All The Ways The Scale Lies To You

healthierwiser

Jan 31

Written By Adam Fisher

Takeaway Points:

The scale is always lying to us. At any point in time, numerous factors are causing our weight to fluctuate wildly in different directions.
If you’re unaware of what causes these fluctuations, you may be discouraged when you appear to gain weight while trying to do the opposite.
In reality, water weight, energy consumption, diet macronutrient composition, food, clothing worn, and other factors can all throw off your actual weight, making it hard to tell how much you “really” weigh.
By using the right weighing strategies, being aware of these fluctuations, and learning to focus on long-term averages over short term data points - only then can an accurate picture of your weight emerge.
Content warning: Normally I do not discuss diet or weight loss much, but this article is primarily about the topic of weight loss, and involves heavy discussion of diet.

The Scale Lies To You

It’s actually incredibly easy to cheat the scale and give yourself the illusion of progress. Likewise, it’s incredibly easy for the scale to cheat you and give you the illusion of a lack of progress.

I’ve written before about how I don’t believe that most people need to lose weight, so much as they need to get a bit more active. Many of my clients actively aren’t trying to lose weight. In over a decade of exercise, I’ve gone through numerous bulks but I’ve rarely actually trained to cut weight, simply because it’s rarely productive for my training goals. Yes, you can learn to exercise for (and enjoy!) things that aren’t losing weight.

Recently, however, I’ve decided that now is a good time to cut weight. I’m not able to train for my normal training goals (strength) due to my lack of access to a barbell and squat rack, so instead I’ve focused on getting better at bodyweight exercises and trying to master some of the more exciting and unique calisthenics/gymnastics movements. But aside from that, since I don’t need to maximize my muscle mass to maximize my strength, it also just happens to be a good time to cut weight. It also helps that bodyweight exercises use your bodyweight as resistance - so it gets a bit easier to master the harder movements when you’re a bit lighter.

I’ve written before about how you actually shouldn’t trust the numbers on the scale on any given day, and why it’s basically impossible to actually “ruin” your results with a single cheat meal or even a whole weekend of cheating, so long as your plan is good, you’re following it the rest of the week, and you don’t get discouraged. Your weight will fluctuate by a few pounds regularly due to factors generally beyond your control, and there’s nothing you can do about that. That’s normal.

You can, however, learn to ignore what the scale is telling you on any given day. You can track your weight and instead take a weekly moving average, which smooths out those random ups and downs, and gives you a far more accurate picture of what your weight is actually doing from week to week. Once you learn to think in the long term, the scale isn’t so scary, and it’s a lot easier to stick to your plan. Results aren’t a short term thing - they’re a long term process.

That said, there are still plenty of ways to explore WHY that scale fluctuates so much. So, I wanted to dig in deeper.

Water Weight

Water weight is the single biggest culprit for confusion. The average person carries around a significant amount of water in their body, which is a necessity for normal processes. But there are ways to quickly manipulate the amount of water stored in your body, if you know what you’re doing.

When you sweat, for example, this results in immediate water loss. Over a sustained period of sweating (stuck in a sauna, a very long cardio workout, hot yoga, wearing a plastic “slimming wrap” that makes you sweat), you sweat out a lot of water, and your weight is temporarily lower. If you lose enough water, you’ll become woozy and eventually dehydrated, and this will cause health issues.

I remember when I used to do very long, workouts (long before I actually really knew what I was doing in the gym) and I would weigh myself both before and after working out. I would always laugh to see that, after a 1hr long leg workout followed by a 2hr long cardio session (like I said, I didn’t really know what I was doing), I would have lost sometimes even 5-10lbs. Then, of course, I would go back to the water fountain, drink a ton, and immediately weigh a lot more.

Many people are aware of this effect, and use it (whether consciously or not) in order to give the impression of certain results.

For example, athletes who compete in sports with weight classes can often use this effect to cheat their weight class - they sit in a sauna and sweat out as much water weight as they can, show up for their weigh in as dehydrated as possible, and then rehydrate as quickly as possible so that it (hopefully) doesn’t affect their performance.

Likewise, many “weight loss” products attempt to give the impression of weight loss by inducing sweating in the individual, pointing out the weight loss, and then hoping that the individual simply doesn’t know anything about how water weight works. Hot yoga and slimming wraps are good examples of this scam.

Food, Water, And Waste Buildup

Whenever you eat or drink, you instantly gain weight equivalent to the weight of the food and drink you just consumed. This may be an obvious fact when you point it out, but it’s wild how few people actually take this into account when thinking about their weight.

