To start, my last one hour exercise session was Friday. It's Tuesday now and haven't been to the gym/exercising since then. When exercising, I didn't see my weight go down a lot, but after some days of not doing it and drinking a LOT more water than usual, I've been losing more weight than when I exercise. Is this water retention (I'm not fully sure on what this actually is) finally leaving my body, is it water weight coming off, etc? I can't fully justify why I wasn't at the gym because it's mainly excuses, but the one major reason was because today I'm leaving for a two week trip and was busy packing/shopping.

To add, my eating habits have been going down-hill (not by a lot, but still) since Friday night. A couple of days I've been eating (breadsticks) at midnight and wake up later to find out I've lost weight and haven't gained. Shouldn't this be the other way around?

I'm not going to stop exercising because of this (I don't know if my body needed this long period of rest to lose weight or something) due to the fact that one of these days if I keep the bad habits going from the past few days then I will surely gain more weight.

Weight yesterday morning was 171.6. Today's weight is 169.4. And I ate pizza at midnight....(But I also drank a lot of water?)

Any help is appreciated greatly!

You really can't tell anything about how your weight loss plan is working based upon a few days of data.

So, so, so many factors determine your fluid retention on a particular day, and most of these are out of your control. Factors like the weather, humidity, how hydrated or dehydrated you have been over the past few days, your hormonal cycle, sodium intake over the past few days, your muscles' state of fatigue, and on and on.

With all that variability, you just cannot draw meaningful conclusions over the space of a few days. "I stopped/started exercising and a few days later I saw _______" or "I ate/didn't eat such-and-such and a few days later I saw _______" are correlations but they are not necessarily causative. People are so tempted to draw conclusions on such a short time scale but those conclusions are more likely than not to be specious and misleading.

It really takes as much as 4-6 weeks to detect the effect that a change on behavior has on your rate of fat loss. If you stopped exercising for a month, and didn't change anything else in your behavior, and then came in with observations about how that affected your rate of weight loss averaged over that entire month, you might have observations worth acting on. But a few days? No.

that happened to me once too...last winter i took a three day break from exercising because we traveled for a funeral...i barely ate while there, due to being extremely busy the whole time...when i got home i found that i had dropped TEN POUNDS in just 3 days...and it stayed off, never to return, not even when i started eating as usual and exercising as usual...i'm still not sure what to make of that LOL

You have to look at your weight loss on a bigger scale... I know, I weigh every day too and obsess about it.
About the breadsticks and pizza... I think your body requires a good amount of water to store the glycogen in carbs. You may be having some water retention from that.

I have always noticed this pattern that you describe. If I stop exercising for a few days, I get a whoosh of weight loss. I have no idea why that is. I have been exercising consistently, so I haven't experienced that in awhile because I haven't taken a break. This phenomenon does happen to me, though.

Weight loss isn't so predictable. And I think more cumulative than a few days. Yes, after exercise the body/muscles retain fluids so there may be a bump up, but to really see the result of effort takes more than a few days. Just keep living as healthy a lifestyle as possible and you'll see results - if you are consistent over the long haul.

I wish!