Weight maintaining, body fat % going up?

Cinarocket
Cinarocket Posts: 49 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
Per FitBit Smart scale.

This has been the trend for a couple weeks now, I'm not hugely worried but it is a small concern.

I've been in maintenance stage for a few weeks now which basically results in me eating more (averaging 2500 instead of 2000 or so) and consuming more junk food which I almost never did when I was losing weight.

In one sense I'm not surprised one metric of the scale is going up because I can't realistically expect that the transition would be as easy as going from a lot of exercise, healthy food to little exercise and a lot more junk food without ramifications but my weight has been around the same (which makes sense because despite eating junk food a lot more often I often am not far from 2500kcal which is what is required to maintain).

Not familiar with how body fat % so wondering what are likely the causes and consequences of such a trend? I'm willing to question the way I approach maintenance because the way i've been it's basically 3 cheat days a week instead of 1 and I know it's not ideal but hey it's holiday period!

Below I've posted the graphs of both weight and body fat % and you can observe that after losing weight i've been stabilizing for a couple weeks and after losing body fat i've been going up for the same last couple weeks (going from 17% to nearly 20)

40bb290ea75bbef11560461f7db51c76.png
cf6fd657667ab88e6c7888f738168c0d.png

Thanks in advance and merry christmas everyone.

Replies

  • neanderthin
    neanderthin Posts: 10,201 Member
    Water retention from glycogen stores in muscle is calculated as muscle and when weight is lost glycogen is reduced appearing to be an increase in body fat. If your not weight training you may have lost some muscle in tandem with some weight loss, but generally speaking body fat calculators are not very accurate and the mirror has always been a good indicator for me.
  • aylajane
    aylajane Posts: 979 Member
    edited December 2014
    I have a fitbit aria scale as well, and it works pretty accurately when you have a lot of fat. Once you get leaner, it loses accuracy. THere is an "athletic" mode that is a little better. But basically once you hit a decent body fat it stops "working". Here is my story with it --
    http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10033546/dexa-scan-one-year-results-have-to-tell-someone

    Bottom line - use measurements and pics at this point. If you need accuracy, get a dexa or other more reliable type measurement.
  • ndj1979
    ndj1979 Posts: 29,136 Member
    scales that measure body fat % are widely inaccurate…as long as your weight is going down it means you are losing fat …worry about that number and not the body fat% number...
  • katherine_startrek_fan
    katherine_startrek_fan Posts: 425 Member
    ndj1979 wrote: »
    scales that measure body fat % are widely inaccurate…as long as your weight is going down it means you are losing fat …worry about that number and not the body fat% number...

    I agree with this.

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