Water weight fluctuations can throw off your weigh-ins. These short-term changes in weight can make you think you’ve gained weight when you’ve really lost fat, mess with body fat measurements, and temporarily affect your progress.
Weight fluctuation can be caused by many things, including changes in sodium and carb intake, sleep patterns, and exercise/activity, as well as from travel and jet-lag. Of these, sodium is the most common offender: If you have a day where you eat way more sodium than you’re used to (such as from highly processed foods like deli meats, pizzas, etc.) your body weight will almost certainly shoot up the next morning.
But water weight is a short-term change, and doesn’t mean your fat loss or muscle gain goals are suffering. That’s why it’s best to keep things like sodium intake and exercise as consistent as possible.
When you weigh-in with extra water weight, the Avatar system can’t account for this directly. The artificially high body weight could throw off your progress, and, depending on how you measure your body fat, this may or may not be accounted for with changes in body fat because water weight can confuse tests like BIA and tape measures.
There are two things you can do to lessen the impact of water weight fluctuations:
Keep a mostly consistent routine for sodium intake, exercise, and sleep.
Weigh yourself multiple times in a week so that you can take a weekly average. This will help mitigate the effects of one or two artificially high weigh-ins. To input a daily weight into the app, turn on the Log Daily Weights feature in Advanced Features.
Water weight change is common on the first week of changing your goal. If your body is adjusted to eating a higher amount of carbs, dropping those suddenly as you switch to a weight loss goal will cause a big drop in water weight. On the other hand, if you’ve been on low calories and suddenly take a boost when switching to reverse dieting or muscle gain, you might see a spike in water weight. This is accounted for in the app’s adjustments, so as long as you hit the macros, your adjustments take water weight fluctuations into account.