Originally Posted by
pdlamb
It's possible that you've actually lost that much weight and that it's all body fat.
However, it's also interesting that you started your post with "doesn't hold water." My experience has led me to the point that I don't believe a weight drop of less that five pounds because I can sweat that much out pretty easily -- in other words, I treat a loss of <5 pounds as a water weight loss. At 10 pounds I start to believe that I've lost weight.
So is this a water weight loss, or the start of something significant? Check back in with us in a couple more months, and let us know if you've found a reliable, long term path to your weight loss.
My experience is similar, but with careful controls, 5 pounds can be a real signal IF your weighing protocols are well-defined. For example, I weigh myself once a day, first thing in the morning, before any breakfast or coffee. With this protocol, changes of less than 2 pounds could be noise, but changes of 3-5 pounds, in my experience, are usually signal. An exception to this would be if the evening before, I put in a good workout (in the winters I Zwift in the evening) and went to bed both dehydrated and depleted in glycogen. On the other hand, if I were to include weights from different times of the day, the "noise" band would grow larger. I can easily be 3-5 pounds heavier after dinner than I am first thing in the morning.