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When you want to lose weight, it can’t happen fast enough. The fat mass you’ve accumulated over a few years, you’d prefer to lose in a few weeks. Quickly before summer or to look your best for the holidays. How frustrating is it then when suddenly you’re losing less weight than the week before?
When you walk into the gym and confidently step on the scale, it can feel like a big blow to your face. Instead of losing weight as you expected, that *&^% thing shows that you’ve actually
GAINED WEIGHT! All those cupcakes and Oreos left untouched for nothing…
Fortunately, there’s nothing wrong when you realize that losing body weight (or fat mass) is never linear. In other words, you’ll never consistently lose the same amount of weight every week. It simply doesn’t happen because your body isn’t a machine that you can program to ‘continuity mode’ or pinpoint accuracy.
When you weigh yourself every week over a longer period, you should actually see results. However, when losing body weight, possible fluctuations influenced by the causes mentioned below should be taken into account.
Naturally, there are better ways to measure your progress. Relying solely on the number displayed by the scale doesn’t show the difference between muscle mass and body fat. If you don’t have (severe) overweight, doing a body fat percentage measurement through your skinfold measurement and checking your reflection is a great way to see how you’re progressing. In this article, however, I want to show you how the results in changes in body weight can look for someone with significant overweight.
Ingrid lost 30 kilos with ups and downs
As an example, we’ll use Ingrid’s weight loss process, who started with a weight of 119.3 kilos at a height of 1.70 meters (BMI of 41.3). In the 9 months she’s been a client with me, Ingrid has lost almost 30 kilos. It goes without saying that she didn’t lose the same amount of weight every week, as you can see in the diagram below.
On the horizontal axis of the diagram, you see Ingrid’s starting weight (119.3 kg) with the week number of the year below it. The blue bars indicate the weight, and from this, you can see in the diagram how her weight decreased.
The blue line, compared to the horizontal black line, indicates how much weight was lost compared to the previous week (numbers on the vertical axis to the right). If this blue line is equal to the black line, there is no weight loss; if it is lower than the black line, weight has been lost; if the line is higher, weight has been gained.
You can see that in weeks 17, 18, 19, and 20,
hardly any weight loss occurred. Then, Ingrid loses 7 kilos in 6 weeks, after which not much happens for 3 weeks, and her weight even increases slightly. This isn’t strange. Your body weight isn’t only influenced by changes in the amount of muscle mass and fat mass you carry. What you’ve eaten (in the past few days) determines the amount of glycogen stored in your muscles and liver (every gram of glycogen binds 4 grams of water). Your menstrual cycle, among other things, affects water retention, and of course, it also matters whether you’ve just been to the bathroom and if that all-you-can-eat sushi from last night is still in your stomach. If you didn’t eat sushi, the salt from your meals could still have had an impact.
Although you’ve done your best, haven’t eaten anything unusual, and managed to stick to your normal exercise routine, the result on the scale can still be disappointing. The human body is more complex than we realize, and the laws of mother nature can’t be defied.
What I want to show with this graph and article is that there can be quite a few fluctuations in your body weight. Although it’s desired to lose weight every week when the goal is to lose weight, this often isn’t the case. Despite at least a small setback every 4 weeks or a stall in weight loss, Ingrid and I knew that we were doing well and that it’s mainly about long-term success.
The right mindset for long-term success
To keep your motivation and/or avoid falling back into bad habits, accept that you won’t lose the same amount of weight every week. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with what you’re doing, and you don’t have a ‘difficult, slow, or stubborn metabolism,’ some things you just can’t control.
Set a long-term goal and see what you can do in the short term to get there. By sticking to your efforts and not giving up, you keep yourself as responsible as possible and will ultimately become successful 🙂
References
- Stephen N Kreitzman, An Y Coxon, Kalman F Szaz. Glycogen storage: ilusions of easy weight los, excesive weight regain, and distortions in estimatesof body compositon. Van Staveren WA, Deurenberg P, Burema J, De Groot LC, Hautvast JG
- International Journal of Obesity [1986, 10(2):133-145]
Seasonal variation in food intake, pattern of physical activity and change in body weight in a group of young adult Dutch women consuming self-selected diets.
