What does it mean when you lose or gain “water weight”. Is it as simple as you’ve drank a lot of water, then pee it out? Does that count as weight?
In: Biology
Water weight is the weight you gain from the water in your body. Just as eating 1 kg of food makes you weigh 1 kg more, drinking 1 kg of water (about 1 liter) you weigh 1 kg more. If you pee or sweat away water, the you lose the mass of the water you pee or sweat away.
Water weight is sometimes used by anorexic people before having a weigh in in order to increase their weight so they appear less thin if they’re weighed. It is a clever trick of them, but sad that it can be used by them to get out of getting treatment or similar.
Your body has a lot of water in it that is lost and gained very quickly. Peeing is one way you lose it, sweating is the other way.
A fully grown adult is capable of fluctuating one or two pounds a day just by drinking water and peeing/sweating it out. A dehydrated person could be several pounds lighter than a well-hydrated person who is otherwise the same size and has the same amount of body fat. It just makes sense. A liter of water weighs one kilogram (2.2 pounds). You’re supposed to drink about two liters of water a day. A full bladders’ worth of pee can be about a quarter to a half liter, a normal person pees an average 6-7 times a day. So you’ve got 3-5 pounds of water cycling in and out of your body every day just from drinking and peeing, not even to count sweating.
When you ask whether this “counts” as weight, it kinda depends what you mean. When you step on a scale, it obviously doesn’t know whether you’re dehydrated or not. It just weighs your body, which might have a lot of water or not very much water. Yes, technically, you could “lose a few pounds” just by dehydrating yourself for a day without eating any differently or exercising, and you might say this is “cheating” if someone is trying to lose weight, because that weight is just gonna come right back on once you start drinking water again.
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