Any food you consume effectively stays in your system for a few hours while it is processed. During that time, water is extracted and used to refill water stores as needed. Usable material is broken down and converted to more useful forms of energy and nutrients, which stay in your body. Unusable material is collected and stored until you eventually have to go to the toilet.

This also means that, in the exact reverse of the example above, using the toilet will immediately mean a loss of weight equivalent to the weight of the waste expelled. If you’ve eaten a significant meal, this might be quite a lot coming out the other end.

You could also do other things to manipulate weight in this context - for example, the use of laxatives and diuretics to aid more rapid excretion of these waste products, or purging food in the stomach via vomiting. However, these methods are obviously unhealthy and generally associated with eating disorders. Long term, they will cause more harm than good, and are obviously not recommended.

Macronutrient Distribution Changes

One thing which many aren’t aware of, is that different macronutrients (fats, proteins, carbs) will affect the body differently. Some carbs digest very quickly and thus pass through the body very quickly, thus having a very short term impact on your weight. Meanwhile, proteins and fats may take longer to digest, meaning your weight is temporarily maintained at a higher level for longer after eating a meal.

Notably, carbs are also stored in the body via water, meaning that when carbs are consumed, your body will store more water in order to accommodate the new carbs. This helps to explain why sudden swings in carb intake can cause sudden swings in weight as well.

If you were to switch over to a low or no carb diet, for example, you might see an unexplained drop in weight above and beyond what the calories would suggest, simply because you didn’t know that you also lost a bunch of water weight in the process. This helps explain why low carb diets often seem to tend to work better in the short term, even though the research generally shows that they don’t work better in the long term.

Then, if you were to switch off of that diet and begin consuming more carbs again, you’d see a sudden increase in your water weight which could give you the impression of having immediately gained a lot of fat. This might serve to further convince you that the low-carb diet was really superior, when the reality is just that you (re)gained some temporary water weight.

This is also very relevant when it comes to the topic of cheat meals. When people are generally eating a good diet, they tend to be minimizing their carbs, emphasizing their protein, and watching their overall calories. If that person then eats a cheat meal (or has a cheat day) and eats a ton of carbs, they might step on the scale the next day to discover that they seem to have gained several pounds overnight (even though this is mathematically impossible based on the number of calories eaten).

I tend to find that when clients who are good at tracking their weight eat a cheat meal, they have a spike in weight for the next day or two, but then that excess weight quickly disappears when they return to their normal eating habits. In the long term, it has no impact on their results.

However, I think that most people, seeing that spike, would often become discouraged and convinced that they’ve “ruined” their diet - when they really haven’t done nearly as much damage as they thought. They may have set themselves back a little bit in the long run, but not enough to actually matter.

Recently, I experienced this in real time. The screenshot below is from my Apple Health app, where I track my weight every day due to my current weight cut. On the 12th, my weight spikes from 85kg to 86.4kg - as if I had gained almost 1.5kg/3.3lbs overnight.

What could have possibly happened? Well, it was quite simple, actually - I had just hit 1 month on my diet and decided to take a diet break for the weekend, not watching my food at all. On the 11th (Saturday) I ate a bunch of comfort foods, on the 12th (Sunday) I saw a huge spike in weight and continued eating comfort foods - but then on Monday, my weight normalized back to 85.6kg, even though I had eaten just as much on Sunday as I had on Saturday - a lot closer to reality. Within 2 days back on my diet after those 2 days off, I was back in the exact same place I was before I went off diet, and then continued to see my weight trend down over the rest of the week.

In short, it didn’t actually have much of an impact in the long run, even though it had a very dramatic effect in the short run.

Energy Balance

When you eat food, it’s typically broken down into usable forms of energy - carbs, proteins, and fats are broken down into constituent parts and then used in different energy-generating pathways in the body. Until use, they are stored in the body - typically, as bodily fat or stored in the blood as blood sugar.

While I think a lot of exercisers are probably aware that stored fat is effectively just energy being stored for later use, many don’t realize that blood sugar is ultimately similar - the added weight of that stored energy adds up. When you’re exercising, your body tends to want to preferentially use stored blood sugar first (since it’s easier to get to), so it tends to have less of a long term effect on your weight as it’s always getting quickly used up first. Fat storage gets the bad name only because it’s the energy that’s stored long term, while carbs get burned for fuel first.

But that doesn’t mean, for example, that you can simply consume a no-carb or no-fat diet in order to try to game the system. The body will use whatever’s available in order to try to fuel its activities, and won’t be picky if it’s forced. If it runs out of carbs, it will start breaking down stored fat as needed; if you’re eating a lot of carbs, it will focus on storing fats and using that carb up first. Thus, you can still gain and lose fat weight pretty much no matter what type of diet you’re following, provided that you’re eating more or less than you need. At the end of the day, calories still matter the most.

