Why You're Gaining Weight While Working Out
Weight loss is a reasonable goal as long as you approach it in a healthy manner. But exercise and nutrition aren’t just a numbers game. Your workout routine and how you fuel yourself impacts your metabolism, fuel storage, and key hormones like cortisol, insulin, thyroid, and sex hormones, which are all critical for success when you’re trying to hit your optimum weight.
So if you’ve been wondering why you might be gaining weight, here are the reasons why the scale may be stuck—or moving in the opposite of your desired direction—and what to do about it.
1. You’ve gained muscle
Your muscles respond to the stress of hard training on the run and in the gym by getting bigger and stronger. And here’s an often overlooked fact: Muscle tissue is more dense than fat tissue. So as you gain more muscle and lose fat, you change your overall body composition, which can result in a higher weight, but a smaller figure and better health.
If the scale has inched up, but your waistline hasn’t and you feel strong overall, don’t sweat the kilos; they’re increasing your power.
2. You HIIT too often.
Though high-intensity interval training can be very effective at improving fitness and shedding kilos, too much can put too much stress on your system and lead to the opposite result.
People forget that exercise is stress. It’s generally positive stress, but when you put an excessive physical stress like high-intensity exercise on top of an already stressed system, your body will view it as negative, and you’ll increase cortisol production. When cortisol is high, it can lead to insulin resistance, lower levels of thyroid stimulating hormones, and depression of testosterone production in men and progesterone production in women.
"Make the goal getting healthy or fit or increasing athletic ability—not doing it just so you can eat more."
3. You’re consuming more calories than you’re burning
When you start working out, your body starts burning more calories. And when you burn more calories, your body naturally wants to compensate by eating more calories to make up for what you’re burning.
What’s more, people tend to overestimate how much they burn in a workout. I suggest keeping logs of how many calories you burn in a training session, as well as tracking your food intake. Myzone, for example, will tell you calories burned during exercise, while weight loss apps like MyFitnessPal offer easy food recording. You definitely don’t need to write down these numbers for months but try a week or two just to see how your stats line up. It’s a red flag if you’re exercising only so you can eat more. «That’s a good theory, but you don’t want to use eating as an excuse to exercise» as Ivana Cujova, the Personal coach in Geneva is explaining to her clients.
4. Your pre- or post-workout snacks aren’t the best choices
As your appetite increases from burning more calories, it’s easy to reach for pre-packaged and processed foods that contain simple sugars. But instead of filling your hunger with chips, cookies, or crackers, go for healthy post-workout snacks, such as fruits, veggies, lean protein, and healthy fats, so you get filling nutrients and likely in smaller portions.
While it’s beneficial to eat something after a workout to recover and rebuild, you don’t always have to have something. Many people take in too many extra calories simply because they’re trying to eat a snack within 30 to 60 minutes of their workout. If you ate lunch or a mini-meal an hour before you exercised, you probably don’t need something post-sweat, too.On the flip side, if you don’t eat before your workout because you’re waiting for that post-activity re-fueling window, you might be left absolutely starving after exercise. That’s also a safe bet for gaining weight. Reaching a state of extreme hunger tends to cause people to overeat, so keep your satiety levels in check.
5. You’re giving the number on the scale too much credit
The scale has officially been dethroned as the ultimate measure of fitness. While you can see weight loss/gain in numbers on a basic scale, there are so many things it doesn’t take into account: muscle mass, water weight, etc.
Me as a Personal Trainer in Geneva, what I am trying to explain to my clients is; they should ignore the scale and pay more attention to objective measurement tools such as body composition: the percentage of your body made up of fat versus lean mass (muscle, bones, organs, etc.). While you can judge a certain amount about your body composition by looking in the mirror (hey there, six-pack), the only way to truly track your body composition is by getting a body fat test.
6. You’re eating too much protein or carbs
Marathon runners might need to carbo-load before the big day, but if your runs last less than an hour, you don’t necessarily need to fill up on carbs—the same goes for protein.
Most people actually already get enough protein in their diets, so you don’t need to focus so much on getting more of it—even if you’re weight training or HIIT-ing it more. People love to talk about protein because it is essential, but if you eat too much, you’re going to gain weight, as it will be extra calories.
7. You’re not lifting weights
Cardio increases your metabolism more, spiking hunger levels, but weight training offers a strong way to counteract that. Plus, when you gain muscle from lifting, you actually burn more calories at rest.
Lifting weights tend to not boost appetite as much as cardio, and it increases resting metabolic rate by accumulating lean muscle mass.
Even better, focusing on strength training can help you live longer—which is an even better pay-off than shedding a few pounds.
8. You’re only moving during your workout
The most common mistake is that people will work out and then their other daily exercise goes down. When you put so much emphasis on your gym time, but you sit at a desk the rest of the day—or maybe you pushed it so hard that you don’t have the energy to move for the next 24 hours—you could essentially keep your daily calorie burn hovering at the same spot as before your workout routine picked up.
Remember to keep moving throughout the day by taking breaks to go for a walk or taking the stairs instead of the elevator. It’s not only your time spent in a scheduled sweat session that contributes to your overall calorie burn.