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Why did I gain weight? I never cheated on the diet, and I exercise daily!
By Beth | January 21, 2008
Q: Help! I gained 6 pounds today, and I know I didn’t cheat on the diet! Not only that, but I exercise every day, too. What is going on? How could I GAIN weight eating a low calorie diet?
A: I’m sure you already know that what you’re experiencing is normal, and that, by way of comfort, you definitely did NOT gain six pounds of FAT. In order to do that, you would have had to eat 21,000 MORE CALORIES than you burned, since one pound equals 3,500 calories. And 3,500 times 6 is 21,000. You probably haven’t even eaten 21,000 calories in a whole week!
And there is definitely no way you ate 21,000 more calories than you burned.
Thus there is NO WAY that those pounds are fat pounds.
It has calmed me down to remember this many times when, for a second, I saw the scale had gone up, and thought I had gained fat, but there was a different cause for what the scale said.
It’s fun, also, to know that when I did an internet search, in just my first search, I found 2,710 pages on which a person on a diet and who was exercising had gained weight, couldn’t believe it, and was reminded by others that weight gain in that situation cannot scientifically be fat, and is almost certainly attributable to muscle gain AND water gain, combined. (A couple of those links are at the end of this post.)
One thing everyone should remember is that it is FAR more important to judge what is happening to your body by using ONE pair of jeans, so you can keep track of how baggy they get. Use them all the way to the end of the diet. They are a delightful way to see your progress!
Jeans don’t lie, but scales do!
If I made a list of the 5 biggest things to watch out for (and if anyone wants to add to this, I might include this in my next 6WD edition):
ANYONE ON ANY DIET SHOULD ALWAYS WATCH OUT FOR:
DANGER NUMBER 1.
Trusting scales more than trusting jeans.
Scales giving us only ONE number, while they are actually measuring THREE things: fat, muscle, water. We get the one number, but the scale doesn’t tell us whether it is reporting our water content, our muscle content or our fat content. This is why scales can be dangerous. Jeans just give the size.
DANGER NUMBER 2.
Forgetting that what we are really trying to achieve is a SIZE DECREASE.
The weight number is just a way to see if our size has decreased. Think about it this way: would we care if we weighed ten thousand pounds, if we were wearing a size 8? No, we wouldnt! And would we like it if we weighed 125 pounds, but were still wearing a size 28W? No, we wouldn’t! So the reality is that on a diet what we actually want to lose is SIZE. The weight is just a second-hand way of determining whether our size has decreased or not. Instead of second-hand information, which is what we get from the scale, if we want to know our size, we should measure our size. Use jeans!
DANGER NUMBER 3.
Weighing too often.
Our scale weight will go up and down; we will hit plateaus (my longest was 6 weeks at one point!); we will eat a lot of salt sometimes; etc etc. If we don’t get on a scale at all, we will never know that we have hit a plateau, or that we are retaining water sometimes. That will save us days of agony, if we are all emotional like I am! hahahah I can’t overstate how much more we will know by using the jeans method than the scale.
DANGER NUMBER 4.
Forgetting that it takes 3,500 calories–not just of food intake, but of UNUSED FOOD INTAKE–to gain ONE pound of fat.
So when we see pounds appearing on the scale, think back. Did we eat 3,500 calories EXTRA in the past day? If not, then it is physcially impossible for that pound to be fat.
DANGER NUMBER 5.
Forgetting that there are three things fluctuating all the time, in our bodies: Fat, water, and muscle.
Therefore, when we see weight change, up OR down, we have only a one in three chance of guessing which thing caused it–yet we dieters ALWAYS want to guess that it was fat!
For everyone’s amusement, I am including some links here.
The first link will take you to a random page where a girl has been dieting and exercising and has suddenly gained weight and is quite unhappy about it. A lot of people write back to her. It’s fun to see that they all say the same thing that we are saying here.
http://malaysia.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080119170725AAkkiSU
The second link will take you to a search result page, so anyone of us can read any one of the nearly 3000 pages on which, for the most part, someone has had this identical experience, and an advisor or professional has replied, saying the same things we are saying here.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2B%22diet%22%2B%22gained+weight%22%2B%22muscle+weighs+more+than+fat%22&btnG=Search
Hugs,
Beth
Topics: weight gain |