This also means that a strenuous workout, aside from simply causing you to sweat and lose some calories that way, is also going to cause you to lose weight immediately, even if you aren’t sweating much. Your muscles store energy in order to be ready for activity - and when you use it up, it takes time to replenish those stores.

Likewise with water weight, this weight will naturally come back the instant you start eating again and your body rushes to replenish stored energy and blood sugar. Additionally, the amount of weight lost from energy alone is likely to be very small.

An hour long run, for example, will probably burn only about 500 calories overall - about one fifth of a pound. This is a relatively small number in the grand scheme of things. Plus, you’ll be exhausted from the energy loss and from the effort of running that long, and your muscles will be screaming at you. You’ll be in a position where all your body wants to do is replenish those calories - and so you probably will, by focusing on consuming more calories.

This is another reason why trying to out-exercise your diet is usually doomed to fail - because at this point, you’re basically just having a fight with your body (when you could be doing this in ways that don’t involve fighting your body’s natural processes).

Muscle Mass

When you work out, you’re not simply expending energy. In the recovery process from your workout, your body is given a powerful stimulus that tells it that it needs to improve in order to be more prepared for this stimulus in the future - so it adapts, by either optimizing energy systems, building muscle mass, or whatever else was demanded of it in the workout.

You may see a lot of junk floating around the internet about how a pound of muscle mass is so much smaller than a pound of fat - it is, but not by a large amount. However, especially for beginners on a well-structured exercise plan, the reality is that you can absolutely be both losing fat mass and gaining muscle mass simultaneously. If these are happening at roughly similar rates, you may be seeing your weight seem to stay still, even though the reality is that you’re getting much leaner.

Besides, many people feel great from building some muscle mass - they get much stronger and feel more confident about their bodies, even if it means that they’re gaining weight (and possibly some fat mass) in the process. Many heavyweight powerlifters and strongmen are very proud of their bodies and their abilities, even if they’re not the stereotypical picture of “health”.

In the long run, building muscle mass raises your metabolism and this tends to create a positive feedback loop in which your ability to do more, makes you want to do more, and you become more active in a general sense. This is the most important benefit of exercise.

In the short term, however, many who are looking to lose weight or get in shape may be frustrated by their weight seeming not to change at all on the scale. In this case, using other measures to track your body fat percentage in addition to your scale weight can help to give you a more accurate picture of what’s actually going on. You can absolutely lose weight but gain fat (bad), or gain weight but lose fat (good) - and many people wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference from the scale alone.

Your Weight Fluctuates Normally

In addition to the above, your weight actually is constantly fluctuating on a normal basis, and it may be for things that you don’t have any control over. Due to things like circadian rhythm, even your height is fluctuating on a daily basis due to things like the normal activities of your spinal discs. The only reason you have the impression that you should have some steady “weight” which is some objective number, is simply that you’re not weighing yourself every hour. If you did, you’d likely find that your weight fluctuates pretty significantly throughout the day, and that you don’t actually “weigh” any particular amount for very long.

This is partly due to factors like food and water consumption above, but it’s highly possible that there are other factors outside your control which you simply don’t know about.

There are some claims that the amount of water weight can vary around monthly cycles as well, for those exercisers who experience menstruation. I’m not sure how backed this is in the research, but it’s certainly a possibility.

Clothing

This one is kind of stupid when you think about it, but it’s a rule that I see ignored basically all the time, and even I forget about it quite a lot. Obviously, the clothes you wear are always weighing a little bit, and that adds to your weight. Duh, right?

However, I think we all have some miraculous power to imagine that our clothes “don’t weight that much” or “don’t contribute that much anyway” even though they really do. One of the gyms I worked at had a scale out on the gym floor for everyone to use - and of course, they would use it every time they came in to workout, no matter what they were wearing!

You can imagine a guy feeling like he’s a loser because he gained weight because he chose to wear long sweatpants today when he usually wears shorts, or a winner because he chose to wear shorts today when he usually wears long sweatpants. Or maybe the other day he was wearing heavy running shoes, and today he decided to use some of those minimalist slip on shoes to run in.

Because your fluctuations in bodyweight are relatively small on a day-to-day basis, even those small fluctuations in the weight of the clothes you’re wearing could possibly cover them up.

It’s best to just skip the clothing altogether, because otherwise you’d have to individually weigh your clothes and subtract those from your overall weight, and that simply overcomplicates the already annoying process of weighing yourself.

Weight Loss/Gain Isn’t Linear

Due to all the minor fluctuations above, your weight at any time is likely a few pounds above or below what could be called your “actual weight”, or average weight on a weekly moving average. While the average weight on your weekly moving average is literally just a number that you’ve made up by doing some math, it’s actually a way more accurate picture of what’s actually going on, which is a little weird when you think about it.

