Talk to me about weighing/tracking progress

[ohthegoats]

How is the 'best' way to do it?

I don't think weight is particularly important in the scheme of being less fat and more fit/healthy, so I thought I'd just go with taking photos of myself to track progress.

BUT, this was too 'slow' - I needed to see/know more immediate (maybe weekly) benefits of my hard work. So I started weighing myself weekly.

All OK until this week, when I've randomly put 3lbs back on. I've got almost 5 stone to lose to be middle of BMI range, so really any sort of work to reduce calories should be having an fairly consistent impact.

In this week where I've put 3lbs on, it's been the end of a period (although I'm VERY perimenopausal, so this is the first period in 8 months), I've run 10 miles, I've swum 2km, I've done 3 resistance/HIIT sessions and cycled 9 miles on a commute. I've stuck to 5:2 and three plates of non junk/home cooked healthy food on the other days.

This is the sort of stuff that makes me think 'fuck it', even though I know consciously that anything I'm doing for my health can only be good.

Any other methods? Measuring sort of works for me, but again it's not often quick enough.

I use a ribbon cut to exactly where my waist was on day one so the shrinkage is obvious. 3lb on might be totm or whatever.

3lb feels like a lot, but it is fairly normal to fluctuate that much.

As long as the general trajectory is going down, you just kind of have to accept that there will be days when it spikes up.

Don worry - you can't have put on 3 pounds of fat that quick. It's probably water retention.

Photos are great.

But how about body fat percentage? Most accurate way to do this cost effectively is fat calipers. Then use the Jackson Pollock formula.

Waist circumference is another good way.

PS: I've been where you are: exercised more and gained fat. Answer: it's the diet. Your food macros are probably off - carb heavy maybe. Or carb timing is wrong.

I use two additional apps, both of which give trends - weight diary and happy scale - alongside MFP which is a blunter instrument for tracking weight. Over time logging weight every day shows a bigger better picture and makes me much less neurotic about the daily ups and downs.

It's very easy to put 3lbs on or even take it off. I could do that in 2 days.
I weigh but I also measure. Measuring takes longer to show but tends to give a more accurate overall picture - fewer random fluctuations - imo.

I do also weigh every day. Helps to keep me on the straight and narrow.

Muscle is denser than fat so you could be losing far and building muscle with all that exercise. I wouldn't focus on scales. Keep doing measurements. My gym has one of those body fat measuring things. That should show changes to your body fat compostition.

Muscle is only about 19% more dense than fat. So this may be part of the answer but also possibly not all.

Also building muscle takes time. Depends how long she’s been at it.

I think that's normal weight fluctuations. Also 10miles won't burn that much, maybe in the region of 600 calories. The point being that exercise does burn calories but makes you hungry so it's very easy to overcompensate