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Of course you're going to gain weight when you eat carbs. Glycogen contains mostly water and carbs, so if you store glycogen you gain weight, up to 20 lbs from

by iopq 10y ago

Of course you're going to gain weight when you eat carbs. Glycogen contains mostly water and carbs, so if you store glycogen you gain weight, up to 20 lbs from completely depleted. So let's say you eat low carb and train very hard for a week. Your muscles will be depleted, your liver will be depleted. You see that you lost 10 lbs! Great! But is it? Maybe you lost one pound of fat and 9 pounds of water. Then you eat NOTHING BUT carbs for three days and you gain 20 lbs. Oh no! But actually it's your muscles expanding their capacity to store glycogen (since you trained hard and depleted yourself they will regain even more glycogen than before). You may have not gained ANY FAT AT ALL! I have had great success dieting with medium fat medium carb diets. I try to keep between 180lbs and 220lbs (I'm 6'4"). I'm saying that this kind of tracking is oversimplifying the issue of fat loss - you need to see that you're losing fat tissue which involves at least caliper measurements.

ghshephard 10y ago
I was wondering when someone was going to mention this. I can add about 11-12 pounds of body-weight by scale reading in a single day simply by eating food rich in carbs the day prior. Cutting the Carbs out of my diet see's that weight disappear (thought it takes 4-5 days). Adding Potassium, Sodium, Magnesium supplements to meals reduces the water loss somewhat. Agreed - that the real question isn't weight, per se, but Lean Body Mass. DexaScan is also a good approach to nailing down that number.
- iopq 10y ago
  Yeah, I had a DEXA scan T 191lbs and I was 16% BF. It's not practical to do this every day, though. But what I've found is that calipers actually do a good job at showing body fat changes. They're horrible for absolute values (if they say 12%, they might be off by 4%), even at multiple measurement sites. But if calipers measure more or less, you can still be fairly sure that you have gained or lost fat mass. Measuring like that I found that nothing beats lots of caffeine and plain low calorie diet.

by iopq 10y ago

ghshephard 10y ago

I was wondering when someone was going to mention this. I can add about 11-12 pounds of body-weight by scale reading in a single day simply by eating food rich in carbs the day prior. Cutting the Carbs out of my diet see's that weight disappear (thought it takes 4-5 days). Adding Potassium, Sodium, Magnesium supplements to meals reduces the water loss somewhat. Agreed - that the real question isn't weight, per se, but Lean Body Mass. DexaScan is also a good approach to nailing down that number.

iopq 10y ago
Yeah, I had a DEXA scan T 191lbs and I was 16% BF. It's not practical to do this every day, though. But what I've found is that calipers actually do a good job at showing body fat changes. They're horrible for absolute values (if they say 12%, they might be off by 4%), even at multiple measurement sites. But if calipers measure more or less, you can still be fairly sure that you have gained or lost fat mass. Measuring like that I found that nothing beats lots of caffeine and plain low calorie diet.