exercise and weight gain

sham0968

I have always loved to exercise...Most of my life I have exercise...Then I went awhile without exercise because of a busy life style. Every time I exercise I gain weight. I tell myself it is muscles. One time I quit exercise and lost pounds but that could be muscle tone..I want to lose weight and be toned. Would it be better for me to lose the weight and then exercise to tone or just continue the diet and exercise routine that I am doing?

Dlibo1013

guess it depends on what you look like. If your happy ome way do that :-) Maybe try light exercises and stretching

Sharont213

whenever I take a few days off exercising, I tend to lose.. and then regain when I start. It's not muscle but actually fluid retention. Muscles hold water (actually, they are properly hydrated) when you are exercising.. stop, and you lose the water..

FitSeachely

Continue the diet and exercise routine that you are doing, just tweek it a bit. Remember, we tend to overestimate how many calories we but and underestimate how many we eat.

TrainingWithTonya

If you want to maintain muscle mass while losing fat, you have to do both exercise and good nutrition. While a lot of people will argue that you can't build muscle very fast, it is possible to build lean tissue faster then you burn fat. Notice I said "lean tissue" and not muscle. Lean tissue is anything that isn't fat. Water and glycogen are lean tissue. When you start exercising, you are training your muscles to store more glycogen to fuel that activity. When you store one part glycogen, you store it in 3 parts water. The reason is that they will both be needed to burn for fuel for those activities later. This gives that "muscle pump" that you hear about after a workout. It's actually the extra glycogen and water being shuttled to the muscles to be stored for your next workout. This may sound bad because everyone seems to want to get rid of "water weight", but honestly this is water weight you want to keep so that you can perform better in the gym next time.

The good news is that even though it seems like you are gaining weight, you aren't gaining fat. The bad news is that it takes a lot less time to get a pound of glycogen storage then it does to burn a pound of fat. This is why I tell my clients not to weigh themselves for at least a month or 6 weeks when we start a new program. I know it is discouraging to see the weight go up, but look at your body not the scale. You'll start seeing those muscles and start feeling firmer, even if the scale doesn't go in the direction you want at first. Eventually, the fat burning will catch up with your glycogen storage and the muscle you are building (because you can do that too, it's just not a lot of actual muscle fiber growth) and the scale will go down. And when it does go down, then you will see even more definition.

sham0968

Thanks that helped a lot...

CeejayGee

Remember that weight is just a number on a scale and that weight is a trend over time. You could get on the scale every day of the weak and have it say a different number, depending on how much fluid you're retaining, your time of month, whether you need to use the restroom, whether you've hada big meal, and on and on. It fluctuates and is just a number and a trend.

If you're happy exercising, do it. Why? Because it makes you healthy and that's more important than that number on the scale. Do exercises that tone you and give you the shape you want, without worrying so much about the number on the scale! Do what makes you happy.