Thread: How sensitive to carb consumption is water weight noise?

Not at all interested in deliberately limiting carbs for any reason except for that some days I might prefer to eat fewer of them and favor fat for the sake of variety and temporary preference.

If otherwise I'm maintaining my deficit accurately and hitting my protein target, but have an odd day here or there where I eat mostly meat and have relatively few carbs without some kind of a consistent basis, should I expect much "noise" to ensue on the scale?

I know in the long run, weight is a function of CICO, but I'd like to avoid anomaly swings if possible as I'm weighing in on a fixed schedule. Curious if the big drop in water weight most people experience when they eliminate carbs for several consecutive days would occur at all if one simply opted casually to reduce them for a day or two.

Thanks

Originally Posted by EliKoehn

Not at all interested in deliberately limiting carbs for any reason except for that some days I might prefer to eat fewer of them and favor fat for the sake of variety and temporary preference.

If otherwise I'm maintaining my deficit accurately and hitting my protein target, but have an odd day here or there where I eat mostly meat and have relatively few carbs without some kind of a consistent basis, should I expect much "noise" to ensue on the scale?

I know in the long run, weight is a function of CICO, but I'd like to avoid anomaly swings if possible as I'm weighing in on a fixed schedule. Curious if the big drop in water weight most people experience when they eliminate carbs for several consecutive days would occur at all if one simply opted casually to reduce them for a day or two.

Thanks

I don’t think it will matter if it’s just a random couple of days as I think it takes some time to deplete glycogen stores. Anecdotally noise is more affected by variance in calories throughout the week than changes in macros for a given amount of calories.

Generally I think it’s difficult (and futile) to try to separate the signal and the noise on a day-to-day basis.

If you go by weekly estimates a method that worked well for me was to just «save» the highest and lowest weight number each week and keep track of how that interval (upper and lower end) was moving from week to week. I think this method works as long as you assume the noise is distributed equally over time. Suffolk is a statistics nerd and may object.