Keto made easy

Five Pounds Overnight

2017-08-03

August 2, 2017 — five pounds up

The story

I gained five pounds. Five. Five whole pounds, overnight (video OCNV2313).

I'd been watching people in the group freak out over one pound, or two, or a pound they thought they'd lose and didn't. What they had to compare themselves with was a feed full of "lost another three pounds!" posts. Nobody posts on the day they gained two. So I made a video on the day I gained five, on purpose (video OCNV2313). The next day the same video went up on the channel (video f9P8BPWHc4U).

First, the obvious: I did not gain five pounds of belly fat. There's no way I ate something like 15,000 extra calories the day before and stored all of it as fat. I'd tracked it. I didn't even eat 3,000 calories, and with my exercise I burn something like 2,800 (video OCNV2313).

What I did eat was more than I'd been eating. For a while I'd been landing around 1,000 to 1,500 calories a day, not because I'd set that limit, just because that's what I was hungry for. That day I was hungry all day, which was unusual for me. Plus it was date night. So: a fairly big omelet for breakfast, a salad, that meal shake that tastes like a barn smells, some cheese sticks, and a steak for dinner (video OCNV2313). (The barn shake has its own story: A Rough Weekend and a Small Group.)

So where did five pounds come from? My guesses on camera: some of it was digestion, food I'd eaten and hadn't passed yet. Some of it was water retention. And some of it might be the "whoosh" people talk about, which I explained with a balloon. When a fat cell lets out fat, it fills back up partly with water to hold its shape, the way a balloon that loses air would stay firm if you put a little water in, and then at some point it lets that water go. I even did the chemistry on a triglyceride molecule on camera (video OCNV2313).

Then the important part. I said I wasn't worried. I wasn't changing anything about my diet, I wasn't doing anything to reverse it, and I hadn't even checked a keto stick that morning, because it didn't seem that important. Maybe I'd had too many carbs. I didn't know, and I was still way down overall. I expected the loss to pick right back up and told you I'd report back in a few days (video OCNV2313; video f9P8BPWHc4U).

And I ended on the line I kept coming back to that whole summer: a diet isn't what's in one food, or one meal, or one day. It's what you eat over the course of a week. Be patient when your weight jumps, stick to the plan (video OCNV2313).

Same lesson as the anniversary panini, really, just from the other end. That time it was one big meal. This time it was one ugly number.

What I'd tell you now

The literature agrees with the headline and is gentler on my chemistry. Fat comes off in grams, not pounds: in a metabolic-ward study, adults on a carbohydrate-restricted diet lost about 53 grams of body fat a day (Hall et al., 2015), so five pounds of fat either way in one night isn't on the table. Water is what swings. One mechanism that is well documented: insulin makes your kidneys hold on to sodium; in healthy men an insulin infusion cut urinary sodium output (DeFronzo et al., 1975), which is one plausible link between a bigger eating day and a heavier next morning. My balloon-and-triglyceride "whoosh" was my own 2017 explanation; none of the studies I'd now point you to measure it, so treat it as a picture, not a fact. What to actually do: weigh on a schedule, look at the weekly trend, and use the tape measure and your clothes too (stall or fluctuation?; water weight; non-scale wins; the whoosh effect). If the scale messes with your head, or you have a history of an eating disorder, weigh less often, and talk to your therapist or doctor about how you track (keto and eating disorders).

Watch the originals: the day-of video and the channel version. Short answer version: gained weight overnight on keto?

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