Keto made easy

I Gained 5 Pounds Overnight on Keto: The Raw Recording Behind the Video

2017-08-02

This is the home recording of the morning I stepped on the scale five pounds heavier than the day before. It is the same take that went up on YouTube as Gained 5 Pounds Overnight on Keto?: the words match almost line for line, and the YouTube upload adds a few seconds at the open where I say hello to the group. If you want the full write-up of the video, start there. This page covers what the raw file adds and how it reads next to what I said ten months later.

In this recording

Watching this in 2026

What holds up is the instinct, not the chemistry. The chemistry at [1:08] was me thinking out loud, the machine transcript garbles it, and none of the KB's evidence pages covers the "whoosh" idea, so treat that part as my hypothesis, not a finding.

The part I'd keep is the arithmetic and the refusal to react. I had a log, I looked at it, the numbers didn't add up to fat, and I changed nothing. That's the habit.

There's a better explanation for a big-eating day showing up as water than my balloon. The electrolytes evidence page lists DeFronzo et al., 1975: insulin infusion, with blood glucose held constant, cut how much sodium, potassium and phosphate healthy men excreted in their urine (doi.org/10.1172/jci107996). A day with more food, and maybe more carbs, means more insulin, and holding on to sodium tends to mean holding on to water. That's a mechanism, not a measurement of my morning, but it fits better than triglyceride molecules swapping for water.

Then vs now

I kept making this point. In the 2018 Tough Love broadcast I said the scale had gone up three pounds one morning after dropping 3.6 the day before, that it fluctuates a lot, especially for women, and that people should measure their body with a string or a cheap impedance scale that tracks against itself (live QPOU6932). That's the same lesson with a better tool: stop asking the scale a question it can't answer from one day to the next.

What I'd add now is the bigger frame. The ketosis evidence page lists a metabolic-ward study where switching 17 men to a ketogenic diet at the same calories raised energy expenditure by about 57 kcal a day and slowed body-fat loss after the switch (Hall et al., 2016, doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.116.133561). No diet makes a five-pound swing in body fat overnight, in either direction. Fat moves slowly; water moves fast.

If your weight is swinging along with swelling, shortness of breath, or you're on blood-pressure or diabetes medication, that's a question for your doctor, not for the scale.

Key points