What It Means If You Gained Weight Within a Day or Two: 5 Possible Reasons

Day by day, your weight may vary by as much as 5-6 pounds. But this doesn’t always mean that it’s time to go on a diet. As it turns out, even factors like the time of the day or your menstrual cycle can affect the numbers you see on the scale.

We at Bright Side carefully studied different things that can affect your body weight. We hope that it will help you understand your body a bit better.

1. Your muscles are sore from a recent workout.

If you’re actively involved in sports, then your body begins to store glycogen. Glycogen is in the water and binds with it during a process that releases energy for your muscles to work. Extra water in the muscles can also add a few pounds on the scale.

2. It’s that time of the month again.

If during your period you gain 3-5 pounds, don’t be alarmed — this is totally normal. The extra pounds will go away after a few days of bleeding. During menstruation, various processes occur in the body, like hormonal changes, bloating, and a decrease in magnesium, just to name a few.

3. You ate more food than usual.

After you eat, it takes anywhere from 6 to 8 hours for food to pass through your stomach and small intestine. Then, for 36 hours, the food moves through the colon. All in all, the whole process — from the time you swallow food to the time it leaves your body as feces — takes about 2 to 5 days. If you ate a lot a few days ago, your weight results won’t be as reliable.

4. You ate more salt the day before.

If you saw extra pounds on the scale in the morning, then it’s possible that you have been consuming too much salty food lately. As a result, your body held onto extra water. That’s because the kidneys, which filter out waste from the blood, maintain a special ratio of electrolytes, such as sodium to potassium and sodium to water.

5. You weighed yourself at different times of the day.

Usually, we weigh less in the morning than we do in the evening. It can happen because all night long, a bunch of carbon atoms leave your body through breathing. Each of those carbon atoms weighs almost nothing, but every breath expels roughly 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 10 billion trillion atoms. If that sounds boring, you can calculate how many of them are lost per night!

In addition, at night, the body sweats and loses a lot of water which also reduces weight.

Have you noticed that your weight changes over the course of several days? What was the difference between the numbers on the scale?