Why did I gain weight?

[benjaminsweet]

I've been dieting and exercising regularly, and I'm not sure why I gained weight this week.

Exercise I do is mostly running, skiing, walking, a tiny bit of using the rowing machine, and shooting hoops. My diet is really just trying to watch my calories and eating primarily stuff that's good for me. This week I definitely had more coffee with cream + sugar than usual, but it seems to be an awful lot of weight gain for that.

I always weigh-in wearing the same thing every week, and after I use the bathroom, etc. etc.

More about me: male, 5'6", age 25. Goal weight of 140.0. History is below.

week 1 (starting weight): 156.0

week 2: 155.2

week 3: 152.6

week 4: 148.4

week 5: 147.4

week 6: 146.0

week 7: 143.2

week 8 (today): 146.0

Below you'll see my calories burned for this week. (Can't remember what my calorie defecit was. I know I had one, it just wasn't as much as usual.)

Obviously, the week before was a good week for weight loss. Here's what it looked like. Not too different.

As much as I want to believe this was "just muscle gain" there's not really anything pointing to that that I can see. I don't lift weights, Plus my gut seems to look a little bigger this week, lol.

[WendyB]

It could be what you ate the day before. Was there a lot of sodium? Look at your food log if you logged it.

We don't lose every week either. Next week you might have another big drop.

Just keep hanging in there

[benjaminsweet]

Yesterday I had dunkin donuts hash browns, chicken tenders w/ fries and condiments, snyder's pretzels, and yeah generally other unhealthy food. I was away for the day and forgot to bring the food I packed.

That said, I came home and drank a ton of water thinking it'd flush it out of my system.

How long does the sodium stick around?

[Skullclutter]

The sodium weight should be gone by tomorrow or the day after, in my experience.

[Runkrissy]

I also want to point out that you have lost 10 pounds in 2 months. That's freaking amazing!

[benjaminsweet]

Haha thank you!

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@Runkrissy wrote:

I also want to point out that you have lost 10 pounds in 2 months. That's freaking amazing!

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[benjaminsweet]

Just wanted to add - I normally don't sleep very well. But this past week, I'd say I slept even worse than usual. That could've been why I felt the need to drink even more coffee than usual. I've got a feeling excess coffee + poor sleep could've attributed to this as well.

[HZlauer]

I know from tracking my journey over several years, I experience weight gain for a couple of reasons. Sodium is the biggest one. Often when I eat out I'll have a spike in weight after. Even when my calorie count is low from eating soup, I'll have a spike in weight. Soups often have crazy amounts of sodium. I don't worry about that as it isn't real weight gain. You know when people return from vacation and they say, "I gained five pounds on vacation." They likely didn't really. It was just all the eating out they were doing. It generally comes off in a few days. 

I also have a spike or my weight doesn't go down when I change my workout significantly. This is is especially true if my muscles are sore. This spike for me tends to take longer to pass than a sodium spike but for me it'll drop a lot  when it does. 

You're making excellent progress. Don't let a seeming hiccup throw you off. You must be doing something right. 🙂

[HZlauer]

Also, you are approaching your goal weight and progress tends to slow down as one gets closer to their 'ideal' weight. 

[Dominique]

@benjaminsweet: it’s normal for your weight to fluctuate, and weight loss (or gain) is seldom perfectly linear. I understand some people prefer to weigh only once a week. This has some benefits, but OTOH it means you only have four values per month to work on. Another approach (which is the one I’ve adopted) is to weigh daily, but use a free service called TrendWeight that you can link your Fitbit account to. TrendWeight takes your individual daily weigh-ins (which usually are all over the place, whether you’re losing or gaining) and it draws a trendline from them. You can see an example for myself (last three months) here:

For me, this takes the guessing out of the equation: I focus on the red trendline and forget about the individual daily points.

I’m using a Fitbit Aria, which automatically syncs my weigh-ins to my account via WiFi, but if you don’t have one, you can manually input your weight in your Fitbit account and TrendWeight will retrieve the data just the same.