Glycogen and scale fluctuations

With December being just a few days away, I thought it was a good time to cover scale fluctuations. 

Picture this: you’ve spent a week in a deficit and shredded 1kg. You go for a big meal out on Saturday, tis the season, and you regain that 1kg and then some. If you don’t know where the majority of that weight gain is coming from, it can be very demotivating.

Rest assured that the weight gain is not from you undoing a week’s hard work. A tiny amount will be from body fat regain, and the rest will be from everything else that impacts the scales.

Prefer to watch than read? Then please check out the video below:

What is Glycogen, and how does it impact our weight?

Your body has what’s known as glycogen stores; stored carbs in the muscles and liver. The liver contains 80-100 grams of glycogen, and the muscles contain 400-800 grams of glycogen, depending on how jacked you are. And every gram of glycogen holds onto 3-4 grams of water. If you combine the weight of the muscle and liver glycogen, then add the 3-4 grams of water each gram of glycogen is holding onto, you end up at 2-4.5 kg. Let’s simplify the maths and say each gram of glycogen holds onto just three grams of water, when we add this to the middle ranges of liver and muscle glycogen storage we end up at around 2.7kg. If someone has been in a deficit, and they’ve been breaking into this glycogen storage, particularly if they’ve been low carb, they can see some pretty substantial scale increases from just one carb heavy refeed. 

Food weight impacting the scales

You’ve also got the weight of the food. For example, let’s take an 8 oz stake, as we know how much that weighs. 8 oz is around 0.2kg, and the weight of that food will still be passing through the digestive system when you weigh in the next day. Obviously, you wouldn’t have just eaten the stake; you would have had chips, which will have added to the glycogen storage. They will have been salty, which can increase water retention, and naturally, when we eat more salt, we tend to take on more fluids, and this fluid weighs x amount. For example, a litre of water is around 1kg. 

Summary

All this stuff combined can add up to a ridiculous amount, and none of this is body fat. Yes, if you’ve eaten at a surplus, you’ll have regained some body fat, but most of it will be all this other stuff. Just get straight back on it the next day, and you’ll be surprised by how quickly the scales will come back down!