I just need a little encouragement. I weighed in tonight at WW thinking I would have lost (I had been well within my points all week), and it turned out that I had gained 3lbs! Not 1 or 2, but 3! In one week! I'm am trying to not let this setback be devastating to my self esteem or motivation, but for now it's not working and I just want to wallow in misery. Has anyone else out there been in the same place? Any tips on being proactive? I was really trying to hit my 5% goal next week, and unless there is an act of God, it's not happening!
Grrr...

Its ok!! Don't be discouraged!! You're body is getting used to the whole shebang and it's just confused!!! I've been there, I'm still there sometimes. What we are doing for ourselves is wonderful, but it will be a battle we will have to deal with for the rest of our lives. So, we have to be able to handle the little "tests" our bodies give us. Hang in there, we can do it!!

I have totally been there. Because I work nights, my weight ping pongs all over the place. No way with a calorie restriction in place did you gain 3 lbs of fat in a week. It's just water weight. Don't sweat it. But do examine what you're doing so you can figure out the source of water weight gain. I'm sure you're staying in your cals. Are you drinking your water? Getting enough sleep? Did you eat way too much salt?

The key is to NOT give up. Keep the big picture in mind. This is just one week in a long journey. The only way to fail is to stop.

For me, the scale always lags behind anyway. My clothes will be looser but the scale either stays the same or goes up. It's always the last to catch up. I got a love/hate relationship with that thing!

When I previoiusly lost a large amount of weight it was in two week chunks meaning one week no loss the next week a loss and I was in points each week. There were also times I gained alot but found it was water retention such as when I went on holiday and then the next week lost the water weight and more. And sometimes you just don't know what it is. If we eat more then we expend we will lose over time.
If I have a bad few weeks and truly believe I was on program I re-examine my measurments and points and so forth.
Good luck and it will come.

Thanks guys. The truth is that I haven't drunk enough water or gotten enough sleep. I didn't even think about that when I was complaining.

Update us on how this week goes!

Here's an example that just happened to me - I worked 84 hours in a week and a half. I work nights and always gain water on my workdays. My weight went as high as 322.2 lb, but I didn't let it get me down because I knew it was just water. Only two days off with a normal sleeping schedule and I peed out almost 10 lbs of water. Insane.

I do this too. I am following weight watchers and my points will all be in line and I could have some wicked weight gain swings. I did sit and analyzed what I was eatting and have found I need to increase more vegetables, drink much more water and work to avoid sodium. Sees to be helping.

The other thing is I try and step back and look at the big picture. I counted hw any weeks I lst, stayed the same and those I gained. Overall it wasn't that many when I gainf. I am trying to accept that I am losing on average 1.2 lbs per week. Which I am trying to b grateful for because it will be more hn 50 lbs this year. I have had to let go of defining success as losing 100 lbs in one year.

Hope this helps

Thanks for the encouragement! The more I think about last week, the more (I think) I understand what happened. I ate a lot of foods that were not nec. high in points, but out of this world in sodium, (i.e, Pho, Corned Beef and Cabbage, Tortillas). I didn't drink enough water, or exercise like I should have. Also it was my TOTM, so maybe that factored in. We'll see on Thursday when I weigh in, fingers crossed!

Gaining occasionally, even when sticking 100% on plan is absolutley normal. And it can come from so many possible sources.

The weight of the water in your food and beverages. Water has zero calories, but if you drink a quart and then get on the scale you're going to "gain" 2 lbs.

Your body needs water to function, but your body doesn't carry around a constant supply - the supply varies depending on your needs. If you're sick, hurt, during certain phases of a menstral cycle or recovering from normal amounts of physical activity, or are eating a higher carb diet... all of these things (and even more) can affect how much water your body needs (and therefore holds onto).

