Similar to weight loss plateaus some people experience unexpected weight changes during their diets. Of course, this is not what you want. In a perfect world you follow a diet and your weight declines in a linear fashion until you have reached your ideal weight.

 

Unfortunately, we dont live in a perfect world, so we have to first identify the cause of unexpected wieght changes and then solve the problem.

 

To help you do this I will now go over the most common causes of sudden weight changes. Some of them are similair to the causes of weight losss plateus but there are a few additonal causes you might not be familiar with.

 

 

The first and most common cause of sudden weight changes is water retention. Unwanted water retention can usually be overcome by drinking more and lowering your sodium intake.

 

If you have been dieting for a very long time, so for several months, the stress hormone cortisol can also lead to water retention. Here, the best solution is a diet break, but dont use this as an excuse to go off your diet and make sure elevated cortisol levels are really the reason.

 

Certain medication and supplements like impure forms of creatine can also to water retention making your skin look puffy and your muscles less lean. So if you are regularly taking certain meds make sure to takl to your doctor about this.

 

 

Another common reason for sudden weight changes is a higher than normal carb intake. Carbs are stored as glycogen in the liver and muscles and each gram of glycogen is stored along with around three grams of water.

 

So if you recently switched to a high carb diet than this might very well be the reason for your weight changes. This by itself is not a problem, of course, because like I said before carbs are not evil and additional water weight isn’t really a health problem. Just make sure your carbs are coming from quality sources like rice, potatoes or whole grain products.

 

 

Number three on the list is food. Obviously, food weighs something, which means that if you weight yourself right after you ate you will weight more than if you weighed yourself on an empty stomach.

 

To cancel out these kind of fluctuations I recommend weighing yourself twice a week in the morning after you got out of bed and before you eat breakfast.

 

 

Number four and five are two things that are outside of my expertise qhich are a women’s monthly period and digestive problems. Both can lead to sudden changes in your weight and if you believe you’re having your period irregularly and/or have digestive problems then please talk to a doctor.

 

These are the most common factors for sudden weight changes. Before I end this post let’s talk about one more possibility.

 

This factor will not lead to sudden weight changes but long term stagnation or even weight gain: It’s underestimating your daily calorie intake.

 

I’ve already said it in the post on weight loss plateaus but I’ll say it again just to make sure. Long-term problems with your diet almost always come down to an improper calore deficit.

 

You have to make sure to give your body less energy than it expends otherwise it won’t lose any weight. Please always keep this in mind during your diets and regularly check if you calculated your claorie needs correctly.