That title should say.... WITHOUT EXERCISE* Sorry I just woke up! lol


I had no allergy pills for about a week so I avoided exercise, aside from leg lifts and squats and some weights. I thought, well as long as I keep tight control over my food I'll be fine. *buzzer beep* EHHRRR wrong!

Oct 26: 170
27: 170.2
28: 170.4
29: 170.8


Excuse me a moment.

That just won't do, and I don't even know how I managed it TBH. My sister made cookies and brownies all in the span of 2 weeks and I didn't have any, nor did I have any cake from the week before. I don't know what the culprit is, but it's very frustrating.

I got my pills back yesterday but didn't exercise because I wanted to give my body a chance to absorb it and get used to it again. No excuses today. Ugh. I will NOT go back to 171. I refuse.

I have to be at a friends place sunday, where the schedule will be hectic and the food unhealthy, so I was thinking... Bring my own food, eat as healthy as Ican, and maybe, because I'm obsessive, I might just do some sit ups or push ups while everyone is asleep, if we go to bed at a decent hour Which I somehow doubt... or maybe I can go for a walk in the morning at least.

Sometimes we walk to this guy's house, and it's a few blocks away. So at least I'll maybe have that to look forward to..

but yeah, anyone else think they could go without exercise for a while, only to find that they were sadly mistaken?

I'm jealous!

Exercise doesn't help me that much with weight loss, unless I'm 100% strict on food. I can easily gain weight even if I'm working out like a madwoman. OTOH, I can lose pretty steadily without exercise, if I'm my own food ****, but I feel a million percent better if I work out.

I thought I could get by without it, but apparently not! So I need to get my butt in gear today, haha. I'm usually pretty strict about what I eat, although now that I think about it I did have some skittles yesterday.

My body is a lil weird. I find that when I exercise well but I'm not too strict with the eating, I lose weight. If I'm good with eating and no exercise I lose weight. But, when I exercise and eat really well, the scale just creeps up .. and pretty quickly, too (at least to me).

That's why I'm a firm believer that while the diet and exercise formula is there, we need to be aware of our bodies. It's pretty frustrating. I feel your pain. I just it was a simple cut and dried exercise more, eat less and my body would respond. I work well with certain types of exercise and some foods are better than others for me... blah, blah, blah!!

You know your body, so do what you have to to keep the pounds from creeping back in.

The ONE thing I require myself to do, is to see my trainer 3 times a week (its bootcamp style, so both cardio and resistance training).

Everything else is negotiable, but I have found like you that I just absolutely am required to keep my butt moving

I'm the same although I've never thought I could get by without it.

I'm out of commission this week because I hurt my back but I can start again tomorrow (just light running only on soft surfaces, no lifting). It's been hard. However, I've just tried to tell myself that this weekend I'll make up for it and I tried walking often today. My weight fluctuations so much anyways that I could never get as precise measurements as you so it's hard to say the exact effect.

However, I will say, I've NEVER been able to stay on plan eatingwise if I'm not exercising at the same time. Actually, I'm normally able to start working out first and then it leads to better eating habits. It's funny. I see often on these boards a bigger push for completely being on plan for food but not quite as much with exercise. That just doesn't work for me (great if it works for someone else, though!) and I've always found the opposite. I need to be 100% on plan when it comes to getting regular exercise and with food I don't have to be quite as strict (not like eating brownies off plan but having some healthy pizza or a sugar free sweet potato bar won't completely derail me). Now, that could be because I rely so much on exercise. I think for my size I tend to do quite a bit more than normal so that might play a role. I'm also nursing, which means that dropping calories as low as most just kills me.

I don't think four days of data is enough to evaluate whether you would lose without exercise.

Here are my daily weights from a recent 5-day period.

10/19 - 219
10/20 - 219
10/21 - 220
10/22 - 220
10/23 - 221

Oh, crap! Look at that. I must have really binged, there, or dropped the ball on my exercise. Look at how fast I'm gaining!

Actually, I was completely on plan that whole time, and exercised the same as I usually do. It was just a fluctuation of a couple of pounds, the kind of fluctuation I have all the time. A couple days later I was back to 219, and today I saw a new low, 217.

I suspect you are being intentionally hyperbolic, so I don't mean to pick on you or tell you things you already know. I just want to stress that your thread highlights one of the pitfalls of weighing every day without keeping the longer term picture in mind. Weight loss is not monotonic - few people will ever see the numbers marching cooperatively and uniformly downward day after day after day.

And there are so many factors that you cannot draw conclusions based on a couple of days of data. You have to watch how the numbers change over weeks or even months to evaluate your patterns and develop a sense of how your behaviors really affect your weight loss. That gain of 2 pounds in 5 days didn't faze me for a moment because I've been watching my numbers long enough to know that I just have that kind of fluctuation. I know that my plan works and if I stick to it, I'll lose about 5 pounds per month, regardless of what happens on the day-to-day.

I agree that you can't really evaluate the effect of no exercise and on-plan eating this way. Our weight fluctuates for all kinds of reasons.

In fact, in my personal experience, exercise lies. That is to say, the morning after I work out, I am always 2 to 3 pounds lighter than the preceding morning. It's due to dehydration. I may drink as much as 50 or 60 ounces of water while working out, but I still end up seriously dehydrated.

Any time I saw a new low when I was losing weight, it was the morning after working out. By the next day my weight was back up, and the day after that it was usually even higher. That evening I would work out, though, and the cycle would start again.

I also found sometimes that my weight would jump as much as two pounds for no apparent reason, and stay up those two pounds for a week. It's just one of those things. The next week I'd be down four pounds, so it was just water weight I was retaining for whatever reason.