Water weight is real. Really real.
I recently went out of town on vacation. I haven't had one in years so I decided that I wasn't counting calories.
When we left, I weighed 163.8. This is down from an all time high of 180, and my MFP start weight of 175ish.
We got back Friday morning and I weighed out of curiosity. Between not counting, restaurant food, and the onset of shark week (at the beach, tee hee) I knew that I'd have some weight gain.
I weighed 170 lbs again, but I just noted it as a curiosity because I've learned enough about CICO to know that there's no way on earth I'd eaten that much. I logged it somewhere other than MFP, and decided to weigh every afternoon after I woke and peed (I work nights).
Friday afternoon: 168 Saturday afternoon: 166 Sunday afternoon:164.6
So if you're fretting about gaining 2 lbs overnight, don't. Especially if it's water weight. I can cop to a one pound weight gain after a week of snacking (peanut MnMs mmm) and eating out. That's probably real. But the rest is just salt.
Posted Jun 5, 2016, 10:03 PM UTC
Being almost twice as big as you, I can have twice as much swing in water weight. I came back from a multi-week vacation and thought I'd gained like 15 pounds. I was devastated and binged the next day, but then lost 5 pounds, it was a miracle! Or, more like water weight. After four or five days my weight stabilized, I ended up gaining 3.5 pounds, which was actually better than I had expected from nearly 3 weeks of eating out of control.
I'm doing much better and healthier these days, I actually rebounded back to healthy eating really easily after a day or two of freaking out back home. And my exercise routine actually didn't suffer, it was an active vacation, despite the eating.
Yup! It was a fairly dramatic gain and loss for me though, so I figured after seeing other people posting near daily about phantom 2-3 lb weight gain, it might help them to understand that water weight is a thing, but not a very serious one.