Sun, Mar-28-21, 20:26
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Senior Member
Posts: 8,654
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Plan: Atkins-ish, post-WLS
Stats: 408.0/288.0/168.0
BF:
Progress: 50%
Location: Southern Colorado, USA
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The notion that fat cells replace the fat volume with water volume has been pretty thoroughly debunked over the last many years. It was an attractive way of explaining the whoosh phenomenon that many observe, but it hasn't held up to close scrutiny. Some have jumped on the opposite claim that this means that the notion of the "whoosh" is therefore an illusion, but I don't think this is at all the case, it's just that the mechanism behind it is a lot more complicated and at least there are several researchers that are trying to pin it down.
I do think that when your body is established in a glycogen metabolism that your water/electrolyte balance is simply different than when you are established on a ketone metabolism. This largely explains the rapid loss when going to LC and the rapid gain when falling off LC (though it doesn't address the whoosh effect, which is clearly real, just not well understood).
Don't put too much credence in trying to match up short-term fluctuations with short-term salt intake or exercise. It's much more chaotic than that. The body simply has way too many things going on all at the same time to make much sense out of daily, or even weekly, fluctuations.
Keep in mind that a liter of water is more than two pounds and most of us can drink a liter of water in very short order. I know that my bladder can hold slightly over a liter of urine (as demonstrated quite graphically to one nurse when I was in the hospital and she insisted that a one liter bottle was more than sufficient -- and who got to change the sheets shortly after that).
So right there is the potential for a four pound swing in short order having to do with nothing more than whether you have recently drank a lot combined with whether you have recently emptied your bladder.
We all want instant gratification and we want explanations for why we aren't seeing it. That's part of being human. But we need to get over it when it comes to health and weight and diet and fitness. These are slow trends against the background of a lot of fast noise.
Getting over it is hard -- damn hard. It goes against the grain. Some people get over it by refusing to step on a scale more than once a month (and some only do so once a quarter in order to really drown out the noise). I don't think that's very realistic for most of us. Weekly is probably a decent middle ground, but if the low takes you down a couple of pounds one week and up a couple pounds the next, that can completely overwhelm the actual loss that has occurred -- so we need to be prepared to shrug it off.
I'm still one of those that insist on weighing daily, but have to constantly remind myself that daily and weekly fluctuations have to be discounted. Even on a monthly level they can be frustrating. So increasingly I am putting emphasis on where I am today relative to the beginning of the PRIOR month. I am slowly getting better at letting that rule my emotions.
Last edited by wbahn : Sun, Mar-28-21 at 20:31.
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