CalButterfly's Journal, 04 September 2014

Water balance, especially for women, will make your scale go up and down. If you can find a scale with bioelectric sensors that will measure your water content, fat mass, lean mass and muscle mass. This will give you a better way to monitor progress. The very best way is to monitor how your clothes are fitting. Pizza is quite high in sodium so even meeting your kcals you will hold onto water to dilute the sodium. Don't panic, you just learned something valuable about how your body reacts to pizza. You may now choose to have it only rarely or not at all (I really like pizza so I have it rarely and fully expect to have a bit of water bloat after). You may notice today that if you up your water intake some and eat some foods high in potassium you will pee out the excess. My body is cycling at about 10-14 days with water up and down with one of those days spent back and forth to the toilet often. 

Hi CalB, I used to get frustrated too, however I went to Amazon and got a medical replica of what ONE POUND of FAT looks like, than I realized it was nothing to sneeze about.I keep it on my desk as a constant reminder, also better one pound down than one pound up. My profile picture is a picture of what one pound of fat looks like, bet your feeling better now!  

Wow, so glad I joined FatSecret. Jwsplatjw and VB4U, thanks!!!! I am feeling better. Both of you have really given me a great pep talk. I just don't know which foods have potassium and why it helps to pee? Yes, one pound of fat is better than one pound of weight gain. Ouch! Lesson learned...pizza no bueno!! 

Check out Worlds Healthiest Foods or just Google foods high in potassium :) I juice celery, carrot and beet root for their minerals. One beet root, 150 g carrot and 450 g of celery give about 350 ml of juice at about 80-100 kcals. It contains about 1.25 g of potassium. The adult human need is at about 4.7 g a day. I'm not a big fan of veggies but I can drink it down without any trouble it has a really earthy taste. The beet root will likely colour your poops red, don't panic its pigment is very strong it may even come through in your urine too. Potassium/Sodium are responsible for creating a voltage potential in our cells (about 70 mV) that is how we get nerve conduction and muscle contraction. If one or the other is too high our body will compensate by dumping the excess typically through the kidney. The modern processed food industry uses high amounts of sodium as a preservative so people are typically out of balance; too much sodium and not enough potassium. This causes water retention which causes blood volume to go up and blood vessels to constrict which causes high blood pressure which causes the heart to pump harder which causes the blood vessels to constrict and further increase blood pressure. So by adding some foods with higher potassium contents while ditching all processed foods we can reduce sodium intake increase potassium intake and help our bodies get into a more relaxed state. Also Google is good to use to learn about this stuff. Just remember there is a huge amount of garbage online and we need to read skeptically. 

I had the same experience for my weigh in this week! The higher sodium from the pizza may have caused some water retention. If it wasn't homemade then all those additives can create water retention as well. No worries! The scale will catch up eventually. Keep on going girl! 

Thanks everyone!!!!! 

Way to go! 

I use to fluctuate like that also with my weight lost CalButterfly! What I cam to notice is that it is better to have your heaviest meal in the afternoon time for lunch. Have a light breakfast, small snack, big lunch, small snack, light dinner, then another small snack! You should eat small before bed because you are laying on your food and it is being stored unless you are doing weight training...not condoning eating heavy but... if you do both, your muscle will continue to burn your fat while you sleep for 3 days. If you do weight training one day, walk the next, weight training on day 3, then aerobics the 4th day, you can do some light walking the next to day just to stretch your muscles from the weight tightness, you will see pounds drop slow but gradual! You don't want a fast decrease. If you lose weight fast you will gain it back plus some even faster. I hope this helped you! Wish me luck on my journey and good luck on yours!!! 

Well Done Young Lady!!!! @>------------