I Gained Three Pounds Overnight!

Yes, that is for real. And yes, I bet you can imagine the look on my face or the words coming out of my mouth when I looked at the scale this morning. No matter how much the rational part of my mind kept trying to talk me down, all I was thinking was "But I was within my calories yesterday! I'm failing! How?!"

Now that I've had a chance to chill out and reflect, I can remind myself of what the quiet, rational bit of my brain was trying to tell me this morning: It's just water weight. I'm a week away from our favorite 3-7 days of each month. I didn't get all of my water in yesterday. And I had a lot of salt yesterday. All of that adds up to lots of water retained.

But what if you don't weight yourself daily like I (have to) do? How do you know that what you gained is water and not "real" pounds? I found an interesting article that tries to answer that:

• If you use a body fat monitor, check yourself against earlier results. If you haven't gained body fat per the monitor, but you have gained weight on the scale, it's water weight.
• Check your extremities. If they're swollen, it's definitely water.
• Consider your diet: Have you been getting enough water? Have you been eating a lot of high sodium foods? Then it could be water... and an easy way to test it is to drink at least 8-10 glasses of water a day and cut sodium intake. If it's water, the weight will drop right off in the matter of a couple of days.
• And right from the article: "Women’s monthly periods can cause up to five extra pounds of water weight. To overcome the bloating, do your best to exercise regularly throughout your monthly cycle, and eat more fruits and vegetables." FIVE POUNDS! Ugh.

The moral of the story is, if you see a big weight increase overnight (or seemingly overnight) and you are either close to a period, or have been getting too much salt and too little water, don't freak out. Course correct on the water and salt, and keep moving, and the extra water-related will disappear as quickly as it arrived.