Over training/over eating?

That doesn't sound like over-training or cortisol to me. It sounds like the obvious, i.e. you're taking in too many calories. You say you aren't logging yet, so start there. Log everything you ingest, food and drink, as accurately as possible, without changing your diet at all. That calorie amount is apparently leading to slow weight gain. despite all your activity.

To lose weight, you'll probably need to take in several hundred fewer calories each day. Maybe that's some cookies, or a bar of chocolate, or cake, or beer, etc. Maybe it's fast food, which can be incredibly high in calories. Even at your activity level pushing up your daily calories burned, a single fast food meal could be 50% of your maintenance calories, i.e. the amount where your weight would remain constant.

JJ2944 wrote: »

weights can be anything from 400-700 depending how much I do/how long I’m there.

I’m female, 40 years old (I feel like since turning 40 this has also made a difference),

I know I really do need to start food tracking

3 points, in order above:

Sorry, but you burning that many calories in a lifting session is EXTREMELY unlikely. This may be useful in getting a more accurate estimate:
https://www.strongerbyscience.com/research-spotlight-expenditure-resistance/

Again, sorry, but hitting 40 doesn't change your metabolism. I know it's one of those things we've heard our entire lives, "oh when you hit 30, your metabolism hits a brick wall" and "oh I used to be able to eat anything I wanted and was skinny as a rail but once I turned 40, I gain weight just thinking about chocolate!" etc etc etc, but unfortunately, that's absolutely not true. From the ages of approx 20 to approx 60 (yes, 60), human metabolism is remarkably stable.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8370708/

Yes, tracking/logging your food will absolutely make a world of difference. Buy a digital scale (they're pretty cheap; I think I paid like $9 for mine?) and start weighing and measuring everything. There's a learning curve and you will almost certainly encounter some frustrations, but this community is super helpful and will be here for troubleshooting and tips along the way!

How do you feel? Are you always tired or achy? Or only for a little while after an exercise session or lengthy cleaning session?

• If being sore and tired never leaves, that's a better clue for overtraining.
• If you're usually fine, a little tired after working (out) hard, then back to normal after some chill time, then you're probably not overtraining.

I'm inclined to think this isn't an issue, since you didn't suddenly leap from zero exercise to a ton, you reported you were doing fine with a bunch of cardio before and have merely swapped TYPE of exercise, not AMOUNT.

The part about myzone and calories is likely in reference to how MFP can connect with some heart rate monitors and automatically add calories burned into the MFP total for the day. A person unaware of this automatic adjustment may choose to report their exercise to MFP manually, receiving a higher calorie balance, but this is actually double-posting: once from the monitor, once done manually. People can thus be fooled into thinking they are allowed more food than they should be consuming.

This does not apply to you, however, since you have not been recording food before now. Just be aware when you do start tracking food whether your monitor reports the exercise or if you need to do it manually.

My bet is as other posters have stated, you're just eating more than you realize. Super easy to do. When you start recording, be honest. Did you eat one serving of something, or 1.5? Did you go back for seconds, or eat "just a couple bites" of something at snack time? Did you know the number one reason so many professional chefs gain weight is through tasting their cooking? A sip here, a nibble there, can lead to over a hundred calories per day, which over a year is 10 pounds gained simply through tiny taste testing.

If it goes in your mouth, record it. Nobody here is going to judge you, give you a pass/fail grade, kick you out of the club for eating this or this much of something else. This is between you and yourself, maybe your doctor or loved ones. The log is for accountability to yourself, but also is a teaching tool. It can be very eye-opening to see how quickly the calorie burn from an intense workout can be eaten. Personally, an hour of intense cardio can be negated by a single cheeseburger; an hour of lifting disappears in 10 seconds drinking soda. Nothing wrong with these food choices; I indulge regularly. But I am AWARE and CHOOSE to partake, rather than make assumptions of "I worked hard, I SHOULD be good to eat this."

One thing I've noticed is that when I do more weights vs cardio, I'm A LOT more hungry. I had to stop doing pure lifting programs because I would literally wake up in the night starving. When I do more cardio, I burn more calories overall but I also don't feel as hungry, so if I'm not logging it's way easier to overeat when doing a lot of weight training.

Now, when I do weights, I have to log and have to ignore hunger cues a bit more, and also accept a much smaller deficit (I might do 4-500 cals deficit when doing more cardio, but can only do 200-250 when weight training else I'll be too miserably hungry to sustain it). I also have times where I quit logging, do weight training, eat all the food I want and accept I'll gain some weight, but those are the times I put on good muscle.

JJ2944 wrote: »

Excuse the typo’s in the above message.

As the 2nd screenshot says, high cortisol levels can cause belly fat in usually lean people. I feel like this is me.

Because high cortisol levels cause an increase in appetite so high cortisol levels often cause one to over consume (in addition to more water retention). A lot of exercise in general (not necessarily overtraining) is going to increase hunger and appetite. As a former endurance athlete, it's one of the reasons I typically discourage people from engaging in that kind of training or those kind of events if they're traying to lose weight (if they ask)...heavy training loads make you hungry AF. I've always found weight loss to be much easier with more moderate amounts of exercise.

As to overtraining...physical symptoms of that are usually pretty evident. Things like chronic fatigue, poor sleep quality, elevated RHR, overuse injuries, chronic DOMs, etc. If you're not experiencing these things, overtraining is likely not the issue...overeating is. A few weeks of logging will help dial that in. It's super easy to overeat when you're working hard, particularly when you factor in that we don't burn the amount of calories that we tend to think we burn, even when we're working hard...and working hard training wise can also lead to a drop in NEAT and offset your training from a calorie expenditure standpoint.

JJ2944 wrote: »

I do have overuse injuries, I’ve developed tennis elbow on both sides however one is ok atm & one really not

Along with the logging I’m hoping that will help. Just waiting on a PT from my gym to let me know my calories/macros.

You don't want to mess around with potential tendonitis stuff like that. Rest, definitely don't do exercises which aggravate it, and do some rehab work like (do your own research here) dead hangs and wrist curls with light weight if you can handle it.

If you're logging your current input accurately, you know that's the calorie amount which results in a slow gain. So, subtract a few hundred from that. This calculator is also a good starting point to look at, but the most accurate version is your logging combined with your weight change.

Get at least 0.7g per pound from protein, and make sure you have sufficient carbs for energy, and sufficient fats, don't try to exclude all fat from your diet basically, while meeting your calorie goal.

https://www.sailrabbit.com/bmr/