Why am I gaining?!

emilyarobbins048

I have been eating healthy and I even started CrossFit 3x a week at least. Why am I gaining weight instead of loosing it? Feeling blah.

AnnPT77

I hear your frustration, and understand! Stick with it, it can be complicated.

Eating healthy alone doesn't trigger weight loss. I've been vegetarian for 50+ years, ate healthy - veggies, fruits, whole grains. Got overweight then obese. Even being active with exercise doesn't assure weight loss. I finally started being routinely active after cancer treatment in my late 40s, training pretty hard 6 days most weeks, even competing as an athlete (not always unsuccessfully in age group comps).

I stayed class obese for another dozen years, eating healthy and working out hard.

What worked for me? Getting calorie intake to the right level, consistently, on average. I reached a healthy weight in just under a year, have been at a healthy weight, s since, now 69. Am I telling you that will work for you? I don't know. It seems to work for quite a few people here, but some say it doesn't work for them.

One thing I would say: If it's been less than 4-6 weeks (or one full menstrual cycle if you have those), and the Crossfit is new, there's a reasonable chance you're seeing some gain from water retention for muscle repair, plus from other normal causes. On top of that, if "eating healthy" implies a shift from lots of refined, processed food products to mostly veggies, fruits, lean proteins, whole grains, then there's a probability of weightier waste on average in the digestive tract, too.

Fast fat loss - 2 pounds a week on the scale - is only about 4.6 ounces of fat loss per day. Normal water fluctuations from one day to the next are multi-pound. I've had swings up to 6 pounds literally overnight, and I've seen people here report bigger ones. Water fluctuations are part of how a healthy body stays healthy. They know what they're doing: We don't want to try to mess with that. If you didn't cumulatively eat enough calories over the time period for that weight gain to be fat - at roughly 3500 calories per pound - then what's showing up on the scale isn't fat. Water/waste can play peek-a-boo on the scale with fat loss for up to several weeks.

If it hasn't been that 4-6 weeks/one cycle, hang in there and see where your average weekly loss lands over that whole time period.

If it has been that long, some things to consider:

Tighten up food logging, to include every bite, lick, taste, cheat/treat day, beverages, condiments, dressings, oils used in frying, and oopsie bad days if there are any. Don't use other peoples full-dish entries in the database, things like "ham sandwich" or "meat lasagna" or even "fried egg". We don't know how much or little cheese, oil, mayo, etc., they used compared to what we're eating. Log what you actually ate, your recipe or meal details. If you do need to use those entries occasionally like if you ate dinner at a friend's house, pick a middling to high calorie entry from the database to estimate, ideally one with a serving size that's specific, not "one piece", so you can adjust to be closer to the amount you actually ate. Ideally, use a food scale: It's quicker and easier, not just more accurate, once you know the tricks.

If you're logging the Crossfit and eating back those calories, reality test the exercise estimate. Look at multiple sources for estimates, or ask experienced people here. It's fine to eat back exercise calories - I eat every single one, have for almost 10 years - but over-estimating them at first is a common problem. (Yes, some of the MFP database entries are probable over-estimates.) Besides that, if the Crossfit is enough exercise load to leave you fatigued afterward, that can reduce daily life movement and reduce calorie burn from that part of life, effectively wiping out part of the exercise calories.

Consider whether your calorie goal might be higher than ideal. It's important not to under-eat, because that's counter-productive. But it's useful to understand that MFP, other calorie calculators, or even fitness trackers are just giving us estimates that are based on the average calorie need for similar people. Individuals vary, can be somewhat higher or lower than those estimates. (MFP and my good brand/model fitness tracker - one that estimates well for others who've reported here - is 25-30% off for me, compared with 9+ years of personal logging/weight history.) It's not the commonest cause of no loss, slow loss, or too-fast loss, but it can happen.

Even a calorie level that worked in the past may not work now. Our lives change, our bodies change, so our calorie needs can change.

Logging is a surprisingly subtle skill. Most of us who've been doing it for a while have had serious face-palm moments when we realized we'd been making some systematic oversight or error. This is an offer, not a demand: If you want to open up your diary to the MFP public and say so here, maybe some of the experienced people will take a look and see if anything like that jumps out. Generally, people who look at diaries in this kind of context want to help and are kind, though you might hear some nutritional concerns or something from people who care about you despite being strangers.

Generally, weight loss is like a fun, productive science fair experiment for grown-ups: We try some things, evaluate the results, adjust the methods until we see the results we want.

If you stick with this for a long time, track meticulously, maybe cut calories a bit further for several weeks, and still see no loss or gain instead, maybe schedule a visit with your doctor. There are various health conditions that can influence or cause weight gain. Hypothyroidism is a common one, especially among women. (FWIW, I'm severely hypothyroid, too.)

I think you can figure this out, if you stick with it. I'm cheering for you to succeed!

elisa123gal

It is irritating for sure. The fitness part is going to pay off.. and the food part.. I guess you have to tweak. I'm going through the same thing. I've looked hard at what I'm doing and found a few things I can do differently. It is frustrating, because there has been effort but no pay off. Funny, how in our minds; when we try hard we think we should automatically get rewarded. But that is not the case with weight loss. unfortunately.

PAV8888

How far into the overweight+ range are you? How much of a deficit and loss do you expect to be seeing and over what sort of time frame? How do you weigh yourself and how are you determining your current weight level?

With really intense exercise (and cross fit qualifies) you're way more likely to see exercise related water weight changes.

Unless you BOTH have a quantity of energy reserves such they they can support a large deficit and you are actually applying such a large deficit*, your exercise related fluctuations are more likely than not to make it very hard for you to figure out your weight level in anything but the longer term.

*and it would be a *not* great idea to apply a large deficit if your body does not have sufficient energy reserves, especially if you're also trying to perform intense exercise

Would suggest using a weight trend app and patiently going about doing things you intend to do long term, for years at a time (not months)

And, of course, healthy food eating is not a guarantee of caloric deficit leading to fat reserve loss. It probably helps manage calories. But doesn't automatically achieve this.