Reasons for Weight Gain on a Diet and Exercise Program
weight gain on a diet" width="300" height="200" />As frustrating as it is, there are a large number of reasons for weight gain on a diet despite your best efforts. This can be very hard on your motivation to keep going. After all when you’ve been doing nothing but counting calories and exercising every day, watching the numbers rise on the scale can make it seem like it’s not worth it at all.
That said, when you understand the reasons for weight gain on a diet you might find that you are less discouraged. Often, it doesn’t mean that you’re actually gaining body fat. There is a lot more going on in your body than can be detected on the bathroom scale.
The following are some of the top reasons for weight gain on a diet and exercise program:
Short-term inflammation
Inflammation is one of those unsuspecting symptoms that tends to present itself as many other things that are hard to track back to it. Among its symptoms can be swelling, redness, pain and even heat, among others. The symptoms caused by inflammation depend on what has caused the inflammation in the first place. When you’re dieting, the exercising you do naturally leads to what is called “microtrauma” to your muscle fibers. These are tiny little tears in your muscles and they’re the reason muscles feel sore after an intense workout. This is a natural process and it is actually what allows your body to become fitter and stronger. That said, as your muscles heal, inflammation occurs in order to open up blood vessels to make it easier to transport white blood cells to the site and transport toxins out of it. Swelling is the outcome, making the area temporarily look bigger. If this occurs in enough tissues, you can appear to have temporarily gained a bit of weight.
Muscle growth
Another point worth considering is that when you eat properly and work out on a regular basis, your body composition will change. Indeed, you will burn body fat away but at the same time, you will build lean muscle mass. This is great news for burning more fat as muscle is a natural fat builder, but at the same time, those new tissues come with their own mass and, for a while, this can register as weight increases on a scale. This is because a bathroom scale measures weight regardless of whether it is caused by fat, muscle, water, or anything else.
Stress
If you’re not coping well enough with the stress in your life, it could have an impact on your waistline. Stress causes your body to produce a hormone called cortisol, which is notorious for effects that promote weight gain.
