Losing fat gaining muscle?

oliviajohn1

I have been focusing a lot on losing weight over the last 2 months. The scale went down quite quickly at the start but then stayed at the same number for about a month even though there were obvious differences when looking in the mirror and I was being told how much weight I have lost. I have also been using a body composition scale (I know this is not always completely accurate so I take it with a pinch of salt). It has fluctuated quite a bit but the overall trend has been a decrease in body fat (around 3%) and an increase of skeletal muscle (31% - 34%). Could this explain why the scale often remains the same for a long time while I continue to see differences or is this too little of a difference to affect that?

AnnPT77

What's your exercise routine like?

For a woman faithfully doing a good, progressive strength training program (i.e., weight lifting or equivalent), getting adequate protein specifically and good nutrition generally, who's relatively young with favorable genetics, and who is eating in a calorie surplus (not deficit), but not taking performance enhancing drugs, a really good rate of muscle mass gain would be about a quarter pound of new muscle mass per week (twice that for males).

Any of those criteria that don't match what you're doing would reduce the the potential probable rate of muscle mass growth, so make it less than 0.25 pounds per week, perhaps much less.

Very few people would consider a quarter pound of fat loss per week a satisfying result, for fat loss. So, it's very unusual for any likely rate of muscle gain to outpace any satisfying rate of fat loss.

I'm not in a position to say what did or didn't happen for you, but the odds aren't great that muscle mass is the explanation for an unsatisfying weight loss rate over a period of a month, especially for a woman.

You may in fact be losing fat; water weight fluctuation can hide that on the scale for a suprising period of time. Or, you may have something going on with calorie intake (eating) estimation, and are eating close to maintenance.

This might give you some insight into that water-fluctuation possibility, if you haven't already read it:

https://physiqonomics.com/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-weight-and-fluctuations

Best wishes!