Many of us have been told by a dietitian or weight loss book that we shouldn’t weigh every day, but a lot of us just can’t help ourselves from checking when we walk into the bathroom in the morning. Perhaps after you understand the mechanisms involved in water retention you’re mind will be free from the torture you feel when you’ve done everything right, but still manage to have gained weight.
Women are especially prone to retaining water because of the water need for menstruation. I’m sure you’ve experienced this, and hopefully you’ve noticed that it goes away just as quickly as it came. Typically it’s possible for women to retain as much as five pounds of water, and men to retain up to three pounds.
Sodium, or salt intake is the major player in water retention. A good rule is to limit yourself to 2,800 mg of sodium a day, and we all know just how easy it is to fly past that line. Just about all of ours foods contain some sodium, but processed foods more than anything contain huge amounts. Be sure to read the nutritional info on products, especially if you have an event soon that you want to wear your favorite pair of jeans to.
Thankfully, just as easy as it is to pack on the water weight, it’s just as easy to take it off. You’ve probably at some point in time been able to drop 10 pounds or more in just one week. There is no way for all of the to be fat, the majority of it is water weight. Unfortunately though, a scale can’t tell you how much weight you’ve lost in fat and how much you’ve lost in water. There are several techniques for measuring the ratio of water to fat in your body, but they aren’t cheap and they aren’t convenient. The most accurate method involves passing a current through your body, which allows the doctor to measure the amount of resistance and in turn, can calculate your water weight.