Why do we weigh a couple pounds less when we get out of bed in the morning compared to when we got in the night before?
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The common misconception is that any weight we lose is either water or food waste. Sure, those things are weight that can be lost in visible ways, but how does fat get lost? Our blood isn’t depositing things in our intestines or anything (as long as we are healthy), and the molecules of fat and carbs (carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) are more than what makes up water (hydrogen and oxygen)!
Instead, our blood is depositing the waste of any fat or carbs we burn into our lungs: carbon, in the form of CO2 (ever wonder why we breath in O2 and breathe out CO2? where does the C come from? From our metabolism!).
And logically, the backbone of most organic material (carbon) weighs a surprising amount! Even if we usually think of air as weightless, there is enough mass difference between CO2 and O2 that it adds up over night.
Because we are breathing through the night (otherwise we’d be dead), we lose weight through the night. It is also part of why when we burn more calories (exercise) we breathe harder.
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