Ep. 038 - Weekend Weight Fluctuations

SHOW NOTES

Ever been frustrated by weekend (or vacation) weight fluctuations? 

Well, you're not alone. Here's the good news: if you step on the scale and it goes up 3, 4, 5 pounds - you haven't gained fat.  You are retaining water and your body is inflamed.  In today's episode, I talk about the mechanics of short term weight gain plus I offer a new strategy and mindset on how to approach your weekends.   

I challenge you to rethink your approach to weekends and provide you with tools to optimize your health. Whether it's being more intentional with food choices or understanding the role of exercise in weight loss, I've got you covered. 

TRANSCRIPT

Repeat after me, I did not gain 5 pounds of fat over the weekend.

Welcome to man in the Arena. Go to podcasts for all things related to health and weight loss for men over 40. Here we discuss strategies that will get you off the sidelines and into the game so you can achieve your optimal health. It's time to lead a legacy of longevity.

Hello and welcome to another episode of man in the Arena. It is the beginning of October as I record this and we are having amazing weather. Where I live, I don't think it's rained in two weeks and the leaves are changing. It's just a really great time to get outside and get moving, whether it's walking or hiking or running, and my calf is healed, so I'm back to running. I'm feeling great, and I also just did this prolonged group fast in the Arena community. It was really cool to connect with a bunch of the guys in there and just do this longer fast. I've done a 48 hour fast before, but this time we did something different. Essentially, we did two prolonged fasts back to back, where we started on Monday evening around 8 pm and we entered into a 36 hour fast, meaning we didn't eat until 8 am on Wednesday morning, and then we had a 12 hour eating window, followed by another 36 hour fast from 8 pm Wednesday night to 8 am Friday morning, where we just then we ate again. So it was a really fascinating experience and a little bit more challenging that I remember the last 48 hour fast that I did was when I did that, and certainly it was more challenging than my day to day 16 hour fast. Some of the things I noticed were intense hunger cues in the first fast that were kind of infrequent but more intense. And then second time around I noticed less intense hunger cues but they were more consistent. They weren't that infrequent going and then coming back. And there was, of course, a number of other things that I experienced, like some brain fog, I felt cold, I felt headaches, I was thinking about food a little bit more often, and all of these things made me realize that I need to be a little bit more disciplined with the types of food that I'm eating during my regular intermittent fasting schedule, because I know that when I'm dialed in on my eating, I would never have felt these symptoms nearly as intensely. So that was a really good takeaway, but I now feel like I've attained all of the benefits of that prolonged fast like autophagy, and I feel like I've undergone a bit of a reset and now I'm really dialed in. So that was really helpful and really beneficial, and I know a lot of the guys who did the prolonged fast at the same time. They feel the same way, and now we're talking about doing this more regularly in the arena. So if this perks your interest, I want you to get on over to the spear methodcom slash the arena. I want you to sign up for my monthly community because we're going to be really diving into this stuff.

We're doing more and more of these fast. We're doing a lot of really cool other things as well All around support and coaching to help guys live their healthiest lives, and that's what it's all about. That's what this podcast is all about. That's what my coaching is all about is that there's support and there's a lot of great information out there that we bring together for guys who are over 40. And we're just seeing really great results. Now, one of the things I realized with the fast that I just did is how much water weight I really shed over the course of the fast and over the course of the week, and I know that I also burned some really good fat stores as well, but it made me think about how quickly we can actually lose weight and then put weight back on, like every weekend. I see guys who put on one to two pounds or even five pounds over the course of a weekend. If this is you, I want you to keep listening, because what I'm about to share with you is going to make you feel a whole lot better, and it's going to make you feel a whole lot more sane. Most importantly, you need to know that if you put weight on over the course of a weekend, you haven't actually gained fat. Now, I don't care how much you ate or drank, you did not get better.

Okay, certainly not five pounds fatter, and especially when you do the math right, there's 3,500 calories in one pound of body fat. If you actually gained five pounds of fat, that means you would have had to consume 17,500 calories above and beyond what you would have also burned over the course of a weekend, and so if you burned an average of 2,000 calories each day for three days, that's an additional 6,000 calories, equaling 23,500 calories in three days over the course of a weekend, and when you divide that up, that means you have to eat 7,800 calories a day in order to gain five pounds of actual body fat, and there's no way. That's just way too much food. So instead, there's other factors that are at play here, and what you need to know come Monday morning when you step on the scale, is you actually retain mostly water. Okay, now, this isn't an open invitation to eat whatever you want or drink whatever you want on the weekend, but I want to simply point out that we don't have to berate ourselves. We don't have to get frustrated every Monday morning when we step on the scale and we see it go up a little bit. We still want to be accountable on the weekend, and I'm going to talk about this at the end of the episode.

