Don't forget the glycogen fuel stored in your body

The other thing to keep in mind when you're using the bathroom scale is that when you first start limiting your calories, your body is going to start burning through its glycogen stores. Glycogen is basically a fuel stored in your body. It stores sugars together with water and locks them up in the tissues and organs of your body like an energy battery, ready for you to use at a future time.

There's water locked in with those calories. That water weighs a lot. So when you start restricting your calories, the first thing your body burns is this extra storage of energy, this extra glycogen. And the glycogen causes you, as it's burned, to shed water. You might look at the scale and think, gee, I lost 5 lbs, but you really lost no body fat whatsoever. It was just water, because your body released glycogen. What usually happens to people when their glycogen store has reached zero is they get really hungry, they think they're in a starvation panic, and then they overeat. Their glycogen stores fill right back up, they gain the 5 lbs back, and usually they overate to such an extent that they store another half a pound of body fat or so. Now they're half a pound heavier than when they began and they lost no body fat whatsoever. It was just a game of glycogen and water storage they saw reflected on the bathroom scale.
Bathroom scales are useless
So ignore the bathroom scale. It is not useful for telling you how successful you are in losing body fat. I don't use one at all. The only measure you should use is a "fat scale" or a caliper. A caliper is the best way to measure body fat. Body fat calipers measure the thickness of body fat in key locations around your body. For men, one location is on the upper pectoral area, another is the midsection and the third is on the top of the quadriceps of the leg. For women it's the back of the arm, the midsection and along the hip.

However, you've got to learn how to use a caliper correctly if you want it to be an accurate indicator of fat loss success. I just mention it as a tool for people who are really serious about losing fat. People who use bathroom scales to figure out how much weight they've lost are just playing a silly game of deception -- the bathroom scale is useless. I mean, you could lose bone mass and you'd still look like you were having lots of progress on the bathroom scale.

How do you lose bone mass? Easy: you stop engaging in exercise, stop walking, stop running. If you do all that (which I'm not recommending, by the way), then you would start to lose bone mineral density, and that would be reflected as weight loss. When you say you want to lose weight, be careful what you ask for. Your body has a number of ways to lose weight that have nothing whatsoever to do with losing body fat or enhancing your overall state of health.

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