Ever heard the saying ‘Never assume, it makes an ass out of u and me’ ? Well this pertains to me this week...
I weigh myself every morning, not to pat or kick myself in the butt for the ups and down of the scale but to better understand myself- what the effects of the training, the quality of sleep, types of food I am having, time of month are having on my body. It’s just another tracking method in my bag of tools. So, when I woke up Monday morning, I was slightly perplexed by the 2kg weight gain that happened overnight. I know that I could not have put on 2kg of body fat overnight but could not fathom an obvious reason for the gain- I did not train over the weekend, was not coming on, on first glance did not have any foods out of the ordinary, stayed within my macros* and there wasn’t a lot of volume of food for it to be accumulated in my gut. In the past, when I did not fully understand what the ‘weight’ I was measuring represented, I would have agonised over this but having a better understanding of it now, I just recorded it and moved on.
Fast forward Thursday night and I am going out with the girls for dinner and a movie. As I also track my daily food and because I knew pretty much what I was having, I decided to log my dinner into my handy app called Cronometer. I also decided to log what I was going to have at the cinema. Now this is where ASSumptions made an ASS out of me. I was going to have a Tango ‘No Sugar’ Ice Blaster. To those who don’t know what this is, it used be be called Slush Puppies in the UK -it’s a shaved/crushed ice drink with syrup, in this case sugar free (or so I thought). I had ASSumed that it’s macros would be similar to a diet soda- negligible calories and no carbs. WRONG!!! Looking up its details (I actually had to call Slush Puppies as all the cinema sites had conflicting information), I found that a large serving of 32oz had about 25g of net carbs and most from a polyol called glycerol. I am super sensitive to polyols, my IBS goes haywire whenever I consume them. I generally do ok with sucralose or stevia but sugar alcohols like maltitol (is a big no-no), xylitol (mostly no), erythritol (sometimes no) and this glycerol was a new 'no'. Flashback Sunday, I went to the cinema with my daughter and had not only my ice blaster, but hers as well!!! Perhaps that’s what caused the weight gain/water retention? Maybe or maybe not but the take home message for me is that to never take anything for granted, double or even triple check as ASSumptions are the mother of all f&&k ups.
*Macros is basically short for macronutrients, a term used to describe the three key food groups we need for our bodies to function: proteins (to build and repair muscle), carbohydrates (to fuel energy) and fats (to keep you satiated and absorb certain minerals and vitamins).