How did I gain weight?
 

I have been eating healthier. No junk snacks, no soft drinks, only drinking water. And I still managed to gain 3 lbs in a few days. If I am gaining weight eating healthy, wth is the point?

How's your salt intake?
Have you done any exercise today?
Is it your time of the month?
Have you used the same scale on the same surface to weigh yourself?
Are you weighing yourself at the same time everyday?

I'm asking because all of these can cause water retention which shows up on the scale. It is short-lived however so it will come off as quickly as came on. As long as you've stuck to plan then you have nothing to worry about. (hugs)

No matter the calorie count, if I eat high carb I retain tons of water and can't lose weight. I can eat fruit, dairy, meat and cheese but the grains, even whole grains, don't allow me to lose weight. Try changing up the foods you are eating it may help.

Not sure what "eating healthier" means. That alone won't lead to weight loss--it's the amount that you are eating.

Maybe list what you eat in a typical day?

Good for you about giving up soft drinks! :cheer2:

Jay

I ate healthy for most of my life without losing weight. Healthy food doesn't make you lose weight, eating fewer calories than you burn does. It's just as easy to overeat healthy foods as it is unhealthy foods.

That's why methods that count or measure food intake are often the simplest way to lose weight (whether you're counting calories, weight watchers' points, exchanges...).

You also can't judge weight loss or gain by a few days. Just the weight of the food in your gut and water in your body (that you haven't yet pooped or peed out) could account for that weight.

Every month I gain 6-10 lbs of water weight with TOM. I would bet that if I ate no food, I'd still gain that weight as long as I was drinking water.

Even if you reduce calories, you're not guaranteed no gains and consistent losses. The body doesn't work that way, and if you expect it to, you're going to get fed up and quit.

I'd recommend that you join a TOPS group if you can (taking off pounds sensibly), because you'll start to see what average weight loss really is (every group reads off the group's gains and losses for the week and the total net gain or loss. By dividing it by the number of people in the group, you'll see what most people are really losing (and a recent study done by a Wisconsin medical school found that TOPS is just as effective as Weight Watchers and similar programs).

What you find out is that most people have at least one week per month in which they gain. And most people lose an average of far less than one pound per week.

My local group has won state-recognition awards for best weight loss (I think second or third place, out of dozens, if not hundreds of groups). Every month there's a contest that gives $10 to the person or people who go the whole month without gaining or missing a meeting. Most people don't miss meetings, so all you have to do to win the money is not gain (I've not gotten the prize yet - because of that darned TOM gain). Out of 25 men and women members, the prize is usually only split by 2 or 3 people. That means 90% of the group has at least one gain per month.

You're not doing anything wrong, except expecting the unreasonable.

What does "eating healthy" mean? If you want to see if there's something you could improve, you'll have to write down a few days worth of food intake to let us all see.

You can eat very healthy foods and gain weight if you eat too many. Calories are in ALL foods. Not just "junk" foods, and soda.

I agree, it would help to know the quantity you're eating, and what you're eating. It's possible that you're retaining too much water from excess sodium, or that you're not eating enough.

It's possible that you could be eating less healthy than you think, as others have suggested - so posting more specifics would be helpful.

But, it could also just be one of those things.

As much as we wish it was, weightloss is not a monotonic process where our weight marches cooperatively downward a few ounces a day like clockwork. Sometimes we all suffer through seemingly inexplicable cycles of whooshes, bounces, mini-plateaus, fluctuations, bloating, and so on and so on. This is all part of the process.

There are so many factors that affect your weight on a given day - many of which are out of your control. You can retain water because you ate too much sodium, because you drank too little water, because you exercised, because of the weather, because your hormones are at a particular part of your cycle, or for no reason at all. The food you eat weighs something, too, so depending upon how much food (and how much waste) is in your body at a particular moment, your weight can fluctuate by a few pounds due to that too.

You can't control all the variables that determine your weight on a particular day. So how do you deal with it? The key is to take a longer-term view. What matters is not whether you weigh less today than you did yesterday, or even whether you weigh less today than you did a week or two ago. What matters is whether you weigh less today than you did a month or two ago. Trust your plan, stick to it like glue regardless of the short-term fluctuations, and try to take a longer term view.

If your exercising you could very well be gaining lean muscle mass, which is GREAT! Muscle is much denser and weighs more than fat. So if your diet is good keep at it. The scales don't speak the entire truth!

Your portions are too large if you aren't weighing and measuring all of them and tracking every bite, lick and taste.

Women don't gain muscle like men and exercising for such a short time is not going to have increased muscle mass. Muscle and fat weigh the same but muscle takes up less volume than fat so if you are gaining muscle, your clothes would be looser but you weight would be the same, not more.