Help! I Gained More Weight :(

[Guest]

I have just started exercising and cutting back calories. I have been doing this for like 3 weeks and I actually gained 5 pounds. I am so disappointed. How can this be? I am actually trying harder than ever before, and I GAINED weight. Whats going on here?

 

[Harold14370]

I can think of a few possible reasons. 1. If you are a woman, you can gain and lose quite a bit of water weight in the course of a month. 2. You weighed yourself on two different scales, or you bumped the zero adjustment on your scale and knocked it out of adjustment. 3. You are miscounting your calories and eating more than you think.

 

[Guest]

Yeah its possible that I am miscounting the calories..thats all I can think of. I just use fitday.com and maybe the amounts I am putting is off or its not the exact piece of food etc.

It might be the water weight. I dont think its anything to do with the scale because I am very conscious when I weigh myself. Its always in the morning and its always on a flat surface and I make sure I start off on zero.

Its just frusterating but I am not about to give up. I am going to watch my calories even more and make sure I am eating the right amount. Thank you for your response.

 

[Hoping2BThinAgain]

What your status? as in height, weight, and body fat?
how many calories are your having? are you into macros?
what kind of exercises are you doing?
are you drinking enough water?

 

[Guest]

I am 28/female, 5'2 and 205lbs. I used to be 200lbs when I started 3 weeks ago. I used to eat 2300 calories a day and cut it down to about 1650 calories per day. I ate 1650 calories a day for 3 weeks. I walked for about 1.5 hours a day 5 times a week. That is my typical exercise.

I am not sure what macros are...but my body fat percentage is very high. About 43% I think. The reason I know this is because when I looked into joining a gym 3 months ago, they did all my tests.

I drink like 4 glasses of water..which I know is not enough, but its am improvement for me.

 

[Engage4Life]

Your calorie intake is good to lose weight as long as your still eating healthy and do you take into account what your drinking? One soda has over 200 calories in it. I calculated it out once I had to run one 8 minute mile to burn off one soda.

Try walking incline on a treadmill it burns calories faster then running did for me. I would also advise doing in home aerobics. High interval training melts fat away but might be too tough for people just starting out. Remember too you don't really start to burn fat until 20 minutes in to your work out. Walking by itself really doesn't do that much unless your walking like 5 miles a day.

Make sure you stretch before and after you can even hurt yourself just walking too much.

Everything you swallow has calories food or drink. People tend to over look the drinks when counting calories.

 

[clever_plant]

Okay, there might be some basic consequenses of exercise and more but not enough water going on

If you're unused to the exercise in general you will increase the amount of blood in your body during the initial period of exercising, since... well... moar blood is guut for work hard!

Also if you're drinking more water than usual, but not quite enough for your needs, your body might be hanging on to that water like there is no tomorrow

I'd say give it a month and see, oh.. and macros is insider super hawt fancy talk for getting a healthy varied diet with "the stuff the body needs" or, proteins, carbs and fatty acids.

micros are the more hardcore lvl 5+ things your body needs.. like trace minerals, vitamins etc.

neither should really impact your ability to loose weight, I mean... I believe steve started the notion that you can always look at anorexics, those people ALWAYS loose weight, and they don't give a flying fuck about micros macros or anything else

 

[mizzie]

Yeah its possible that I am miscounting the calories..thats all I can think of. I just use fitday.com and maybe the amounts I am putting is off or its not the exact piece of food etc.

One thing to think of, are you actually weighing or measuring your food? I use fitday as well, but I have noticed that one serving of chicken breast (for example) on fitday is 4 oz. Well, when I buy chicken breasts there are three for a 1 pound package, so each is about 5.3 oz on average. That's 1.3 servings, not one.

If you eat an extra 1/3 of everything without knowing it, it's really easy to gain weight when you think you should lose. You could actually be eating 2145 calories rather then 1650! Ok, that's a generalization, but the reality is that it's really easy to under estimate calories even when you track them.

I don't know if you eat cold cereal, but that's another one that's horrible for under estimating. An average "bowl" of cereal is actually like 3-4 servings! You really need to measure it at least, although weighing on a kitchen scale is more accurate.

Of course, I doubt you'd gain 5 pounds of fat in that time even with under estimating your calories, so it is possible that it's water weight as well. Get more water and be very careful of portion sizes.