Sarahg wrote: Now will someone pleeeez tell me how I can gain a kilo eating that.
I am short,I am middle aged,I have dieted all my life and I only have a few kilos to loose
Weight fluctuations are normal, especially for women. One of the most important things to realize is that Weight changes =/= fat/muscle mass changes (does not equal). Meaning - if you lose or gain weight, that doesn't necessarily mean that you lose or gain fat or muscle tissue. Not to a noticeable degree anyway.
The number looking back from the scale is your total weight. Of that total weight 50-65% is water. That's a lot of water. It should make a lot of sense that our daily liquid intake and expenditure has far, far, far more effect on our total weight than everything else put together.
The problem is, it is nearly impossible to accurately predict water weight fluctuations. Unless you live by an extremely strict daily routine, always the same level of activity and always the same foods in the same amounts - you will experience massive fluctuations in the water weight very regularly. Even if you do follow a very strict routine, our hormonal fluctuations can wreck havoc even then - again, this is even more pronounced in women.
My recommendation would be to forget the scale - at-least by itself. Women tend to get obsessed with it, and yet the scale gives extremely inaccurate results. I can easily lower my weight while getting fatter. Or I can increase it and get leaner. Simply because the scale can't tell me what are the levels of water weight/fat tissue/ muscle tissue in my body. And without that separation, the absolute number on the scale doesn't really matter as much. (And forget those BIA scales that shoot electricity through you to give you fat percentages, those are totally inaccurate and also change depending on your hydration level)
Don't think about dieting as a race to lose kilograms. Consider it a marathon, a life style with the never-ending goal of looking fit and being healthy, energetic and happy. What the scale shows is mostly irrelevant. It's just a number. Pay more attention to the measuring tape and the mirror. A number on the scale doesn't tell you if your pants will fit and it definitely won't win a beauty contest. When other people look at you, they won't care what you weigh if you look good. Doesn't matter.
Use the scale only in conjunction with the mirror and the measuring tape and why not also your athletic capabilities and overall health and happiness levels. Now that's a way to truly measure your total progress.
If you do use the scale, use it regularly. That means, always use it at the same time of the day, at the same situation (after WC visits, no clothes etc.). Also, don't even pay any attention to the numbers until it's been about 2 weeks since you started a new activity/dieting approach. And even then, average the weight changes from multiple weighings over a longer period of time. The weight simply fluctuates too much in the short term, especially during the time when we change things up. What you are really looking for are TRENDS. In which way the body-weight is heading towards over a longer period of time.
Sarahg wrote: Thanks,
I measured my waist and I am a few cm less
Interesting
Also my pants feel really loose
So weird
Debs wrote: But good!!
Indeed - very good. As I wrote above, the scale is just one tool out of many and in my opinion a rather bad tool at that if used by itself. Without more information from other methods, the scale's numbers are nearly worthless.
ferretgal wrote: Have you considered that you might not be eating ENOUGH, and triggering the dreaded starvation mode? Just a thought...
Actually, that's largely a myth. Studies show that even if you completely abstain from food for 24 hours, your metabolism actually speeds up, not down. And even if you starve for days, the metabolism only starts to drop very little and even then, a large part of the metabolism slow-down is not due to starvation per se, but due to weight loss and lowered activity due to the lack of energy that usually accompanies starvation.
Your body weighs less and thus less energy is needed to move it around, and because you tend to move around less, you also burn less calories.
More often than not, the reasons for weight loss temporarily stalling is either due to water weight fluctuations or simply due to inaccurate food consumption reporting. (The majority of over-weight people underestimate the amount of calories they eat, while underweight people overestimate. The human psyche is a bit nuts, lol)
.
2018 Goals 
