Gaining Weight While Exercising
It’s a scenario that can seem all too dreadful: You dedicate hours and plenty of sweat at the gym only to step on the scale and find that you’ve seemed to gain weight instead of losing it like you would expect. Seeing a few extra pounds on the scale is a common complaint among avid exercisers dedicated to their own weight loss programs . After all that hard work and not seeing the desired results, it can be easy to throw in the towel, grab a seat on the couch, and finally indulge in that meal that you’ve been dreaming about. But when is comes to exercise, persistence, consistency, and patience will be rewarded eventually. Seeing a few extra pounds on the scale, even when you are exercising, isn’t always a cause for alarm. It is certainly no excuse to stop your workout or decrease their intensity. There are a number of reasons why those few extra pounds seems to crop up now and then.
You could just be weighing yourself at the wrong time. One of the reasons the scale may seem off is that you body is just going through it’s normal fluctuations throughout the day. First off, if you are the type to weigh yourself several times in a day, stop the habit now if you would like to stop wasting time. It’s admirable to want to keep track of your weight, but your body weight naturally fluctuates as you eat and drink throughout the day. Fluids come in and out and that can be the cause of scale readings that don’t seem to make much sense.
Also, eating a meal with a high salt content can cause your body to retain water and cause extra pounds on the scale. If you were low on water or dehydrated in a previous weigh-in, the difference may be very surprising but you shouldn’t be so quick to worry that you gained weight. It could just be water weight. Some dieters insist on having a scale in their kitchen, but weighing yourself after meals is definitely not the right time to get an accurate reading, since the food you consumed is being read, not your actual weight. You have to give your body enough time to digest and metabolize the food and it takes more than just a couple hours.
To get a more accurate depiction of you weight, weigh yourself once, first thing in the morning before you eat or drink anything at around the same time each day. Weight can fluctuate a few pounds depending on what you eat the day before so it’s not a bad idea to write down your daily results and then average them at the end of the week.
Sometimes, building up lean muscle mass can lead to slight weight gain. Although if you’ve only been working out for a week or so, blaming extra pounds on muscle weight is a bit unrealistic. But to bypass a potential confusion as to muscle ratio and fat, measure not only your weight, but get your body fat measured also. That way, you can access your body fat percentage. As you continue to work out, you should see that number decrease. Also, sometimes measuring inches is a much more satisfying way to see your progress. Sometimes, the scale might not be budging but the inches may be coming off so keep track of measurements on a weekly basis.
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