weight training & not losing

That can be frustrating for sure. How is your nutrition? What is your calorie goal for the day? It sounds like you just need to optimize your diet a bit. You say that you have very low carbs. Carbs (in the correct amount) are good and provide you with energy. I stick to a 40/40/20 macro ratio (protein/carb/fat). It works pretty well.

Allan

Burning 2,500 calories a day? Is that including your BMR?

Can you open your diary? Either you're overestimating your exercise or underlogging your food.

erm...looking back over your diary for the last week most days you are logging 187-600 cals eaten in total...is that right??

if so your weight loss will slow down as your body worries about where it's next meal comes from


if just not logging then it is hard to offer advice

I have to go back to the person who said about the water retention. On the days when I lift not just swim I don't lose and may even gain. Then after a couple days off I drop down again.
However, as a no carb person who has celiac's if you are doing a lower carb diet you do have to watch for hidden carbs in spices -sauces etc and high sodium as most low carb high protein foods like that pattern.
Also try drinking coconut water after you lift . It is a good diuretic but restores your electrolytes.

I know where you're coming from having recently started heavy lifting myself. The inches are dropping but the weight isn't. However I think you have just about summed it up in your last post.

Firstly have you EVER seen a size 10 woman that weighs 200lbs? I haven't so the pounds MUST come off eventually if the inches are.

Secondly WHEN you drop to a size 10, if I took your scales away from you, would you (or anybody else) even care about the weight? I know if I was wearing a size 8 bodycon dress I wouldn't care if I weighed 300lb!

Keep plodding on and results will follow, promise :flowerforyou:

Remember, weight means nothing. It is just a measure of gravity acting on the body. Go by the inches and especially the body fat percentage. Like was previously stated, whenever you add weight training you will store glycogen in the muscles in order to fuel the workouts later. That glycogen has to be stored in 3 times as much water as glycogen. This is a good form of water retention because it is required before you can actually start building actual muscle fiber size. (You have to max out the storage capacity of the existing muscle first before the body feels like it needs more muscle to do the next workout.) When you are storing this glycogen and water, and eventually adding muscle fiber proteins, you will see increases on the scale but they are much denser than body fat so they won't take up as much space as the same weight in fat. If you are losing body fat at the same or slower (more likely) rate that you are storing glycogen, you will see little decrease or even an increase on the scale but will see the inches lost with circumference measurements. This is why I don't re-weigh my clients for at least 8-12 weeks and even then I only do weight so that I can get an estimate of body fat in pounds. If the fat is going down and the lean is going up, I don't care what anyone weighs because I know they are getting healthier. And yes, you can be heavier and wear a smaller size. My sister and I are a classic example. I outweigh her by 40-50 pounds but I'm 4-5 sizes smaller than her. The difference is that I lift weights (and do cardio and stretch and stay active all day everyday) and she doesn't. Thanks, scale, but I'll keep my 50 extra pounds of lean body mass and look better a swimsuit this summer. ;-)

Out of interest how long will I have to be lifting for for my muscles to stop retaining water? or am I stuck with it for good?

If you keep lifting, you will keep storing glycogen in water. Even if you build more muscle fibers, you will store more glycogen in those muscle fibers too. This is a good thing. It is what fuels your future weight training workouts. If you stop lifting, you will start to lose those improvements in about 3 days. But who would want to lose those improvements in strength and ability? The good news is that unless you keep increasing the weight you are lifting you will max out with how much glycogen you will need to store. When that happens you will start to see the scale go down because the fat burning will keep happening from the exercise and healthy eating.

If you are losing inches, you are losing fat. Why do you care so much about what the scale says? No one knows that number unless you tell them, all they see is you body getting smaller. There are a number of threads here on MFP with women who weight train and stay about the same weight while losing a bunch of fat so they look much better. If you have a lot of fat to lose, your weight will start to come down eventually as you are losing fat. I would personally suggest stick with a tape measure and photos and put the scale away.