How is it possible to gain weight while asleep?
January 30, 2019 3:42 PM Subscribe
Please help me solve this old mystery! For a while, i fairly consistently weighed more when i woke up than when i went to bed. I would weigh myself right before going to bed and as soon as i woke up. I would eat no food and drink no water between those times. Why/how is this possible?
There was a period in my life, a few years ago, where i would weigh myself quite frequently. I know you are not supposed to do it, but i had a scale, for a change, and i was just interested in how weight would vary throughout the day or day to day or whatever.
The mystery is this: at some point, i noticed that i fairly consistently weighed more when i woke up than when i went to bed. I have never figured out how this is possible! I would weigh myself right before going to bed and as soon as i woke up. I would eat no food and drink no water between those times. There was no snacking and sleep snacking/drinking. (Sometimes i would even get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, so i really should have lost weight!) When i saw this, i was pretty incredulous so i started weighing myself a few times before going to sleep and writing down the weight, the scale showing a consistent weight, then doing the same thing in the morning. The weight in the morning would be higher than it was right before going to bed, and i had it in writing, so it wasnt just me miss-remembering.
If anyone knows how this is possible! Sometimes it would be up to a 2 pound difference! I cannot imagine there is a way the amount of water i breathed in at night through the air would cause that and i have never figured out another explanation, since, as i said, i didnt eat or drink anything between weighings. As far as i am concerned, even with the changing biological properties of everything going on in my body, my overall weight should have stayed the same or decreased [through moisture loss due to breathing] since the overall mass should have stayed the same or decreased.
ps. I dont know if this is still going on or not, since i havent had a scale in a few years.
There was a period in my life, a few years ago, where i would weigh myself quite frequently. I know you are not supposed to do it, but i had a scale, for a change, and i was just interested in how weight would vary throughout the day or day to day or whatever.
The mystery is this: at some point, i noticed that i fairly consistently weighed more when i woke up than when i went to bed. I have never figured out how this is possible! I would weigh myself right before going to bed and as soon as i woke up. I would eat no food and drink no water between those times. There was no snacking and sleep snacking/drinking. (Sometimes i would even get up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, so i really should have lost weight!) When i saw this, i was pretty incredulous so i started weighing myself a few times before going to sleep and writing down the weight, the scale showing a consistent weight, then doing the same thing in the morning. The weight in the morning would be higher than it was right before going to bed, and i had it in writing, so it wasnt just me miss-remembering.
If anyone knows how this is possible! Sometimes it would be up to a 2 pound difference! I cannot imagine there is a way the amount of water i breathed in at night through the air would cause that and i have never figured out another explanation, since, as i said, i didnt eat or drink anything between weighings. As far as i am concerned, even with the changing biological properties of everything going on in my body, my overall weight should have stayed the same or decreased [through moisture loss due to breathing] since the overall mass should have stayed the same or decreased.
ps. I dont know if this is still going on or not, since i havent had a scale in a few years.
^ came here to say this.
Energy burned for base-rate metabolism would be a more likely culprit than moisture loss due to breathing for weight loss overnight. But systematic measurement error is most likely to blame.
posted by supercres at 3:48 PM on January 30, 2019
Energy burned for base-rate metabolism would be a more likely culprit than moisture loss due to breathing for weight loss overnight. But systematic measurement error is most likely to blame.
posted by supercres at 3:48 PM on January 30, 2019
Response by poster: Bondcliff, unfortunately i do not remember which type of scale i had; i believe it was analog, but other than that i do not recall. The temperature affecting calibration is an interesting thought! I think that is a likely cause, since i did not have smart thermostats so my house would be much colder in the mornings than when i went to sleep. I had no idea (obviously) that temperatures could have that effect on household scales. Thanks!! :D
posted by miss so and so at 3:49 PM on January 30, 2019
posted by miss so and so at 3:49 PM on January 30, 2019
Impossible, your scale is inaccurate. You are not feeding any matter into the system except oxygen and you lose weight (in the form of CO2) with every breath.
posted by w0mbat at 5:41 PM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by w0mbat at 5:41 PM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]
I regularly lose two pounds in the shower, so I'm really interested in the answer here. I know that 1-2 pound weight changes are basically noise, but I can't even count the number of times the scale showed two pounds less after a 5 minute shower. If it were just random variation of an inaccurate scale I would expect to weigh two pounds more after a shower sometimes, but that has never happened.