Then there's the weight of undigested food in your body. Just like with the water, if you eat a head of cauliflouwer you're going to "gain" 2 to 3 lbs. And complete digestion (sorry to be graphic but from swallow to the point the fluids and solids end up in the toilet bowel) can take up to three days (and longer in unusual cases).

Some people do seem to lose weight at a predictable rate, but I've learned this is by far the exception not the rule, but this information (for some weird reason) isn't at all common knowledge. We're "taught" to be traumatized by NORMAL fluctuations.

In my TOPS (taking off pounds sensibly) group we have a prize ($10 split among all the winners) for members who weighed in every week (most members do) AND had no gains. Out of 30 members, usually only 2 to 3 people "win" each month (and it's not the same people every month)

That tells me that gaining at least once a month is pretty normal. Even when you're doing "everything right."

I think we get discouraged because we're encouraged to think we've done something wrong, or that we're not like everyone else.

When I first started (and was losing even slower than I am now, and I'm still losing very slowly) I whined to my doctor that I thought I should be losing at least 2 lbs a week like a normal person, and he scolded me, saying that "normal" isn't losing 2 lbs every week - normal isn't even losing 2 lbs a month, it's losing nothing, or losing and regaining, or just gaining.

His mini-lecture got me thinking about weight loss differently, and I started paying attention at my TOPS group, and I realized that the "average" weight loss for my group of 30 members is less than a quarter pound per week. The group isn't made of lazy, crazy, stupid slackers. They're just ordinary folks trying to lose weight (most 30 and over, so a younger group might lose a little faster), and the average is only a quarter of a pound per week.

Most of my 105 lbs have come off at the average rate. That's right, I've lost 105 lbs mostly at the rate of one pound per month or less. I haven't worked as hard as I have in the past (but that's been a good thing. In past attempts I always starved myself, got sick of it, and regained it all).


We need to really understand "normal," and we don't. We only see and hear about the amazingly rapid losers, not the average and slow losers. We don't know what normal is so we think we're failing when we're actually succeeding.

I wish I had understood as an 11 year old or even as a 30 year old that losing 1 lb a month was fantastic success and not failure. I gave up time after time in weight loss not because I was failing, but because I felt like I was failing (because I was taught to expect 3 or more pounds each and every week - and sometimes even my WW leaders would console me with "better luck next time" rather than congratulations when I lost less than 2 lbs a week. We've all been brainwashed to think that 1-2 lbs a week (consistently each and eveyr week) is slow weight loss when it's actually amazingly rapid weight loss.

We've been taught to see our successes as failures, and so it's important to know what average and normal weight loss really looks like, and it doesn't look like anything we've been taught to expect.

Wow such wonderful wise words Kaplods. You inspire me.

Aromyn - whoa...you had like practically all of my triggers for water weight gain - too much sodium, not enough water, AND TOM?

Looking forward to hearing how this Thursday WI goes for you!

All of this really struck a chord with me. Thank you so much for posting.

This time around I'm trying to alter my concept of what constitutes weight loss success. Losing that a deadline mentality is so hard. Harder than turning down chocolate!

I can find myself falling into old habits of getting bummed when I lose "only" 1.8 lbs a week. WTH? I have to actively talk to myself and look back at what I weighed a month before and tell myself, "Look, you're 7 lbs lighter than you were a month ago. That is great progress!"

Oddly enough, I think weighing everyday has helped me see just how much my weight can change from day to day and it has absolutely nothing to do with getting fatter - just the normal changes in your body.

It really just tears me apart that I quit so many times before because I didn't realize that I was doing amazingly well, just not well enough to impress myself or others (I got a lot of feedback from my family, from the weight loss "experts" at Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem and other programs I joined, and even from some doctors, telling me I was failing miserably - or at least implying it with disapproving clucking sounds, or sometimes out-and-out insults, "Why are you wasting your money(Mother)." "Why are you wasting my time (doctors, dietitian)..."

