I exercise and eat healthy - but get fatter

Are you carefully logging your calories?

If you are gaining body fat, then you are consuming more calories than you are using.

__nicole__ wrote: »

My BMI is 22.7

No, I don't use a food scale.

I'm a teacher. So I stand or sit during the day.

OK, so I should better start to track what I eat. I just drink water or unsweetened tea, sometimes one cup of coffee in the morning.

I'd say it's time to recalibrate. Track what you *normally* eat to see what went wrong, THEN adjust.
And, given that you're at a healthy weight, opt for 0.5LBSs a week.

Um, I don't mean to be personal here, but is there any chance you might be pregnant?

You are underestimating your calories and overestimating you exercise calorie burn. Are you doing any kind of strength training? You should be. If you diet and don't do strength training, your body fat percent is going to go up. The higher your body fat percent, the fewer calories you burn at rest. You have a high body fat percent for someone of your body weight.

Start strength training, start worrying about your body composition, up the protein and get a food scale.

One doesn't gain fat weight without a surplus (and some possible hormonal issue). You're eating much more than you think.


A.C.E. Certified Personal and Group Fitness Trainer
IDEA Fitness member
Kickboxing Certified Instructor
Been in fitness for 30 years and have studied kinesiology and nutrition

"eating healthy"....
"eating healthy"....

As others have said, start quantifying this. Calories. Numbers. Tracking.

The science is sound and the numbers don't lie. The sooner you start measuring your input vs output in regards to calories, the sooner you'll start to figure out where the problem is.

Then you can adjust and start losing weight again.

Simple maths is all that's required to work out your approximate calorie limits. Current weight (in lbs) x10 = max daily calories for loss/deficit, x14 for sustain, x16 for gain. Work out whatever calories you burn through physical exertion each day and add that to give you your total max limit for the day.

I.e. My current weight, 218lbs, my calorie limit = 2180. 5k run = ~550 calories; Walk to work 350 calories. New max limit: 2180 + 550 + 350 = 3080. If i eat under this, I'll weigh less the next day. If i make sure that I've eaten an appropriate amount of protein that day, more fat will be lost than lean muscle.

Repeat until target weight (I've been losing 2lbs a week since November)

Keep it simple. Don't over think things. Limit your calories and use the macros to control how you feel, i.e. protein to quell hunger, carbs to give you energy. The weight should gradually fall off if you stick to this.

Measuring calories burned through exercise is trickier. The calculations on this site aren't always the most accurate but when used in combination with other online calculators, can give you a bit of clearer idea of how much you've burned.

Also, if you're standing all day as a teacher, wear a pedometer. Chances are you'll clock up a good few hundred calories of exercise from all the walking about throughout the day.

__nicole__ wrote: »

The Jillian Michaels DVD is a mix of cardio and strength training. I've done the programm for several times and it has worked with visual results every time.

It's possible it's just too easy for you, now. Are you increasing the weights that you use on it each time?

After 3 months of tracking the effort/weight/calorie burn on machines at the gym, it seems to me that even if you find it a lot easier than when you started, the difference in calorie burn for say 40 mins of cardio is negligible (like within the realm of 50 calories).

As long as you're doing the exercise correctly and in a consistent manner, it should be fine.

Heart rate, i've never paid too much attention to. Calories will burn no matter what heart rate you get up to. The more time you spend doing an exercise, the more calories you'll burn.

Sure there's probably an optimum burn point and whatever, but as far as I'm concerned, you're already over-thinking things when you get to that point. Maybe think about that stuff when you're trying to min/max some miniscule bodyfat percentage or something after you've gotten down to the weight range you want.

I am not saying this to insult you, so don't think I'm trying to imply you're not an intelligent or self aware person, or anything.

But chances are extremely good that you're not as accurate on your intake as you think you are. Please understand this is coming from someone who has been dieting off and on since she was TWELVE. I know that a serving of meat is supposed to be about the size of a deck of cards, I know that serving of pasta is half a cup which is about half the size of a tennis ball -- all that smack.

If you do not measure (and I mean use a scale rather than volume measurement) every damn gram that goes in your mouth, you cannot be sure of your intake.

The handful of raisins you eat because you're starving when you get home from work while you're prepping dinner... That counts and needs to be weighed. The creamer in your coffee counts. (IF you're like me and use half-n-half that does add up quick). The oil you use to sautee those very healthy veggies -- totally counts and needs to be accounted for in your diet.

If I am making this out to be a tedious, obsessive pain in the butt... Well, you're right. It totally is. But after doing that for a period of time, you WILL have a much greater and more accurate understanding of your caloric intake.

(I say this as someone who would have sworn on a stack of Bibles I had to exercise a million hours a week and eat less than 1,200 calories a day to lose weight. Not really true. I do work out about five hours a week, true enough, but I am losing a pound a week pretty steadily at an average of 1773 calories a day and I'm a short, middle-aged yo-yo dieter!)