What do you do? Do you take action or ignore it?

I have been maintaining for months now by regular exercise and portion control. However, I noticed some of my petite clothes start to feel a bit tighter.I weigh myself regulary , especially the first thing in the morning .I usually range between 121 to 123.Now I noticed the scale has been creeping up to 124 -125.I don't track my calories anymore or maybe I could be over eating.

Hi Telly986

I'd say that you can take action whenever you feel it's necessary. If you're up a couple of pounds, then a good place to start would be to record your calories eaten for two or three days just to see where you're really at. It's easy to drift upward. For example, it's easy for me to overeat a little bit at every meal if I don't pay attention.

People do slowly gain weight over time--this isn't abnormal. But you can judge for yourself whether you're uncomfortable with the gain.

I start logging my food into my fitness pal so I can get a handle on what I'm putting in my mouth.

Hmm. 2-3 pounds should be pretty undetectable in clothes. So, either you're also undergoing body "recomposition" (replacing muscle mass with fat mass), or you're having what I call "bad body image" days, where you look in the mirror or move around in my clothes and "feel" fat even though objectively very little has changed. For me, the negative body image feelings can be triggered very powerfully by a few days of higher scale weight, even when that higher weight is literally 1 pound. But body recomp is also a real thing, and tends to happen if you do mostly cardio for exercise. Your body burns muscle as well as fat on days you're in a calorie deficit, and then puts back only fat on days you are in a calorie surplus, because the cardio doesn't build muscle. So, over time, if you're not in "perfect" energy balance, cardio can make you "fluffier" at the same weight. The cure for that problem is incorporating resistance exercise into your weekly routine, and maybe upping your protein:carb ratio.

Also, FWIW, if you lost weight by calorie counting, then checking on yourself by going back to logging calories can be useful. If you lost weight some other way, then logging your food may be less useful than going back to whatever it was you did to lose the weight in the first place (e.g. weighing and measuring portions, a la WW).

That sounds like a good idea. I am going to stat logging again to keep track of my calorie intake so I can get an idea where I am .............before it becomes 10 pounds

That makes sense.I was wondering why I feel a bit heavy even though the scale is 1-2 pounds heavier.I will start tracking my calories again

I dislike obsessively weighing. So the fit of some of my snugger clothes is one loose metric I use to figure out if I'm drifting. After a long time in this boat, I feel like I'm pretty objective about where I'm at and fully expect a range of weight over time.

For me, sometimes a snug waistband has been a call for tighter checks on intake or small corrections here or there. Or perish the thought, stepping back on a scale.

Many good points made above by neurodoc. Have seen such recompositioning when I've relied too much on cardio alone.