Cheap digital scale - sitting on floor near shower, which is why I noticed I was weighing two pounds less after a shower. It was a large bathroom and I don't think the temperature in the room changed significantly - not enough to fog the mirror anyway.
posted by COD at 6:08 PM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]
Cheap digital scale - sitting on floor near shower, which is why I noticed I was weighing two pounds less after a shower. It was a large bathroom and I don't think the temperature in the room changed significantly - not enough to fog the mirror anyway.
posted by COD at 6:08 PM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]
Slightly different possibility--were you on birth control at the time? I went through a phase with my IUD where I would actually gain weight overnight and then lose it during the day. Rinse and repeat. It only lasted for a little while; once my body got more used to the IUD my weight stabilized. It was very strange in the meantime. Hormonal fluctuations can cause water weight gain, so I'm assuming I was having some kind of new hormonal shift overnight that caused me to retain water.
posted by Amy93 at 6:26 PM on January 30, 2019
posted by Amy93 at 6:26 PM on January 30, 2019
I think the only way to gain weight overnight would be holding on to more O₂ and H₂0 and other gases that you inhale overnight vs the amount of gasses and sweat you expel overnight. That's going to be a hard sell I think to account for pounds worth of gain.
posted by zengargoyle at 6:54 PM on January 30, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by zengargoyle at 6:54 PM on January 30, 2019 [3 favorites]
It's noise. Gotta be. My scale says I lose 0.3 lb from before to after I take a shower.
posted by notsnot at 7:12 PM on January 30, 2019
posted by notsnot at 7:12 PM on January 30, 2019
Amy93, in the absence of drinking or eating what you report is impossible. Water does not weigh more when retained as opposed to simply drunk, your mass doesn't change depending upon how you are holding onto it.
posted by deadwax at 2:05 AM on January 31, 2019
posted by deadwax at 2:05 AM on January 31, 2019
A proper balancing scale would not show this phenomenon. Like Lady Justice's. Earth's gravity is constant, so the relative weight of two things will stay the same except if one of them changes mass.
I have a bathroom scale that says I gain two pounds if I move it. Then if I step on again it goes back to normal.
Impossible measurements are always an instrument error, and it's why negative and positive controls are necessary. Oh! Oh! Get a non living heavy object and weigh IT in the evening and then immediately in the morning. NEGATIVE CONTROL. And find another one that weighs some amount different and weigh it, too, the difference between them is a POSITIVE CONTROL.
DO IT WE NEED TO KNOW
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 4:04 AM on January 31, 2019 [4 favorites]
I have a bathroom scale that says I gain two pounds if I move it. Then if I step on again it goes back to normal.
Impossible measurements are always an instrument error, and it's why negative and positive controls are necessary. Oh! Oh! Get a non living heavy object and weigh IT in the evening and then immediately in the morning. NEGATIVE CONTROL. And find another one that weighs some amount different and weigh it, too, the difference between them is a POSITIVE CONTROL.
DO IT WE NEED TO KNOW
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 4:04 AM on January 31, 2019 [4 favorites]
Response by poster: Made of Star Stuff, weighing controls is a great idea! When i moved states the scale was one of the things that i didnt bring, so unfortunately i cant do that experiment :(. Oh, man, i _really_ wish i had thought of that while this mystery was going on!!
Zengargoyle, agreed! That was part of the confusion!
For the people saying it was just noise, if that was the case, then sometimes the scale would have said i gained weight and sometimes it would have said i lost weight. That it consistently said i gained weight over night was what confused me. And none of this was about actual weight, it was about the supposed gaining of quite a bit of mass overnight that confused me.
posted by miss so and so at 9:06 AM on January 31, 2019
Zengargoyle, agreed! That was part of the confusion!
For the people saying it was just noise, if that was the case, then sometimes the scale would have said i gained weight and sometimes it would have said i lost weight. That it consistently said i gained weight over night was what confused me. And none of this was about actual weight, it was about the supposed gaining of quite a bit of mass overnight that confused me.
posted by miss so and so at 9:06 AM on January 31, 2019
Right, not "noise" -- it's something systematic because it's consistent. But folks probably meant "noise" as in "irrelevant information" rather than "semi-stochastic measurement imprecision."
Too bad you can't do the experiment, I really would like to have known, but I think that the temperature being a co-varying environmental input is probably right on the money.
Here's more than you ever needed to know about what can make scales inaccurate.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 10:45 AM on February 5, 2019
Too bad you can't do the experiment, I really would like to have known, but I think that the temperature being a co-varying environmental input is probably right on the money.
Here's more than you ever needed to know about what can make scales inaccurate.
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 10:45 AM on February 5, 2019
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posted by bondcliff at 3:44 PM on January 30, 2019 [11 favorites]