Lifting and ganining weight.

Weight is a terrible metric to base your success on. Case in point, you could cut off your arm and lose about 10 - 20lbs right now. Would that be satisfying? Stepping on the scale and seeing that wonderful weight loss?

If you’re smaller, you’ve lost fat! That is the goal you should have. Lifting helps you retain/gain muscle, which is awesome. Losing fat is awesome. So, what you’re doing is working, why would you change now?

Throw the scale away. Focus on how you look and feel. Take body measurements (neck, chest, stomach, waist, hips, upper arms, and upper legs) if you’d like more positive data points.

5 weeks is great, keep it up.

I'm not an expert. I've yo-yo'ed a few times. I'm on my 3rd or 4th MFP account and I've tried everything from only running to 18 months of CrossFit. Regardless, I wouldn't go off of what the scale says, especially if you're doing weight training and cardio. DawnEmbers is right, keep up the deficit and you will lose weight, if you're eating right, it should mostly be fat loss. Sodium and hormones totally have an effect on water retention and bloating, so keep what DawnEmbers said in mind. If you're tracking your progress daily, you'll see trends that will tell you how you're doing.

Focus on your Non-scale victories, (NSV). If you look better, and you feel better, just continue what you're doing and congratulate yourself with your accomplishments.

However, if you really want to track your results, you need to record measurements to identify changes. I suggest things like body measurements and body fat percentage. (just remember the daily trends will go up and down).

It may not be for everyone, but I've found that tracking daily body fat percentage helps me follow my progress to see how much fat I'm actually losing.

For instance:

I'm 6'4"
03/15 - 249.9lbs/30.6%fat - 76.5 lbs of fat - 30.4 BMI (Obese)
05/07 - 243.7lbs/26.2%fat - 64.0 lbs of fat - 29.7 BMI (Overweight)

The difference is negative 6.2 lbs total mass, but negative 12.5 lbs of fat.

(I've found the Durnin and Womersley formula with calibers to by my personal preference on accurately tracking body fat, but these recent percentages were taken with an Aria scale)

As far as losing weight and then starting lifting, I researched the same question and got conflicting answers.

Pro weight loss before weight training:

The basic argument here was that fat does not turn into muscle. If you want to lose fat you have to be in a calorie deficit, period. If you want to gain muscle mass, you need to increase your caloric intake, (and lift heavy weight).

Pro weight training to lose fat:

The pro weight training argument is if you're just lifting to get strong then you will benefit from the muscle you build over a longer time frame. This camp says that muscle burns calories even after you've finished your workout. Something small like, let's say an extra 20-50 calories a day, but those extra calories stack as you continue training. They look at it like those extra calories come to 140-350 a week, or 7300-18250 calories a year. Since the estimate lb of fat is 3500 calories, this is 2.08 - 5.21 bonus lbs of fat loss.

My personal opinion, eat to lose fat, do cardio to increase the deficit, and lift weight to get stronger. After 5 weeks you probably.

BTW, after all that research I just went with what felt good, I decided to do diet, cardio, and strength training. Current program is 500 calorie deficit (net), Stronglifts 5x5, and Couch to 5k.