GAINING weight, please help.

Open your diary and provide more info

Alright, I admit I need help. I eat healthy (with a few exceptions that I give myself so I do not go overboard!) and I exercise almost everyday. Since I have started trying to loose weight I have gained weight. It has been a few weeks since I started and there has been absolutely NO weight loss. None what so ever. Does anyone have any suggestions, please? I currently weigh 180 (as of this afternoon) and a few weeks ago I weighed 177. I have been trying to loose baby weight.....but I had my baby 7 months ago. I know that I have not logged in every single day, but the days that I have not logged in are very similar to the day before or after.

Not logging daily could be part of the problem.

Are you weighing and measuring everything you eat on the days that you do log? Do you take into account dressings, cooking oil, liquid calories, etc.?

take your measurements. If your exercising daily there is something happening. Good luck. this is not an overnight fix. drink lots of water, watch your salt, eat what you want in moderation.

Then you're likely not in a deficit and are overestimating your burns or underestimating your food.

Log every day. Weigh your food. Be consistent.

Are you strength training? If so, increase your reps & lower the weight. You may be building muscle too fast. Make sure you're not starving yourself. Workouts take a lot of calories so make sure you replenish some of them, otherwise your body may be going into starvation mode and hanging onto the fat. The next point is a little awkward but very important. Make sure you are getting enough fiber & water in your diet. Not pooing enough or drinking enough water will make it harder to lose weight. If you are "backed up", try drinking hot green tea with peppermint. It's great for your digestion, just don't drink it every day.

It is about calories in vs calories out, but nutrition goes a long way too. I looked through about the last week of your food - all sugar (pop tarts) and pasta (lasagna x 5). I only saw one entry for anything vegetable related (lettuce at breakfast for 5 cals) and very little fresh fruit. Instead of worrying about the scale, spend a week or two trying to clean up your diet and eat a better variety of fruits and vegetables and try to limit the pasta. Get more fiber - at least add in more whole grains. Just some friendly suggestions

Are you strength training? If so, increase your reps & lower the weight. You may be building muscle too fast. Make sure you're not starving yourself. Workouts take a lot of calories so make sure you replenish some of them, otherwise your body may be going into starvation mode and hanging onto the fat. The next point is a little awkward but very important. Make sure you are getting enough fiber & water in your diet. Not pooing enough or drinking enough water will make it harder to lose weight. If you are "backed up", try drinking hot green tea with peppermint. It's great for your digestion, just don't drink it every day.

You have been here since 2011 and you still think these myths are true? I'm very surprised.

OP, you are probably underestimating your caloric intake and overestimating your calories burned by exercise, as others have said.

Don't give up. Just try to accurately measure your food and use a heart rate monitor to get a more accurate burn.

Weight loss is 80% eating less and 20% exercise.

Set a calorie target and try to stay within it for couple of weeks. If you still gain weight, reduce your target. If you lose weight, you know you are doing something right and continue. Very important to log all your calories, with the right meal portions.

Eat more protein and fats and less carbs to get that feeling of eating right.

Building muscle too fast?
Starvation mode?
Not pooing enough?

I just died laughing at my desk! I LOVE Castle! Thanks for this!!! LOL :laugh:

Are you strength training? If so, increase your reps & lower the weight. You may be building muscle too fast. Make sure you're not starving yourself. Workouts take a lot of calories so make sure you replenish some of them, otherwise your body may be going into starvation mode and hanging onto the fat. The next point is a little awkward but very important. Make sure you are getting enough fiber & water in your diet. Not pooing enough or drinking enough water will make it harder to lose weight. If you are "backed up", try drinking hot green tea with peppermint. It's great for your digestion, just don't drink it every day.

^^^^^LOL Agree!!!!!!!!! :noway:

Your diary still isn't open.

I'm going to go with underestimating your calories as well. If you open your diary though we might be able to point out possible sources of inaccuracies. Make sure you use a scale, not just measuring cups. Include everything. Find the database entries with no asterisk whenever possible because those are the entries that are most accurate. If you're going to have an omelet, instead of finding "omelet" in the database, you log "2 whole egg raw, 100 grams cheddar cheese, 50 grams portabella mushrooms, 1 tsp oil" etc.

Let me make a couple of suggestions.

If it passes your lips it goes in your food diary. More importantly is that it be reasonably accurate in your estimate. That may mean you have to measure some stuff so that you incorporate in your mind what a "serving size" really is. As I discovered that "big bowl" of ice cream is not a serving size...it is 3-5 servings. That little dessert dish that can only hold half a cup of liquid, thats a serving of ice cream.

You can get all the way down to weighing food (I do now, more out of curiosity for maintenance than for weight loss. All of my weight loss was done without weighing portions, just estimating from serving sizes described on packages).

We tend to focus on food and food intake, so let me suggest another tactic...a minimum period of time (per day and per week) for exercise. And I mena working up a sweat and getting the heartrate going type of exercise. A heartrate monitor is good for both strength training where it is hard to estimate energy output from strength training and from some other exercises. For example, the rule of thumb of 100 calories per mile for walking at a relatively brisk pace is not going to be that far off unless you are climbing long steep grades or walking with a weighted pack.

Your heartrate, if you set the monitor up correctly, is a good surrogate for that.

My own experience is that for most walking my energy output per mile is about 20-30% less than the 100 calories/mile. That probably was not true when I first started a few years ago. But my cardiovascular efficiency has improved so much that my resting heartrate is now in the range of 54-58 bpm. And when I am walking with my heartrate monitor on a rate of less than 125 bpm is pretty common. Step up the pace to a little over 4.1 miles per hour and I can get it into the 135-140 range. It takes jogging/running to get into the 150's-160's.

I ran a road race a few weeks ago at an average 155 bpm with an approximate 10:50/mile pace (I say approximate because I stopped for a period of time as well as walked/ran on the Cooper River Bridge in Charleston, SC to take some incredible pictures. Once I cleared the towers and some of the more impressive shots on the bridge, I returned to running all the way to the end of the race).

But when I throw a pack on my back with 30-40 pounds and go trekking up and down hills I can get my heartrate up into th 140 range. And hiking in the steeper foothills and mountains I can get my heartrate back into the 150-160 range. Without that heartrate data, ac ouple of my programs would badly underestimate the output. A couple slightly over estimate the backpacking but not by very much (surprisingly).

You can weigh yourself daily for a couple of months to see what kind of weight pattern you are displaying (variability) but that migt alos drive you crazy. Sometimes it is just easy to weigh once per week (so time, same place, same scale, same clothing (or none at all as I do). Finally, measure yourself. Chest, waist, hips, upper thighs, calves, upper arms and neck no more frequently than once every two weeks and probably best to be about once per month. I pick the last Sunday morning of each month. A half-inch here, a half-inch there doesn't seem like much but it adds up and it may confirm clothes lossening up even if you are not loosing weight.

I did not drop any weight during 2011 (at 190) and yet my waist size dropped by 4 inches and my chest size dropped by at least 2 AND I wasn't logging my food intake (yet). But I was logging my activity level so that I maintained some target activity level throughout each week of the year.

It isn't a race but you will get there if you really choose it for yourself and don't let yourself "off the hook."