit of roughly 3500 calories. In the vast majority of cases, you are not going to even come close to creating a deficit that big in a single day. This means that if you drop a pound from one day to the next, most of it is probably not fat. And equally if you gain a pound it’s not fat either.”

Then: “Most of our body is made of water, which is why our weight can change so rapidly from one day to the next. Factors such as fluid intake, salt intake, the last time you went for a pee and much more can influence your water weight.”

“Once you understand that it’s perfectly normal for weight to fluctuate a lot, you can begin to understand why weighing yourself only once a week is often not very useful.⁣”

This is because you could easily catch yourself on a ‘high’ or a ‘low’ day which might have a big influence on your mood (and perception of your progress).

 

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Instead, James advises “you take more regular measurements, and calculate your AVERAGE weight for a week. You can then compare that to the previous weeks average, and this will give you a much clearer idea of how your weight is actually changing over time!”

Summed up, this means, rather than fixating on every minor fluctuation you see on the scales, you want to look at the bigger picture and concentrate on getting the fundamentals right (as well as weighing yourself more regularly and taking averages).

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