Need some insight

"I've also been lifting weights 3x week. Nothing crazy, just getting into the habit, and breaking a little sweat."

It's also possible you're retaining a bit of water ... especially if this is new to you.

First, are you using a food scale to crunch the numbers? We don’t really know where we’re at without one. Measuring cups just aren’t as accurate. You can use the cups for liquids but a scale is better for anything else.

Second, water retention may be an issue. Little or no loss on the heals of a new exercise program is probably the most common complaint on this board. The short answer is newly stressed muscles retain water. It will even out.

Third, watch out for your brain. It will likely try to wreck you. Fact is calorie counting has a significant learning curve. And try as we might to make calorie counting exact, it is not. Read this board regularly and you’ll see even more than water weight, people are distressed by the limits of the calculators and calorie counting gadgets. The calculators get their numbers based on statistics and averages. But no one is exactly average. We don’t really know how many calories we are burning unless we are hooked up in a lab. Plus, in the real world calorie counting is going to encounter gray areas. So in the end we can start with the number the calculators give us, but we only really have our personal trial and error to find what works for us personally. And trial and error can take a long time. Just how it is. Keep trying. If your plan isn’t working, try to fix it. Weight loss is mostly about problem solving and persistence. Good luck.

How many times have you stepped on the scale? Because if it's 1 or 2 times, I'd say it's likely to be either scale error, water retention from exercise/salt, or a combination of all 3. On the other hand, if it's 14 times I'd say you're eating too much. As to why you would be not losing weight when you should be, there are a number of reasons, measurement error might be one, incorrect food energy values another.

I'd suggest that you weigh yourself daily (if possible) until it becomes obvious that you are losing weight. If it's not possible to weigh yourself daily, I'd suggest that you eat at a level based on hunger rather than a certain calorie value and see if that makes a difference.

You don't need to weigh yourself daily forever. Once you have found out your total daily energy used you can cut back on weighings although I'd suggest a monthly weigh to prevent some kind of miscalibration which you don't find out about until months later.

nay0meh wrote: »

I will share that when I first started lifting weights, I got fluffier and gained a bit of weight. My body was not used to this stimulus so it was freaking out, no matter how healthy I ate. This adjusted after a few months, and it was very tough on me mentally but I read SO much about how this is normal and the weight WILL start coming off. Read this article please and connect with me for support! https://strongfigure.com/women-youll-get-bigger-get-smaller/

Hmm. I think her conclusion in the article is right, but she's not accurately explaining the mechanisms, IMO. I think she's overstating early muscle gain vs. the effect of water retention, and sort of overstating how much extra calorie burn from a pound of muscle vs. a pound a fat.

Yeah, it's like twice as much calorie burn, maybe even three times as much . . . but researchers mostly seem to think it's around 6 calories per pound per day for muscle at rest, 2 calories per pound per day for fat at rest (yes, fat's metabolically active, too). Estimates vary, could be as much as 10 calories on the muscle side, among other estimates; could be 3 for fat.

Not big numbers, especially given how long it takes to add a pound of muscle. (Pound a month would be good, for a woman, under ideal conditions . . . and ideal conditions include calorie surplus, i.e. weight gain, don't include a calorie deficit for fat loss. Some muscle gain will be possible in a deficit for some women, just slower than a pound a month. It's a long term investment.

Strength training is totally worth doing, though, to (at minimum) preserve existing muscle better, and strength gain (which is useful) can be much faster than mass gain. (That's from neuromuscular adaptation (NMA), better recruiting and using existing muscle fibers, which tends to precede mass gain.) On top of that, the "pump" from water retention can create a more defined appearance more quickly, if there's not too much overlying fat for that to show. All good stuff!

Besides that, I'd be willing to bet that more muscular people find it easier and more fun to do active things, both daily life and exercise, compared to people of higher body fat at the same weight . . . and being more active in daily life can add surprisingly many calories to TDEE.