Why am I gaining weight still?

MajorHartz

I have stayed under 1500 calories everyday for over a week with on average 2 hrs of working out a day a hour of lifting and a hour of cardio but I went up 1 pound why is this?

Alatariel75

Is the lifting new? Are you sore? I can gain 3-4lbs on the scale when I start a new workout because worked muscles retain fluid for repair. It can happen even if I'm not sore, but if I am sore - whoa nelly, does it show on the scales. It drops off again though, and it's just water weight.

yirara

And besides the correct comment above: there are so many other things that cause water retention: various points in your menstrual cycle for example. Just eating differently might have a temporary effect on your digestion, and if you poop lees commonly then that stuff is still in your intestines, and obviously has weight. Lots of other things. Really, a week is not enough. Re-evaulate after 4-6 weeks, at least from the same point to one menstrual cycle to the next if you have one.

tomcustombuilder

You need to stick program for 4 to 6 weeks to see what the outcome actually is. One week is not enough time to figure anything out water shifting around that hasn’t really been lost yet, very little fat will be lost in a week, give it some time

AnnPT77

Ups and downs are normal, even when the overall trend is downward. The overall downward trend can take 4-6 weeks to show up clearly, or at least one full menstrual cycle for people who have those. That's usually long enough to know how a new eating/activity regimen is affecting body fat levels, but in unusual circumstances it can take longer, even.

You're at two weeks? Hang in there.

One of the traps that makes people give up on weight loss that could've been successful: They freak out about the normal ups and downs, never figure out their personalized calorie needs, in some cases just keep cutting-cutting-cutting calories at every "up" until it's unsustainable. Don't do that.

Stick with your current routine, close to goal calories daily on average, like +/- 50 calories. At the end of at minimum 4-6 weeks, calculate your average weekly weight loss over the whole time period. If you have menstrual cycles, compare weight at the same relative point in at least two different cycles to calculate average weekly change. If your actual weight change rate is different from a reasonable target weight change rate, adjust your calorie goal, using the idea that 500 calories per day is a pound a week, or 1100 calories per day is a kilo a week, using arithmetic to calculate partial pounds/kilos.

That's what I mean by "personalized calorie needs". MFP, other calorie calculators, and even fitness trackers are just giving you a starting estimate that's basically the average for demographically similar people. You're a unique individual. Looking at a 4-6 week average weight change, most people will be close to the starting estimates. That's the nature of statistical averages. But a few people will be far enough different from average for that to matter, and the "why" may not be obvious.

If you don't stick with the current routine, you lose that personalization opportunity. That would be unhelpful.

Like I said, ups and downs are normal, but the trend matters. Here's a many-months graph of my initial weight loss back in 2015-16, zoomed out to show the trend:

And below is a zoom-in on roughly a couple months so you can see the scale weights. The dark, connected line is still the trend, but even it looks a little bumpier close up. My daily weights are the dots connected to the trend line. Look at the dots: Up and down, up and down, sometimes stalls. But the many-months trend was quite rapidly downward.

As a rough rule of thumb, as long as sticking with a fairly consistent eating/activity routine, multi-pound weight changes from one day to the next, or over a few days, are mostly about shifts in water retention and varying amounts of waste in our digestive system on the way to the exit. Over multiple weeks, fat loss starts to show up in the trend of weight changes. Muscle mass change is even slower, months to even years to show up as pounds on the scale, unless someone has a truly dire muscle-wasting health condition - we'd know if we had one.

Below is a good thread about understanding why the scale can lie in the short run. Especially read the article linked in the first post. I found it reassuring. Understanding the process will help you succeed in using it.

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10683010/the-weird-and-highly-annoying-world-of-scale-fluctuations

BTW, if you're new to all that heavy load of frantic exercising, slow the bus down. Over-exercising is counter-productive for weight loss. Most people burn more calories doing daily life stuff - job, chores, etc. - than they do during intentional exercising. Exercising beyond our current fitness level will cause us to rest more, move less - possibly in subtle ways, but it'll happen. When it does happen, we burn fewer calories in daily life, effectively wiping out some of the exercise calorie burn.

On top of that, too much exercise is counter-productive for fitness improvement or health, too. On the fitness front, recovery between sessions is when the magic happens, our bodies rebuilding better. The newer to exercise, the more recovery time is needed. On the health front, exercise is a physical stress. In the right amounts, it's a useful stress, worth doing. In excess, it increases stress unacceptably without achieving extra benefits. Guess what? Another thing that can increase water retention is excess stress, all-source physical and psychological stress combined, largely through the stress hormone cortisol.

People who are seriously pursuing fitness and knowledgeable about it would suggest rules of thumb like increasing exercise by no more than about 10% per week, encompassing not just duration and frequency but also intensity in that 10%. Minute for minute, intense exercise is much more fatiguing than moderate exercise, so more likely to be counter-productive when new to exercise or resuming after a long break.

I'd say: Make a plan you can stick with relatively easilyy to gradually lose your intended amount of weight over a period of months or more, learning and practicing new permanent routine habits along the way. I'm talking about foods you enjoy eating that add up to reasonable nutrition, and keep you generally full and happy at your calorie goal, plus ideally fun - but at least tolerable and practical - exercise that builds fitness gradually. That would be a big win.

Too many people show up here with a mindset like "lose weight fast so I can go back to normal", adopting some aggressive plan of revolutionizing their eating with restrictive food rules or trendy named diets on the lowest possible calories, then stacking punitively intense, miserable daily exercise on top of that. That doesn't end well, but usually does end quickly . . . and it's the recipe for yo-yo loss and regain.

I hope you're thinking about it differently from that, because a different mindset increases odds of success, especially long-term success in staying at a healthy weight.

Regardless of the path you choose, I wish you success. IME, the rewards of both reasonable fitness and a healthy weight are worth the effort required to get there.