Daily Smart Fact #32: Why You’re Fattest at Night and Skinniest in the Morning

Takeaway: You lose more than a pound every night from breathing.  That’s because you breathe in oxygen (O2) and breathe out carbon dioxide (CO2 – two oxygen atoms plus a carbon atom), “so there’s an extra carbon atom leaving in every round trip.”

I like weighing myself.  Call it my own personal body experiment, but I enjoy seeing the fluctuations of my weight throughout the day – in the morning, after I eat, before/after I go to the restroom, right at night.  It might sound obsessive, but I’m not trying to lose weight – it’s just fascinating to observe the fundamentals of input/output on your own body. Eat a POUND of cheese?  Yeah, you’ve just gained an immediate pound.  Drink 24 oz of water?  Yeah, you just gained 24 oz. on that scale.

Anyway, I stumbled upon a neat article that my friend (hi Li!) posted on Facebook and found it intriguing: Every Night You Lose More Than a Pound While You’re Asleep (For the Oddest Reason).  Basically, this guy records himself over a couple of days weighing himself at night and then again in the morning, wearing the same clothes.  He interviews people and eats hamburgers and goes to the bathroom, fun stuff.  Not the most rigorous scientific experiment.  But his finding at the end is that, just breathing at night, thousands of breaths over a typical 8-hour sleep, results in us losing about a pound or more just from the extra carbon that gets expelled.

Daily Smart Fact #10: Get off the couch! Sitting can actually kill you.

Key Takeaway: Sitting for more than 6 hours a day raises the death rate for men by 20% and for women a whopping 40%.

I started wearing a pedometer about 2 months ago at the beginning of Lent, because I was tired of being such a lazy bum.  At the tender age of 29, I’ve been having a lot of lower back pain and I made a correlation that on the days I did nothing but sit and stare at a computer, my lower back would kill me by the end of the day.  When I started wearing my pedometer, I was walking less than 2000 steps a day (I can’t even tell you how many steps because I’m embarrassed).  Now I’m walking over 7,000 steps a day and I actually feel better!  Wearing a pedometer, besides making me look incredibly dorky, makes me conscious of my inactivity.

Anyway, so I started doing some digging around about inactivity and found this New York Times article Is Sitting a Lethal Activity? Here’s some cool points below:

• Why do some people who consume the same amount of food as others gain more weight?  The answer is that people who didn’t gain weight were unconsciously moving around more (not exercise, just simply moving more).
• Men who spent 6 hours or more per day sitting had an overall death rate that was 20 percent higher than men who sat for 3 hours or less
• For women, the death rate was about 40 percent higher

When you are sitting:

• electrical activity in the muscle drops – “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse”
• your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute
• insulin effectiveness drops within a single day
• the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises
• the risk of being obese rises

So…if that doesn’t motivate you to sit less than I don’t know what will! Walk, fidget, jump, take multiple stretching breaks…JUST MOVE!