Gain Half a Stone in 48 Hours... and Lose it in 10 Days

One of the advantages of twittering your meals, blogging your workouts and obsessively recording your weight is that you can backtrack through a period of time and see exactly what you were doing and how it affected your weight.

You can usually tell when I have strayed from the path of nutritional righteousness because I don't twitter what I am eating. This is invariably a combination of being too drunk to remember / be capable of taking a photograph - and in any case too ashamed to post it.

A couple of weeks back I went out on a celebration that was always doomed to result in excess. The day after excessive drinking, for me, usually engenders comfort eating, so it's often a 48 hour deal. Day 1 - too much alcohol and bad food while I'm drunk. Day 2 - comfort food to mitigate the hangover.

I have highlighted those days in red in the food/exercise chart at the bottom. On the graph they are blank because I didn't weigh myself for pretty much the same reason my Twittering stops.

Weight change over 2 weeks - note, y-axis is a decimal stones value, not stones and pounds

I wanted to post this as an illustration of how weight can fluctuate wildly without any significant change to body composition. If you look at my own chart for the last few years, you can see it is littered with spikes in weight that quickly decline.

In this case, it took 48 hours to gain 7 pounds, then 10 days to lose them. To gain a pound of fat it takes about 3500 calories. Did I over consume by about 25,000 calories in 48 hours? Clearly not. Nor did I manage to under consume by 2,500 calories per day in the days that followed.

I suspect a big chunk of the extra weight was water retention from increased sodium intake. Another big chunk would be sheer volume of food in my intestines. The 3-day conveyor belt of end-to-end digestion simply had more stacked on it thanks to my celebratory gluttony. And yes, maybe I did manage to eat and drink 3,500 - 5,000 extra calories, a lot of which would have been stored as fat.

As I've mentioned before, it's this transition from poor food to good food that is often responsible for the initial weight loss people report at the start of some kind of diet. This is quickly followed by disillusionment when the pace of change does not continue.

You can probably tell from the chart that I was pretty rigorous about my recovery effort, so for others this might have taken longer.

My advice would to avoid these binges - but if you are unable to, these 3 things can help speed the return to normal over a couple of weeks.

1. Regular fasts
2. Strictly Paleo/Primal
3. Regular short, intense workouts

Day	Morning	Afternoon	Evening	Weight (stone-lbs)
8th May	fast	fast	Herring, mackerel, steamed vegetables and coconut	11-2.0
9th May	'Super Big Breakfast' - 3 bacon, 3 sausages, 3 eggs, tomatoes and black pudding. 100g bag of salted cashew nuts.	10 x double vodka and apple juice	5 x double vodka and apple juice. Tandoori chicken starter. Tandoori chicken main course.	?
10th May	Crab, salad, walnuts and nut butter and fruit with coconut cream	fast	Bottle of red wine, tandoori salmon starter, tandoori vegetables side dish, whole tandoori chicken, cheesecake, fresh cream.	?
11th May	fast 5-Minute High Intensity Top-Up	fast	Roast chicken and steamed vegetables	11-9.0
12th May	fast	pilchards prawns avocado tomato pepper beetroot nuts	trout, broccoli, red pepper, courgette, onion, evoo	11-8.0
13th May	fast Chest and Shoulders workout with tabata finisher	fast	Venison liver fried in coconut oil, coconut cream, red wine, tom puree, venison blood; mixed veg evoo	11-5.5
14th May	fast	sardines, avocado, tomato, spinach, little evoo	Herring, Ling, Broccoli, Courgette, Green Pepper, Leek, evoo. handful pumpkin seeds	11-3.5
15th May	Compressed Volume Back Routine + Tabata Squat/Swing Finisher	Tinned salmon, tinned sardines, walnuts, tomato, green pepper, spinach	tandoori chicken, lamb and prawn platter with salad & a glass of red	11-4.5
16th May	fast	fast	roast organic chicken with lots of crispy skin, red wine, chicken fat & garlic sauce, mixed veg	11-6.5
17th May	fast	fresh crab, chicken fat from last night's roast, spinach & lemon juice	crab and beetroot stalk soup w coconut cream.... chicken curry w coconut cream, wine, onion, yellow pepper, tomato, garlic, broccoli	11-5.0
18th May	Swimming Sprints and Underwater Challenges Egg, apple, kiwi	canned tuna, sardines + beetroot leaves, yellow pep, walnuts, tom, celery. Mixed nuts finisher	baked trout, kale, broccoli, carrot, onion, asparagus, red pepper, evoo	11-5.0
19th May	fast	fast	ling in c'nut cream & evoo sauce, broccoli, parsnip, carrot, yellow pep, onion, kale, asparagus	11-3.5
20th May	'Body by Science' Workout and Rowing Tabata Finisher 6 eggs, kiwi	sardines, avocado, beetroot+ its leaves	Venison Liver fried in olive oil with coconut cream, wine, steamed veg and evoo	11-4.0
21th May	fast	fast	trout with steamed broccoli, onion and kale	11-2.0