Why your weight can fluctuate with exercise
Excited about finally getting fit and losing weight, you start your new exercise program. Diligently you work hard with your program and a couple of weeks later you find yourself stepping onto the scales to prove that all the hard work has paid off. Shocked, you discover that you have gained 1 kg! Feelings of disappointment and frustration rush over you and doubt starts to enter your mind…Has all this hard work been for nothing??
Short term rewards…always more tempting
If you are like the most of us, we want things to change yesterday, right? Yes…but this is not realistic! Media and large amount of marketing out there promise faster weight loss every year and they all seem to compete against each other on how much weight you could lose in a week. Unfortunately this trend has become popular, exactly because people lose a lot of weight fast. However, no one ask the questions …why and how? Extreme low carbohydrate and detox diets are used to trick your metabolism and force it to use your fat stores. This works in the short term because your body has no other option but to use your fat stores. In the long run your metabolism will start to slow down and this comes at a large cost that could send you back to a worse position than where you started (also read how your brain can slow your metabolism down). Short term rewards are always a more tempting choice, like getting fast cash on a credit card. The debt keeps building and you end up with debt that you struggle to pay off.
Faster weight loss on extremely low calorie diets for a shorter period may be appropriate for obese people, under close supervision by medical experts. Obese people can expect to lose a larger amount of weight weekly and in this case it may be appropriate to use the scales regularly. However for someone who needs to lose a smaller amount of weight or more accurately, needs to lose a smaller amount of excess body fat, using the scales as a weekly measurement may not be a true indication of what is really happening inside your body.
Changes inside your body
As a response to exercise, lots of chemical processes occur that build muscle and increase the amount of power stations (mitochondria) for fat burning inside your muscle cells. This is a complex and time consuming process that not only is important for long term weight management but also for improving your fitness and general health. Your muscles need to build and improve their fat burning ability before they can chew into your fat stores. Like a car needs a bigger engine to burn more fuel, we need to build our engine to start burning more fat. Muscle weighs more than fat and the water content inside your body may also change, this is why your weight on the scales might fluctuate initially and therefore is not a true indicator of what is really happening inside.
If you are meeting your daily intake requirements of food and attending your prescribed exercise sessions, there is nothing to worry about. When your body starts to adapt to the stimuli from your training you will notice change. It will happen when your body is ready and these are long lasting healthy changes that will give you much more than just weight loss.
Focus on short term goals that make you feel good about yourself and your achievements such as physical abilities (e.g. how long or far you are able run/walk/ride, how long it took you to run/walk/ride a certain distance, resting heart rate measurements, your strength & energy levels and your ability to do things you haven’t done before).
You might also like to read:
How to eat better for your metabolism
How to get motivation to exercise