As a result, most times when you step on the scale, you’re going to see some number which isn’t really a good measure of your progress based on that number alone. The scale is effectively lying to you at all times - it’s up to you to sort of triangulate the truth by learning to understand the ways in which it’s lying to you, and adjusting a bit in the other direction.

Your weight at any given point is just that - a data point. It’s not a judgment on who you are or how much work you’ve put in. It’s simply data to be taken, analyzed, and made useful. Weighing yourself more regularly, recording your results, getting an average instead of relying on daily data, and learning to ignore those daily numbers, are all important steps in forging long term success.

I tend to find that when clients weigh themselves regularly, they learn to become less obsessed about the number on the scale, learning instead to focus on those long-term trends which become apparent when you treat your weight like a simple data point.

What You Should Do Instead Of Worrying

So given all the above factors, how can we control for the above and make sure that we’re getting as accurate a picture of our weight as possible?

Well, the first and most important is that you want to try to measure yourself at the same time every day, so that you can rule out fluctuations due to circadian rhythms. You want to make sure you’re not wearing any clothing, or wearing very minimal clothing which is the same every day. (I keep on my underwear for the sake of convenience, you perverts.) You want to make sure that you haven’t eaten or drank anything in a long time, and that you’ve just used the toilet so that there’s little, if any, residual waste in your system. You want to make sure that you’re not in a dehydrated state.

So what’s the best way to do this?

The answer is, first thing in the morning, after you’ve woken up and used the toilet, before you’ve put your clothes on or eaten anything for the day. This makes it very easy to control for all of the above factors and make sure that you’re getting as accurate of a picture of your actual weight as possible.

You will still experience up days and down days, as your water weight fluctuates and as other factors come into play. However, if you’re aware of the above effects, you can often know how to account for and expect these things. “Oh, I ate a lot of carbs yesterday, so I expected to have a bit of a spike today” - “I ate very little carbs yesterday, so my weight might drop a little bit more than normal and then stay the same for a few days” - and so on.

Use Other Metrics To Measure Your Success

If you’re generally just looking to get in shape, bodyfat percentage analysis can give you a much more accurate picture of what’s going on, although home tests are generally inaccurate and it’s incredibly inconvenient to use the more accurate ones too frequently.

You can also take waist measurements. Not every person is the same and not every body stores fat the same way, but for most of us, excess fat is stored around the waist or hips. Thus, waist and hip measurements can give you a good idea of what’s going on with your stored fat, regardless of what your water weight or muscle weight is doing. If you’ve lost stored fat but gained muscle weight or water weight, you’d typically see your waist measurement continue to go down despite the scale staying the same.

Using some combination of the above methods is usually a far better option. One method I like is the use of the navy bodyfat calculator - it requires you to take some measurements daily, waist included, and is generally a bit more accurate than your standard home bodyfat testing methods. A tailor’s tape costs a lot less than any other bodyfat testing method, making it a cheap and economical option as well. You can also easily setup a spreadsheet to track these numbers and automate the calculations for you, minimizing your effort. This is the method I use myself, and with my clients.

Aside from that, learn to focus on fitness goals that aren’t just your weight - these are generally going to be a lot more exciting. Doing more reps of an exercise every month, being able to lift heavier weights, or being able to take on longer cardio sessions without getting as winded - these are all experiences that tend to make you feel like you can take on the world, and even if weight loss is your primary goal, you can still learn to appreciate when you hit other secondary goals.

My Own Experiences

One morning on this cut, I went to weigh myself and I was briefly sad to see that my weight was the same that it had been for the last three days. After all, I had seen how my weight hadn’t changed for the past two days, and had spent all of yesterday trying to be a bit stricter with my diet.

But then I realized something - I had forgotten to take off my necklace and the shorts I had slept in, which I normally don’t wear when weighing. Then I realized something else - I had forgotten to use the toilet first thing in the morning like I usually do. I took care of these factors and stepped back on the scale.

Within the span of five minutes, I had “lost” almost a pound, putting me back on track for my expectations for the week. My day immediately went from “ah crap this sucks” to “oh hell yeah” in the span of five minutes simply because it had slipped my mind to account for some of the above factors.

It’s a very easy set of mistakes to make, first thing in the morning, especially when I’m groggy and rolling out of bed because the cat woke me up early. Sometimes, I forget to weigh myself first and start putting on my clothes, before realizing that I need to take them all off again.

Nobody is perfect.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging for 5+ years, coaching for 6+ years, and lifting for 12+ years. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around powerlifting and bodybuilding.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cat or feeding his video game addiction.

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