After going back for this spring break, I realized how little a number on the scale really means, especially for someone that is really into working out and constantly shifting their bulking and cutting cycles. Water weight plays such a big role in that number, and water weight can be impacted so much just by what you ate the day before. For example, if you ate a lot of carbohydrates and bread the day before, your body will retain more water the next day. The same thing will occur if you ate a lot of sodium. I have already known this for a while, but it really showed when changing my diet slightly for a week when going back home. I ate a little more food, obviously, since I didn’t have a food scale and it was my mother’s cooking on the table. However, just from calculating my calories everyday for years, I know that it was nothing crazy. The day I returned to Boston, I ended up weighing 11 more pounds than the day that I left for New York, which is crazy for a week of eating slightly more. 1 pound of fat is 3,500 calories, meaning I ate almost 40,000 extra calories than my maintenance. For reference, my maintenance is almost 3,800 calories.That would mean I ate more than double that everyday, and in total, ate almost 80 burgers, which doesn’t make sense at all. This could mean one thing: water weight. My diet included more carbohydrates, meaning my body retained more water. When I see people freaking out over a couple pounds increase throughout the day, I laugh, because it’s literally just water.