So make sure you stay dialed in, because I'm going to give you some more information that you can use when it does come to planning for the weekend. But let me just explain what's happening if and when you see the scale go up as much as five pounds over the course of a few days. Like I said earlier, it's mostly water retention, and this is caused by a number of factors, but I'm going to dive into four. Okay Sodium and carbs, inflammation, dehydration and not eating enough fiber. Right, so number one when we eat salty foods, as we tend to do on the weekends, it's mostly because we're not intentional and we're eating foods like chips, pretzels, burgers, french fries. There's a lot of sodium in these foods and sodium causes us to retain water, and the same is true for carbs and starchy foods.

So we eat pizza, bread, pancakes for breakfast. Maybe I want you to know that every gram of carbohydrate that enters into ourselves, we retain two grams of water. So if we're eating higher sodium foods, higher carb-related foods, we're going to retain more water. So inflammation is another source of water retention, and mainly due to two things. One is you eat all those foods, sugar, the flour, and that causes our body to become inflamed. The other thing that guys do on the weekend, when they have more time, is they'll exercise more. When we exercise, we experience these micro-tears in our bodies and our muscles and then, in order to repair these tears, our body experiences inflammation. Okay, and it's obviously. This is obviously a rudimentary explanation, but just know that this is the result of exercise. It's not a bad thing, but it does provide us with insight and oftentimes, when people begin an exercise program, they expect to lose weight, but then their weight actually increases. And this is why because we have this information going on in our body. Information leads to water retention, so I know that's frustrating, but that's why I'm very careful to prescribe exercise as part of my method and part of what I teach. I believe in exercise for health and wellness, but not necessarily for weight loss, although weight loss could be an added side benefit. Another reason for water retention is dehydration, which on the surface, I know makes no sense, but what happens is when you don't drink enough water, your cells hold onto it. So when we're hydrated, we're actually flushing out ourselves and we're not retaining it. We're getting rid of that water Right Now, on the weekends, guys tend to drink more and more alcohol and, as we know, alcohol is a diuretic.

So this also increases our dehydration and it's going to increase our water retention plus inflammation. So, lastly, we tend to be dialed in during the week and we eat a lot of vegetables, lots of fiber, and then on the weekend we're less intentional, with less fibrous foods. So fibrous foods not only have more water content, which is going to promote hydration, but they help move foods through our system faster and, as a result, we experience less water retention. So if you see the scale go up on a Monday, don't panic. Just get back into your routine and you're going to drop that water weight in no time. In saying that, I want to give you some tips to avoid when I call the weekend wobbles, and I want you to avoid this water retention altogether. Like I said, I want you to experience what I call the weekend whoosh, where you're actually going to drop weight. I have this client. He kind of takes a different approach to the weekends than most of my other clients and his approach is simple. He believes that the weekend is his best opportunity all week to lose weight and optimize his weight loss.

So, in other words, he optimizes his weekends. Now let me explain the other, more common scenario before I dive into this. Most guys wake up on a Monday and they're all fired up, right and they're motivated, they're dialed in and they're ready to get shit done. It's a fresh start mindset, nothing wrong with this. But they plan their meals, plan their week, they've got groceries in the fridge and they're feeling really optimistic. Then by Thursday or Friday they're burned out. They don't have any meals planned, they don't have any groceries, they just want to eat out, they want to relax and they want to roll into the weekend without any real intention. So, as a result, they start to over drink, overeat and then, hence the five pound weight gain every weekend. My other client, on the other hand, he rolls into the weekend with a plan. He starts Friday morning, he plans the weekend, he gets his groceries and he plans his indulgences. So he's not restricting himself, but he is intentional and he is. He is planful, so he doesn't restrict. He also sets a goal and he does his best to get in two workouts plus other bonus activities like yard work, where it goes from a hike that's separate from his planned workout. At the same time, he allows himself to stay up late if he wants, but he also sleeps in so he gets his full recovery. In other words, he's not shaming himself for sleeping in.

So that's something I want you to keep in mind when you get to Monday, are you at your lowest weight or are you at your highest weight of the week? And if this is you, I want you to start to reconsider what the weekend looks like for you. What's your weekend mindset? So I wanted to highlight this because I wanted you to see what's possible with a different mindset. You can have your fun on the weekend and you can progress over the weekend, and I want you to identify what is your mindset. All right, guys, I hope this episode brought you some new things to think about. Now I challenge you to go and take action. If you're enjoying this content, please leave a review, please share it with your network, and if you want world-class support, coaching and tools and to take your health to the next level, then reach out to me.

I have some one-to-one coaching space available and, of course, there's always the arena, the community, the membership that's open as well. Thanks for stopping by. I look forward to seeing you next week and, in the meantime, keep leading a legacy of good health and longevity. If you're ready to step inside the arena and change the trajectory of your health, head on over to the spear methodcom and download my free guide to learn simple and effective strategies on how to optimize your health today.