Will weight loss stall when starting to exercise?

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creesama
creesama Posts: 125 Member
in Health and Weight Loss
These first 2 months I worked on adjusting my eating and lowering calories. This week I began to introduce cardio (elliptical) starting at just 20min each evening. This morning I'm 1lb heavier. I know that weight fluctuates and all that, but I was wondering if I should expect a weight loss stall as I start making exercise a consistent part of my life? I kinda thought I'd still lose since I'm so overweight (252lbs).

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  • Justin_7272
    Justin_7272 Posts: 341 Member
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    Agreed with @cwolfman13. When you workout and are trying to lose weight it's important to understand the difference between healthy weight loss/gain vs. unhealthy weight loss/gain. Yours is likely water retention (healthy). If you start taking creatine, for example, you'll gain weight, but it's mostly water.

    Also, one-day-differences are not a good way to judge your progress; tracking over time will give you a much better idea of your overall progress. There are plenty of apps - I use Libra, but I'm sure there are many others.
  • creesama
    creesama Posts: 125 Member
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    cwolfman13 wrote: »
    New exercise or an increase in intensity, etc will cause an inflammatory response and cause water retention to aid in repair of muscles and tissue that are being broken down. Your body needs to repair itself, so that is a good thing and natural. So yes...most people see a temporary stall and basically a new starting base point and often slower progress on the scale in general...but that doesn't mean you're not losing fat at the same rate as before...you're just consistently retaining more water.

    Ok, thanks, that's the info I was curious about. And just to clarify, I'm aware that weight fluctuates for a variety of reasons and have seen it first hand. I was just curious if the overall scale progress would start to look different now that I'm adding a new factor (exercise) into my routine. And it was up the last 3 days I've weighed, so it's not like a 1 day thing. But yes, my overall trend has been down and will hopefully continue to trend down with exercise coming in to play
  • Jthanmyfitnesspal
    Jthanmyfitnesspal Posts: 3,521 Member
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    @cwolfman13 is certainly correct if you really did something that stressed your muscles and made them inflamed. I've experienced it many times! But, elliptical is such a fantastic low-impact workout, it might not be a significant effect. Sometimes you will get an immediate down-tick in weight due to fluid loss.

    I find some benefit from working out in the morning before breakfast (although, working out at any time of day is fine). This isn't magic, it's just that I become more energetic on days where I work out in the morning causing me to move around more. Also, I find that I enjoy breakfast all the more after a work out and I tend to eat more mindfully.
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 32,178 Member
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    creesama wrote: »
    cwolfman13 wrote: »
    New exercise or an increase in intensity, etc will cause an inflammatory response and cause water retention to aid in repair of muscles and tissue that are being broken down. Your body needs to repair itself, so that is a good thing and natural. So yes...most people see a temporary stall and basically a new starting base point and often slower progress on the scale in general...but that doesn't mean you're not losing fat at the same rate as before...you're just consistently retaining more water.

    Ok, thanks, that's the info I was curious about. And just to clarify, I'm aware that weight fluctuates for a variety of reasons and have seen it first hand. I was just curious if the overall scale progress would start to look different now that I'm adding a new factor (exercise) into my routine. And it was up the last 3 days I've weighed, so it's not like a 1 day thing. But yes, my overall trend has been down and will hopefully continue to trend down with exercise coming in to play

    Psychologically, IMO, it can be helpful to make a distinction between fat loss (or a fat loss stall) and scale-weight loss (or a scale-weight stall). While the scale weight is easy to measure, the fat loss is what we really care about, right?

    Increasing exercise will not slow/stall fat loss, unless we dramatically over-estimate exercise calories, and eat back every overestimated one of them. Increasing exercise - as others have said - can increase water retention, so mask your ongoing fat loss in the scale-weight measurement.

    The fat loss is about calories.

    At this point (5 years of logging, 4+ years of maintenance), I'm pretty comfortable trusting the process. A few months back, I decided to undertake losing a few vanity pounds super-slowly, like a pound a month. At the beginning of this month, after a long-ish hiatus, I resumed some weight training (but just a small amount). For nearly 3 weeks, my Libra (weight trending app) trend line said I was actually *gaining* weight. I was quite sure I wasn't, based on understanding my calorie needs/logging and trusting the process, after all this time. Sure enough, in just the last few days, my trendline is going downhill again. I've still got that little bit of water retention going on - I know from past experience it'll hang around as long as I keep lifting regularly - but the ultra-slow fat loss has finally been enough to unmask it on the scale.

    Hang in there. If you've been losing fat, and are following the same process now (and eating back a reasonable estimate of exercise calories) the same will happen for you - the fat loss will outpace the water retention, and you'll start seeing it on the scale again.
  • psuLemon
    psuLemon Posts: 38,391 MFP Moderator
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    To add, as a male, i tend to store 2-3 lbs consistently from exercise. Women tend to have 2-5 lbs IME. And then throw in hormones and it can add a few more.

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