Third Week of Dieting - Gaining Weight?

yup; the bloating gave it away - water weight. Hot and humid weather can cause me to gain water weight too.

the 1430 sounds to me to be about right for sedentary settings, depending on your height (I'm tall, so that is about what sedentary would give me) and depending on what weight loss rate you set. But if you used sedentary settings, are you eating back a least a portion of those exercise calories? If you are using MFP's NEAT method and counting yourself as sedentary, then you are supposed to count back exercise calories.

Is the exercise new? That can also cause water retention as the muscles repair themselves.

MochaFox91 wrote: »

Call me dumb, which I may be - Don't think I'm smart enough to figure this out, but the general idea is to always eat back what you burn from exercise? I thought it was a good idea to not eat back those calories?

Maybe this will help - So lets pretend that MFP gave you a goal of 1400 in order to lose weight (note this doesn't include intentional exercise). So you exercise throughout the day and burn 400 calories. This leaves only 1000 calories for your body to live on. It is recommended that women consume more than 1200 calories per day.

Eating back those 400 calories would leave you with 1400 calories which is what MFP gave you to lose weight.


What calorie goal did MFP give you?

No questions are silly.

What exercise do you do? If it's walking or running, as long as you know the speed that you walk / run at, MFP is pretty accurate in my experience. If you do anything else, most people's feedback is that MFP overestimates. In that case, pick a percentage (50% or 75% or any number of your choosing in between) and eat that percentage of your exercise calories each day.

Stick to the same percentage. After 6 weeks, look at your weight compared to what it is now. If you're losing as expected, your percentage is accurate. If you're losing faster or slower, adjust accordingly.

The only thing you can safely say is that your exercise burn is not 0%.

Also, unless you've got a lot to lose (more than 50lb), don't think you should be trying to lose at 2lb a week. Although much of it was probably water weight, as you said, losing 10lb in two weeks is very aggressive. If you look at some of the other posts, you'll see a chart that suggests weight loss rate. I think it's 0.5lb a week for 1-20lbs to go and 1lb a week for 21-40lbs. There may be a range where 1.5lb a week is suggested, but I don't know off the top of my head. Unless you are morbidly obese and have been told to drop weight fast, it's far better for your health to lose weight slowly and sensibly.

MochaFox91 wrote: »

That's fair! I tend to do okay as is, but I can consider trying to eat back some of my exercise calories ( 50%? I hear some do 50-75%. )

Eating back 50%-75% is usually encouraged because anything that tells you how many calories you've burned is just an estimate. Some methods (such as going to a clinic and being hooked up to a machine) can be quite accurate. Others, like going off what a treadmill tells you, can be wildly different. Your body is the only thing that is 100% accurate in terms of how many calories you consume and how many you burn. It keeps track of every single calorie gained or lost.

That's not to say you can't eat 100% of your exercise calories back. Just keep track of your progress. If you eat 100% of your exercise calories and find that after 6-8 weeks, you're not losing at whatever rate you've selected, then eat a smaller percentage of your exercise calories. If you're losing more than you expected to, then you get to eat more calories. The goal is to lose weight at the rate you selected.