I’m on a diet and I weigh myself every morning. Last night I weighed myself before bed. This morning, I weighed myself when I got up. I was 5 pounds lighter this morning than I was last night. I was a bit heavier than usual because I had had a friend over and we ate a bunch of pizza and I always drink a lot of water.
In that time all I did was sleep. I didn’t use the washroom to pee or poo or anything else that involves stuff coming out of me.
Where the hell did all of that weight go? I understand that you sweat, but 5 pounds in 9 hours? That seems crazy.
In: Biology
Your weight did not drop by 5lbs overnight, while you slept. You’re lying or your scale is broken. You’re probably just making shit up though.
*it is crazy*
It’s a mix of water and CO2. Mostly water.
You don’t just lose water through sweat, its also lost as humidity in your breath. You aren’t drinking while asleep, so you never replinish any water lost.
Your metabolic processes are also still running. Even when awake, the majority of actual weight loss is exhaled CO2.
Your body expends calories through your breath and your sweat.
That said, 5lbs is pretty huge for one night. Suspect your scales are a bit broken.
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You should monitor that. Losing 5 lbs over night can be a sign of kidney and or heart failure.
Basically if your kidneys or heart can’t keep up during the day fluid gets retained (edema) then when you lay down the heart/kidneys have an easier time pulling the fluid out and you pee it all out in the morning.
As a kidney transplant recipient myself I went through this in the years before I started dialysis. It was routine for me to drop 5-10 lbs of water overnight because my kidneys simply couldn’t keep up when I wasn’t laying down.
Some of it you breath out slowly with every breath. Some of last nights weight could’ve been water weight in the tissues of your body, which you peed out this morning.
People underestimate how much water actually weighs. A gallon is roughly 8 lbs and there’s about 4 Liters in a gallon. As u/Chaotic_Lemming said, you lose most of your water content by breathing out, and when you’re breathing deeply in sleep, you can easily go through 1 L of water (2lbs).
That being said, 5lbs overnight is quite a bit if you didn’t also have a bowel movement or voiding. More likely your scale is a bit wonky.
The only way you’re losing 5lbs overnight is if you drank an ungodly amount of water that you subsequently pissed out in the morning.
You exhale it,
Almost everything in our body can be broken down into nothing but water and CO2. The only things solid you poop out are fiber from food, bacteria from the gut and and the dead red blood cells the liver deposits there (hence its brown reddish color like old dried blood). Everything else you lose is either in pee or exhaled out.
Respectfully, weighing yourself that frequently is not good for your mental health. Try cutting back to once a week or once a month.
You’ll still be able to track your progress while accounting for daily fluctuations.
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