So I preface this that I know you take smart scale results with a massive grain of salt.
I’ve been using my fit2live smart scale daily since a few weeks into my IF routine. It shows a steady decrease in weight and fat. My scale outputs percentages so I covered all the values to pounds and the results confuse me somewhat.
Over the last 2 weeks my weights has gone down total 6.2 lbs, fat 3.8 lbs, muscle 1.3 lbs. But my water weight had gone up 1.2 lbs, and protein up 0.5 lbs.
I don’t really see:
how my water weight is going up if I’ve lost a decent amount of total weight
how is my protein up if my muscle weight is down?
I’m walking/jogging/hiking at least 3-4 days a week (weather permitting), doing crunches/pushups, light hand weights. So I wouldn’t think I should be loosing this much muscle weight. Is it likely my scale is miscalculating my muscle weight and saying it’s an equal water gain?
I don’t know about your specific scale, but the way these scales work, what they are measuring is how well your body transmits electricity. The more water, the better it transmits.
Muscle has more water than fat does, so if you lose fat, the percentage of water in your body will increase.
But I have no idea what your particular scale is reporting on.
You already answered your own question in your opening statement.
I’ll add a bit of context.
The way these scales work is that body conductivity tests are done on a broad range of people where they use a dunk tank to measure their body composition accurately. Different body fat percentages, muscle mass, etc and then correlated to conductivity readings. Those are programmed into the scale. The thing is that if the vendor publishes any accuracy specifications, they are always around plus or minus 20% on any reading. That’s a huge range. You cannot rely upon precise readings from these scales.
In addition, what happens when you start cutting weight and adding exercise is kind of complex. You can lose muscle mass despite exercising during weight loss, but you also can gain strength and improve quality of muscle at the same time. I really like this NIH published paper on the topic. Your real muscle mass doesn’t move the way you think it would because muscle mass and strength don’t always track.