Even the "experts" often have absolutely no clue as to what "normal" really looks like (or they don't care because they have been just as blinded by societal expectations and definitons of acceptable weight loss)... "Everyone knows" that anyone who isn't losing those magical 1 to 2 lbs per week, each and every week, must lack motivation and must be cheating, that is they are lazy, crazy, or stupid.

And shows like "The Biggest Loser," only reinforce those beliefs. Now people are quitting weight loss, not because they couldn't lose 1-2 lbs like the magazines have for decades said was normal, but because they can't lose the 5 to 20 lbs a week like the contestants on the biggest loser (and I'm not making that up). Those complaints have not only appeared here on 3FC, I've met at least two people in real life who were at the point of giving up because they were "only" losing 3 to 4 lbs per week. It's this person's biggest dream to be on The Biggest Loser television show (which breaks my heart because I know with this person's health issues, there's absolutely no way on earth she'd be ever bw selected for the show, because she'd quite likely DIE or be severely injured her first day in the gym).

It just breaks my heart that people are STILL being told that they are failing, and worse that they're not really trying very hard or must not be very motivated when the person is actually succeeding far, far better than "the average" (and worse, by people who should know better).

It's no wonder that the failure rate for weight loss is often measured in the nearly 100% range (most studies find failure rates in the 95% to 98% range. I believe the lowest failure rate I've actually ever seen for non wls patients was 88% and for wls 55%). So even with wls, success seems to be about 50/50 (and success in all of these studies is never defined as "lost every bit of weight and kept every bit off").

Weight loss is one of the most difficult things a person can do, and yet we treat it like it should not just be easy, it should be rapid as well. We don't treat it like something difficult. We treat it as if any moron should be able to figure it out without any help or support. Yes, that's changing thank Goodness, but sadly it's still more true than not.







I also found frequent weighing to help much more than it hindered, especially because I changed my attitude. I didn't expect the scale to show me what I wanted to see, I decided to use it to LEARN about myself, so at first I didn't just wiegh myself daily, I weighed myself every time I wanted to (and some times I didn't). I even recorded the weight before and after meals, before and after drinking or eating "off plan" or even on, before and after gonig to the bathroom, before and after dressing, at bedtime and first thing in the morning, before and after a shower (how much water "sticks" to your hair and body after a shower? For me it is a little over a pound).

I wrote it down daily and kept notes of my diet and other health issues. I discovered for example that I weigh less when eating low-carb. I weigh a little more when eating high-carb (and I've read that this is because the body needs more water to digest carbs). I gain weight with my period - about 8 lbs (even if I don't eat a single bite off plan). I gained weight after a sunburn (and researced med sites online and discovered that sunburns and any kind of injury causes water retention, because the body NEEDS extra water to heal - ironically, I actually learned this in graduate school biology class, but I had forgotten it).

I also was taking my body temperature every day also (because I was having mystery fevers as part of my fibromyalgia and also my "normal" body temp is very low, so 98.6 is usually a "fever" for me). I learned that my body temperature actually is higher on a low-carb diet.

I LEARNED so much about my body, because I decided to ignore all the information I thought I knew, and to make the observations for myself (and document them all so I wasn't just jumping to conclusions).

It didn't "make me obsessive," it taught me what fluctuations

Thanks for all the wisdom! I weighed in last night, .4 lbs lost. I was expecting to step on the scale and have those 3 lb's magically disappear because I worked my a** off all week, but after reading all of your posts I am putting things into a little more perspective. I also have an amazing Weight Watchers leader, (Fay, for any of you in the NOVA area!), who saw my disappointment and took the time to give me a pep talk and advice. She didn't seem to think my fluctuations were abnormal either, and she would know bc she's lost 111 lbs and kept it off for 20+ years. I guess I'll just try to amp it up a little more...although I am tired just thinking about it. I've been fat my whole life, so I can't really expect to undo 20 something years of bad habits and weight gain in a few months.
I just get discouraged when I feel like I don't have a significant measurement of success.