All right kids, let’s talk about water retention!
I retain water like crazy. My body hoards water at the slightest provocation or alteration to my routine. And that’s okay, and normal, and expected. It’s a super basic thing that our bodies do, but we throw around the term “water retention” like it’s such a Big Fucking Deal.
Bodies are full of water, all the time. It’s not just your stomach and digestive system holding the water, it’s also each individual cell and its constantly changing levels of hydration. But for a ton of infuriatingly miseducated reasons, people are so damn hung up on their scale weight! People make knee-jerk reactive decisions about what they’re allowed to eat that day, or how much cardio to do, or what their moral worth is or whatever, all based on that random meaningless little scale number. A number that is, more often than not, due to water retention.
Please consider the above photos of a drinking cup. This cup weighs 13.6 ounces, as displayed by the kitchen scale in the lefthand picture. This cup is 8 inches tall and 3 inches across. In the second picture, the cup has been filled with water. The cup now weighs nearly 1.5 pounds, almost twice as much.
Did the cup, as a unit, become “heavier”? Yes.
Did the cup itself increase in mass? Did the cup become larger? Did the cup suddenly gain extra “cup” out of nothing? NO! The cup isn’t any larger or more massive. It is simply full of water, and therefore it weighs more on the scale.
Water is, and should be, everywhere in your body. Depending on your current lifestyle, you may simply be retaining some extra water. It’s nothing to stress about. Exactly how much water you are retaining is dependent on many situational, health, and lifestyle factors, highlighted below:
- Do you drink enough water? If you don’t, your body is clinging to what it can get, which translates to extra water weight. Drink more water.
- Do you eat a lot of preservatives, artificial foods, and/or refined carbohydrates? Preservatives are often in the form of sodium, which is an electrolyte that tells your body to retain water. Artificial ingredients are commonly a result of factory processes that alter its natural state, which means your body probably doesn’t recognize it and will retain water as a stress/flush response to the “foreign substance. The human body retains about four grams of water for every one gram of carbohydrates consumed - again, this is natural and not a bad thing, but since refined carbohydrates are absorbed quickly and are often consumed excessively, this may contribute to extra water retention. Gradually shift your diet to include more whole, fresh foods and your body may release some of the water.
- Do you get enough sleep? If not, your cortisol levels (a stress reaction hormone) are too high. Guess what? Water retention. A stressed body will always hang on to water, its most precious resource, just in case something really bad happens. This is a survival mechanism.
- Are you mentally or emotionally stressed? See above re: cortisol. Mental and emotional stress cause a physical response.
- Do you eat enough? Restriction creates water retention by causing physical stress response in the body.
- Do you eat too much? Overeating causes water retention. This is primarily due to digestion, since your digestive system requires more water to process a larger amount of food, but it may also be due to an increased carbohydrate intake (as previously discussed).
- Are you on your period? If you are, I personally advise you to NOT step on the scale unless you’re immune to number fear (if you are, that’s great, just saying). Your uterus is literally shredding part of itself and regrowing new tissue. Your hormone levels are all over the map. You have earned the right to be bloated and moody. It is natural and understandable.
- Have you fasted, “cleansed”, or crash dieted recently? Sudden decreases in intake are pretty much guaranteed to cause bloat once you return to a regular routine. Low-calorie diets cause your body to burn its glycogen stores, and since each gram of glycogen is bound to 3-4 grams of water (see above re: carbs), burning glycogen also means losing water. Glycogen is your body’s main source of fuel, and your body will eagerly start storing it again once you return to any semblance of normal eating, even if that eating is super healthy. This is why fad/crash diets look successful on paper but are spectacular failures in real life. It’s always good to focus on small, long term changes rather than quick fixes.
- Have you voluntarily purged recently? Both deliberate vomiting and laxative use are forcing your body to rapidly dehydrate. This is something bodies generally don’t like doing, so your body is responding in panic by hoarding water “just in case”.
- Are you constipated? Gross, but it does cause your body to hoard water in an effort to get things moving, so to speak.
- Do you exercise? Inactivity makes your body generally slower and less efficient at processing stored water. Try a few days of moving around a little bit if you feel bloated.
- Are you on any medications? NSAIDs, birth control/hormonal treatments, corticosteroids, and some blood pressure medicines cause significant water retention
- Are you lifting weights? Strength training in particular creates temporary “water padding” in the muscles to aid their recovery and performance. This is technically considered water weight, but in this case it's specifically a good thing.
- Do you live an overall healthy, moderate lifestyle? This is so simple as to be condescending, but people somehow manage to ignore the fact that if your lifestyle is imbalanced, so is your body.
If you’re retaining water, be patient and let it leave on its own, which it will, you’ll pee it out over a few days. Eat good foods. Do not restrict or overexercise (this actually makes it worse). Water has weight too, and just because it’s showing up on the scale DOES NOT MEAN THAT “YOU GOT FAT”. Fat gain doesn’t happen overnight. The amount of extra food you’d have to consume to create that kind of fat gain is extreme and unlikely. Your body doesn’t suddenly start storing multiple pounds of fat for no reason, especially when the majority of people I interact with would actually be better advised to eat more, not less. Please calm down.
End note: 5 pounds of water looks scary as hell on the scale, but that’s less than a one-gallon jug of milk. Quite honestly, I pee more than that in a single day. Keep it in perspective. Everything is gonna be okay.
