Weight Fluctuation Frustrations Addressed!

Let’s be honest.

Stepping on the scale can be frustrating and disappointing when you don’t see that ideal number despite all of your efforts.

I know this feeling all too well as someone who watched the scale fluctuate most of my life…until I understood why.

Before I understood my fluctuations, I drove myself crazy chasing the perfect pound, counting every calorie, and driving my body into the ground at the gym. All of which didn’t help my cause – not even a little bit.

I gave up stepping on the scale; thinking if I didn’t pay attention to it, if I didn’t obsess over it, maybe just maybe I would magically reach my dream number. I would eventually feel comfortable in my clothes and my body.

But the truth is you can gain insights from what you track.

I’m not suggesting you should obsess over what the scale says, but rather instead track what makes you fluctuate so you can better understand what is keeping you from the perfect pound, and then take action on the data you’re collecting.

There are 4 primary drivers for fluctuations:

• Water retention
• Inflammation
• Muscle
• Fat

Significant increases or decreases in actual body composition (aka fat and muscle mass) take time. Changes in body composition happen in smaller increments over weeks or months due to the complexities of how they are obtained.

In general, losing 1 pound of fat per week is typical and obtainable. However, gaining 1 pound of actual fat per week is less likely unless you’re eating almost double your usual food intake (I’ll tell you more about why below), which I doubt you’re doing.

Gaining or losing muscle is even more challenging. When it comes to muscle growth, you have to hit the gym hard, consistently, combined with super stacking protein and supplements to get gains (especially for women!).
Back when I was training for fitness competitions, I worked my ass off to gain 4 pounds of muscle over 6 weeks with an intense training routine while being meticulous about protein and food intake.

If you’re noticing significant and constant fluctuations, water retention and inflammation are the more likely culprits day-to-day or weekly than muscle or fat.

In this week’s video and blog, I dive into more details about why your weight fluctuates and what you can do to not only stabilize it but to nail your perfect pound on the scale.

Inflammation and water density can change in the body by the minute depending on a multitude of factors such as…

• The foods you just ate
• The quality of sleep you got
• The amount of water you’re drinking
• The level of stress you’re experiencing
• Consuming diuretics like caffeine, alcohol, and even certain foods
• The balance of vitamins, minerals, and electrolytes in your body
• And how many toxins you’re being exposed to and to what frequency

Food, sleep, and stress are the most common factors of fluctuations I’ve seen amongst my clients and myself.

For example, my husband found he was sensitive to beef from a food sensitivity test, meaning he was having an inflammatory reaction to it. He cut out beef and lost 5 pounds in one week as a result of the reduction in inflammation.

Another great example is a client who found out she was sensitive to 87 “healthy” whole foods once we did the right type of testing. She lost almost 20 pounds in one month by avoiding these personal inflammatory foods, without changing her exercise routine or anything else.

These weight loss scenarios are typical amongst most of my clients once they cut out the top inflammatory foods such as gluten, dairy, sugar, soy, and alcohol. And they see greater gains when they eliminate other specific foods they’re reactive to according to their food sensitivity test.

Aside from food sensitivities, consuming too many carbohydrates or sugars for what your body can tolerate increases water retention.

Carbs and sugars are stored in the body as glycogen, as explained in this study, “glycogen is stored in the liver, muscles, and fat cells in hydrated form (three to four parts water).” So the more carbs or sugars you eat, the more glycogen and water are stored.

Staying up late or not getting good quality sleep disrupts your body’s ability to regulate cortisol hormone, the body’s natural anti-inflammatory. When cortisol is out of balance, it hinders your body’s ability to manage inflammation, and you’ll see that number on the scale reflect this.

And then there’s stress.

Stress increases your body’s output of cortisol hormone, that anti-inflammatory agent, which challenges its ability to regulate not only inflammation but also your sleep patterns, which contribute to fluctuations, as I just mentioned.

Instead of feeling frustrated about the fluctuations on the scale, and elevating your stress levels which will just make them worse, put on your health boss hat and start tracking.

Tracking your metrics daily will reveal what exactly is impacting the number you’re seeing on the scale. Here’s an idea of what to track for clues about what’s causing you to fluctuate…

• If you ate any of the top inflammatory foods: gluten, dairy, sugar, soy, or alcohol
• How many grams of carbs and sugars you consumed
• What time you went to bed and how well you slept on a scale of 1-10
• And what your stress level is each day on a scale of 1-10

And of course, make sure you are using a scale that is calibrated correctly and regularly to eliminate margins of error.

Try this for even just a week, and I bet you’ll feel empowered by what you find, because once you know what’s contributing to your fluctuations, then you can make conscious choices to help you look and feel your best!

As Functional Diagnostic Nutrition® Practitioners like myself like to say… test, don’t guess. Don’t live in limbo anymore, take your health into your own hands and be a health boss 😉

I would love to hear what aha’s, insights, or big takeaways you got from this, leave a comment and let me know!