Why Is My Weight Up?
by lisagraham | January 20, 2010 | In Mindset | Comments Off
It’s really frustrating to get on the scale and see the number up instead of down when you know you had a really good week. You wonder, “Why is my weight up when I did so well?”
If you know you did great with your diet and you exercised consistently, then there is something else going on. There can be several reasons for this.
- Too much sodium. If you had a meal the day before with sauce or seasoning, it could have been loaded with salt. This causes your body to retain water and it takes a day or two before that goes away.
- Carbs or sugar. Things like potatoes, pasta, popcorn, sweets, etc., all cause you to retain water and weigh more. This is especially noticeable if you eat carbs or sugar the night before you weigh in.
- Bowel backup. How much waste product you have packed in your bowels can make a big difference on the scale. Make sure you are having regular bowel movements.
- Water logged. Water weighs a lot and if you drink before you weigh it’ll show, especially if you weigh later in the day and you’ve been drinking water all day. Of course, drinking water helps flush fluid out of your body, but drinking it too close to weigh-in will affect your number.
- PMS. It’s normal for a woman’s cycle to cause weight fluctuations throughout the month. Know where you are in your cycle so you won’t feel discouraged if your weight is up while PMSing.
- Plateau. Sometimes the body just takes a little time to adjust. You may hit a week or two when your weight holds steady. Just keep on course and your body will adjust.
- Diet denial. Often, when our weight isn’t coming down as we’d like, we didn’t do as well on our diet as we thought. We may have had four good days, but blew three days. No matter how good we did on our good days, those bad days will cancel them out!