Real Talk 25th October 2016 by Paula Lyne

Solved! Here’s Why You Always Weigh Less In The Mornings

And why it's not necessarily the best time to weigh yourself.

Screen Shot 2016-10-24 at 17.09.15

If you have a bathroom scales at home, you’ve probably noticed that your weight tends to fluctuate at different times of the day.

While you might be one weight in the afternoon, you could be two or three pounds heavier that night, and two or three pounds lighter that morning. For some people, this daily fluctuation could be as much as four or five pounds, and it’s usually lowest first things in the morning.

Yes, the food we eat throughout the day comes into it, but surely there’s another, more solid reason why our weight is at its lowest point once we hop out of bed? Is it that we’ve simply burned off all of yesterday’s meals?

Not quite, as it turns out. According to dietician Sonya Angelone, the difference in the number you see on the scales is down to water, not food. When we wake up in the morning, the majority of us are slightly dehydrated, meaning we’ve lost water weight overnight.

weight loss

“Since two cups of water weighs one pound, even modest dehydration or water retention can affect weight throughout the day,” she explains to Women’s Health. It’s worth noting that if you drink a lot of water as soon as you wake up or before you go sleep, you may find your weight is a little higher than usual when you wake up.

Plus, Angelone notes, if you often weight yourself at the gym after a workout, your weight will read lower as you’ve just sweated out a couple of pounds worth of water, but once you’ve hydrated it’ll go right back up. “[I]t’s not a true reflection of any changes in body fat,” she warns of that post-gym drop in pounds.

So is there any point in the day at which we can get an accurate reading of our weight, or does such a reading even exist? Not as such, but as long as you’re weighing yourself at the same time each day, your weight will at least read consistently, advises Angelone. Stick to weekly weigh-ins, in the morning, before you get dressed, and you should find you get as consistent a result as is possible.

Tags: