I was tracking weight loss over time, so it's not just water loss. I tracked weight multiple times a day to see when weight loss actually happens.
If it was simple dehydration then sleeping would be irrelevant, but sleep is when something is processed, an action occurs that expels the waste/water.
What I found was that during the day I gained weight consistently from morning till night. I drank water, ran (2 miles then later 3 miles around 4:30pm) ate food (one meal at around 5:30pm), sweated on my runs, bowel movements were every couple days, urinated multiple times a day.
But, consistently gained weight morning -> night. I measured my weight Morning > noon > evening (before meal) > night (before sleep). Only in the morning after urination did weight leave my body. Otherwise is consistent gains.
People want to claim "it's all water", but that is nonsense, as I lost 15+ lbs that month.
So, during a few days, I stayed up all night, no extra water in the night, no urination until morning to see if it was just that 8 hour period (approx) that caused the final loss of total weight to get me to my lowest measurement of the day.
Nope. I had not lost any (or negligible weight, I was still at or near night weight). After I slept, (I'd wake in the afternoon) urinate, and I was back to my expected morning weight - with the average loss of .5 lbs.
Sleep has an effect on the processing of urine related to the expulsion of waste and the metabolism of fat. That is my theory. A lot of people here are calling this asinine, so be it.
If you are up for experimenting, weigh yourself in the morning and night for a week. Then stay up all night and weigh yourself in the morning, then after you get a nap. Then tell me I am crazy and there's nothing to this effect.
In other words, it's not that you don't lose weight until you sleep: it's that you can't differentiate whether you have net lost weight or gained weight until you have similar conditions of measurement.
But I would add to this, that it seems that you can lose some net lost weight from not having enough time sleeping for the process to finish.
Maybe like how a sceptic tank gets filled and drained repeatedly, but only gets drained at night (for an equal analogy). And if there's not enough night (sleep), it can't drain completely, therefore retaining waste.
It would explain also why you get sick if you don't get enough sleep... something else to ponder.
Source: tracking my calories and weight for the better part of a decade and having lost and kept off 150+lbs.
My weight fluctuates 5 pounds in a given day based on how much I eat, drink, workout etc.
Your experimental methodology is flawed because it fails to control for water loss. This isn't negligible: in the summer when it's hot and I sweat a lot, I can easily drink a 1 liter Nalgene bottle in the morning, about 2 pounds of water. It's likely that what you've measured is simply the slow loss of water through perspiration and exhalation throughout the night.
I guess technically this is weight loss because you do weigh less when dehydrated, but it's not loss of fat weight, which is what I think most people mean when they say weight loss.
Weight fluctuations throughout the day due to water/food intake and waste excretion/water loss dwarf any actual fat loss, so I don't think weighing yourself throughout the day is a viable method of determining when fat weight is lost during the day.
I absolutely tested for water loss. What I found was that some extra (?) water retained until we sleep. And that something happens with fat or other processing that occurs during sleep.
Again, I charted my weight carefully multiple times a day over a month. Carefully testing when weight loss occured. I Recorded my diet as well as my exercise.
I lost .5 lbs of fat (on average) every day for a month.
The question I found interesting was "when/how do we actually lose weight?" It has to come out of our body somehow. And it's not through excrement, it's through urine. The reason I know this is because when doing my test I ate one meal a day, and I would sometimes not have a bowel movement for a few days, yet still have eaten a few meals and still lost weight.
Mostly you breath it out, excepting water.
No, you didn't. How do you think you tested for water loss?
Briefly, you'd need to separate out the water for your urine, weigh that, then separate out the water from your feces, and weigh that, and spend all your time in a sealed chamber and monitor the humidity of that chamber to see how much water you're exhaling and sweating out. I'm guessing you did exactly none of this.
Oh and after all that, there's the confounding fact that a small part of fat's mass is metabolized into water, so even measuring all your water excretion doesn't actually allow you to separate how much of that water is water you took in, and how much of that water is the result of fat metabolism.
> And it's not through excrement, it's through urine.
Given urine is mostly water and you didn't control for water loss, your result is exactly what I'd expect from water loss and not fat loss.
Look, do you really think you're the first person to research this? There's a whole subfield of biochemistry devoted to this, with more brains, equipment, and funding than you have. You're right that weight mostly doesn't come out through excrement: most of the mass of burned fat is exhaled as CO2[1][2][3].
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141216212047.h...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-30494009
[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families...
Over time. I was not dehydrated at the end of the month, but I was 15+ 1bs lighter, and my neck, waist and limbs were slimmer.
>do you really think you're the first person to research this?
Nope, I have no such illusions. I find though that science _requires_ discussion to move forward. And I found a phenomenon. I can't explain the details, but the results are sound.
I think it's simple to test my theory. Stay up all night, don't drink anything, do what you normally do. In the morning, you will not have lost any weight (call it water weight if you want). During sleep, your body does something different. Go take a nap, when you wake you will urinate again, but it will be different.
But maybe you can only understand this difference if you are carefully monitoring your weight over an extended period of time?
The reason I don't think the carbon dioxide thing is the primary method of weight loss is because of my tests, where your body weight simply does not normalize until after sleeping. I think the majority of the fat (by weight) comes out in urine.
But I am just guessing based on my experiments over the past few years. Yep, I am an amateur scientist, but I control my weight now.
That establishes what month you lost fat in. It does not establish what time of day you lost fat in. It does not establish that you lost fat through your urine.
I totally believe you that you lost weight in a month; I'm not objecting to to that claim. The claims you made that I am objecting to are:
1. That you know what time of day you lost weight in.
2. That you know you lost weight primarily through your urine.
You did not control for water weight when testing either of these hypotheses.
> I find though that science _requires_ discussion to move forward.
No it doesn't. Discussion is sometimes helpful to the scientific method, but it is not a part of it. Science requires sound experimentation, which you have not done.
> In the morning, you will not have lost any weight (call it water weight if you want).
I don't need to stay up all night to demonstrate that I can lose weight while awake. I just got back from a run and had to go, so I urinated and lost 1.6 lbs according to measuring before and after on my bathroom scale. Since you've given me permission, I'll go ahead and call that water weight.
> Go take a nap, when you wake you will urinate again, but it will be different.
How will it be different? You've literally provided no explanation whatsoever for why you think there's fat mass in your urine.
> But maybe you can only understand this difference if you are carefully monitoring your weight over an extended period of time?
I have gathered my weight data almost every day for the last few months, to correlate with a weight training routine.
Maybe I could understand the difference if you could explain it to me, but all you've done is just say there is a difference.
> The reason I don't think the carbon dioxide thing is the primary method of weight loss is because of my tests, where your body weight simply does not normalize until after sleeping.
What do you mean by normalize?
> I think the majority of the fat (by weight) comes out in urine.
Why do you think this?
> But I am just guessing based on my experiments over the past few years. Yep, I am an amateur scientist, but I control my weight now.
You don't get to call yourself even an amateur scientist if you refuse to even consider very obvious confounding factors. Science is about isolating phenomena, and if you haven't even measured the heaviest thing coming out of your body (water) then you can't claim to have isolated any information about lighter substances leaving your body. What you're doing is not science.
I'm happy for you that you're controlling your weight, though. Good job.
>1. That you know what time of day you lost weight in.
I have no idea when _fat_ was processed, never my point. I know _exactly_ when my weight diminished. (I feel like I did not make this point very clear before)
>2. That you know you lost weight primarily through your urine.
>You did not control for water weight when testing either of these hypotheses.
It is well understood method to weigh yourself every morning to ensure you aren't measuring water weight loss. Feel free to argue against this standard, it's not my personal belief. I do believe doctors and physical trainers, etc... all use this standard.
I'm pretty sure you've been clear. Your idea is:
1. Fat is processed into fat waste at some point. 2. Fat waste comes out in urine in the morning.
2 is almost completely wrong, and you've provided no evidence for that assertion.
> It is well understood method to weigh yourself every morning to ensure you aren't measuring water weight loss. Feel free to argue against this standard, it's not my personal belief. I do believe doctors and physical trainers, etc... all use this standard.
In a scientific experiment, you control for a confounding factor by isolating the phenomena you are measuring from another phenomena that might screw up your measurements.
