I has a nasty stomach bug about 10 days ago and having started with a ‘cold’ I dosed up on Sudafed and raced cyclocross at the weekend. BIG MISTAKE!!!

I have been bed ridden for the last 3 days and having been told by my wife I was looking like Tom Hanks in Philedelphia I weighed myself to discover I’ve lost 7 pounds in a week, I was lean anyway so this is mostly muscle.

To be fair I’ve not eaten a great deal in all that time but its does seem a lot; anyone lost similar? How long til you put it back on? And how long would you give it before you started riding again?

You’ll be surprised how much of that loss is water

Yep, returned from abroad saturday from Sunday to Wed was spent unwell, 7lbs lost. Mainly water but ate nothing so some muscle mass has gone. Too knackered to get out and see how much of an effect this has had.(Fell asleep the moment i got home from first day back at work.)

Have had a few viruses in the past, and usually they affect my weight quite badly. As a slim guy with a fast metabolism anyway, I rely on eating quite a few more calories than most would to maintain a weight.

The worst I had though was dropping from 10st 7 to 9st 11 in 72 hours once. 10lb in 3 days was pretty drastic, but don’t think I managed to consume anything with any calorific value (or at least it didn’t stay in me more than 2 minutes) in that time, and I was sweating a lot too as you can imagine, so lost a lot of water too.

The good news was it didn’t take all that long to put the weight back on after, maybe a couple of weeks tops, by which time I was back to riding my bike fine.

I just had a dose of food poisoning or some virus with similar symptoms, lost 6kg in a day and a half. That’s about 5% bodyweight per day! I figure it’s mostly fluid, as chojin said. The weight’s going back on slowly as I recover.