[John H.]

The other thing to know about the winter is that some people tend to bloat up and hold more H2O weight in the winter. Especially when humidity and temps are going up and down. Can see a 5 lb increase in short order. And you are thinking "I didn't consume an extra 18k of food that I didn't know about

Originally Posted by smontanaro

A few things have occurred to me over the past couple weeks as I've been logging accusations from my scale about my fitness.

• Salt intake matters. A lot. I can generally tell when I've consumed more than my fair share of NaCl. As my wife is a vegetarian and I generally consume a "meat light" diet, excess salt usually comes in the form of highly processed or restaurant food. When that happens, I suck down water light I'm anticipating a drought, generally without letting much go (sort of like I'm a reservoir – my apologies for making light of the folks on the West Coast suffering with atmospheric rivers). My weight spikes and takes a couple days to regress to the mean.
  
• Beware the slimmed down clothes. My wife is an expert with a sewing machine and recently resized a number of t-shirts which fit like tents. Now they fit like they are supposed to, which means I have no room to grow. This is good, right?
  
• Weight training messes with simple single-axis fitness measures. Clearly, considering just weight as a measure of progress isn't ideal anyway, but still, it's convenient. I started stretching routinely about two years ago, and over time have added weight exercises I can easily do in the house, the usual: planks, push-ups, curls, etc. I've always had a twig-like upper body. I still do, but the twigs are now a bit bigger, and I just know there's a six pack hiding under the excess fat I'm carrying around my middle. I don't know how much muscle weight I've added, but it interferes with simple attempts to measure rprogress by weight on the scale. I have no convenient way to measure my body fat percentage, so I guess I'll just have to go by what the mirror and the fit of my clothing say, and not worry too much about my stated end goal.