If you're measuring your weight every day, the confounding factor is the weight of things that aren't you: water/food/waste. So you separate out weighing you and weighing the water/food/waste by weighing yourself when there's the least water/food/waste in your system. So this is how you control the measurement of your weight for water weight.
If you're measuring the weight of waste products that come from processing fat, the confounding factors are still water/food/waste in your system, but the waste products that come from processing fat are mixed in with them, and there's no way to measure them separately. Measuring in the morning doesn't fix this problem. So this doesn't control the measurement of the waste products that come from processing fat's weight for water weight.
It is well understood that 85% of fat weight lost is exhaled as carbon dioxide, so if you're going to tell me what is well understood, you might actually want to find out more of what is well understood.
My point more succinctly:
8 hours of being awake + urination = similar weight from 8 hours previous.
8 hours of high quality sleep + urination = less weight from 8 hours previously.
A simple repeating of the test will prove me wrong.
Would your tracking method allow you to detect the moment of weight loss in this hypothetical scenario?
Some people seem to be thinking that I am saying "fat only gets burned during sleep" which is just absurd, and I am not suggesting that at all.
I think if I was to make a theory it would be something like "fat used up during the day produces waste that is partly stored in the body after being used, but during sleep is when this waste is collected and expelled in the urine." Maybe poorly worded but sums up my thinking right now.
This is a rough guess, but since I haven't seen anything like this reported anywhere I figured it's worth sharing the experience.
And how did you detect the fat waste in your urine?
> This is a rough guess, but since I haven't seen anything like this reported anywhere I figured it's worth sharing the experience.
The reason you didn't see anything like this reported anywhere is that it's not true.
Experience is something I can't argue with. I can't argue, for example, that you lost weight. However, you've stepped well beyond just "reporting your experience" here. In what way did you "experience" expelling fat waste products through your urine? The answer is, you didn't--you experienced expelling water.
You're not adding to our collective knowledge by reporting your subjective interpretations here. You're propagating misinformation.
I didn't have a method to test for fat in urine. But I could measure the fat loss around my waist, neck and limbs over time. Lots of science works in this way where you can't measure something directly, so you must use the surrounding effects to measure it, it's totally valid measuring technique.
>expelling fat waste products through your urine? The answer is, you didn't--you experienced expelling water.
If you want to argue that fat turns into water, and then water goes out as urine, then I agree with you 100% (though I'd argue it's not pure water), and I would add that that process seems to be only be fully completed after sleeping. (experimental proof of this can be demonstrated by anyone with a scale that is able to stay up all night)
Mayo Clinic: "These waste products — water and carbon dioxide — are excreted in your urine and sweat or exhaled from your lungs."
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/exp...
I don't want to argue that.
> and I would add that that process seems to be only be fully completed after sleeping.
This is the nonsense that I would like to argue against.
> (experimental proof of this can be demonstrated by anyone with a scale that is able to stay up all night)
Okay, please tell me the numbers that you collected that you think prove this.
> Mayo Clinic: "These waste products — water and carbon dioxide — are excreted in your urine and sweat or exhaled from your lungs."
That link does not say when during the day it happens.
I'll also point out that I've been saying all along that fat waste is 15% water and 85% carbon dioxide, so if you think that disproves what I said, either you didn't read what I said, or you didn't read what you linked.
I'll also point out that you said:
"The reason I don't think the carbon dioxide thing is the primary method of weight loss is because of my tests, where your body weight simply does not normalize until after sleeping. I think the majority of the fat (by weight) comes out in urine."
Could you do some basic research please, and find a source which says the percentages of fat and water? I've conveniently linked one for you:
"So, for example, to burn 10 kilograms (22 lbs.) of fat, a person needs to inhale 29 kg (64 lbs.) of oxygen. And the chemical process of burning that fat will produce 28 kg (62 lbs.) of carbon dioxide and 11 kg (24 lbs.) of water, the researchers calculated."
[1] https://www.livescience.com/49157-how-fat-is-lost-body.html
And what you saw was just repeated measurements of water loss each morning, plus some actual weight loss, when the real weight loss happened 24/7 but was too spread for you to notice.
>If it was simple dehydration then sleeping would be irrelevant
Sleeping is irrelevant (it is needed to be less stressed, but it's not the time you "actually lose weight" any more than any other time of the day) research has shown.