Weight gain

emmaburns1982

Hello my name is Emma and I’ve been using the App since august and it’s been great. Since Christmas, I upped my exercise from just walking everyday to both walking and cycling every day and I’ve been eating less than1400 calories yet I’m gaining weight , it’s been deflating and upsetting . I don’t know what to do it’s knocking my confidence a lot.

csplatt

Over how many days / weeks are the numbers going up? By how much? Could be normal fluctuations.

springlering62

How carefully -and honestly- are you logging?

Are you using grams or imperial measuring cups and spoons?

springlering62

And help us with height, current weight, age?

AnnPT77

Good questions and ideas above.

If we're talking a little over a month, some water retention from adding cycling could still be in the picture, masking some fat loss on the scale. That should level out soon, though, if happening.

How fast were you losing before on 1400 calories, or were you doing something different before Christmas? Usually a gradual decline in loss rate suggests some logging issues or other reasons we're unexpectedly eating maintenance calories when loss finally stops. If losing at a good rate on a certain calorie level, then a sudden stop, it would make more sense to look at other factors.

I'd suggest giving a little thought to your daily life activity level before vs. now, too. For example, if you were doing a lot of rushing around, shopping, decorating, etc., before the holidays, and days are now quite a bit more low-key, that can make a surprisingly big difference. Personally, I usually do less in Winter generally, since it's cold/snowy here so I'm not doing yard/garden work, going to outdoor events that involve activity for fun, etc., so I burn fewer calories. Step counts don't necessarily paint the full picture.

In addition, how big a jump in exercise load was adding the cycling? If we make a big jump, there's a thing called "exercise calorie compensation" that can happen. At root, it's that the extra exercise is a little too much for our current fitness level, causes fatigue (possibly subtle), so we do less in daily life and rest more. That effectively wipes out some calorie burn from daily life activities. The amount of it can be quite individual.

Some symptoms of exercise calorie compensation can be things like cooking simpler meals, deferring effort-intensive home projects, reducing interest in non-exercise hobbies that involve some movement, and that sort of thing. There can even be a little down-regulation in resting metabolism. It can be easy not to notice! Usually, fitness experts recommend increasing exercise load by not much more than 10% or so per week, in a context where "load" considers all of frequency, duration, and intensity as well as newness to us of that exercise type.

In addition to good questions and thoughts from folks above, most of us who've been logging for a while have found systematic ways we've been under-logging our calories unintentionally. Logging can be a surprisingly subtle skill!

This next is an offer, not a demand: If you'd like some of the experienced old-timers here to take a look at your food log and see if any logging issues jump out, open your diary to other MFP people and post here to say that you've done that. IME, people are not going to be mean or play "gotcha", they'll just point out things they've stumbled over themselves that caused their logging to be less accurate. Some may suggest some food choices that have helped them, or something like that, but the overall intent is helpfulness, not criticism. We're all human, so most of us have had sub-par days, times when we didn't want to log what we ate so have gaps, etc.

I'm confident that you can figure this out, and make progress, if you keep pursuing it. Only giving up the effort leads to not succeeding.

Best wishes!