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Body weight can be a useful indicator that you are making progress but it should always be taken with a pinch of salt. When you are following a structured training and diet plan, you should trust the process and not be disheartened that you aren’t seeing a drop in weight on the scales.

It’s fine to measure your weight frequently, but don’t worry about day to day fluctuation and be mindful of the many factors that can influence your body weight!

Read on to learn about all the different factors and how they affect your body weight.

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Muscle Can Be Deceiving!

When it comes to getting in shape, body weight will never tell you the full story – especially when weight training is involved. The goal with any fat loss plan should be to reduce body fat whilst increasing or maintaining muscle mass.

The key point to take home here is that even if your weight is increasing, it’s still possible for you to be losing body fat and getting closer to your goals!

Increasing muscle mass is extremely important if you want to get in shape long term and find it easy to stay in great shape once you get there! Muscle tissue is metabolically active meaning the more muscle you have, the more calories you need to maintain your body weight. This makes it easier for you to stay lean and burn body fat once you’ve built a solid base of muscle, even when you are eating a high calorie diet!

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Calories In vs. Calories Out

Most diet plans will involve sticking to a daily calorie intake. In order to reduce body fat the calories you are taking in must be lower than the calories you are burning during the day.

Working out exactly the right amount of calories you should be eating is difficult, so most programmes work on an estimate. If this is too high or even too low, you won’t see the weight loss that you expect.

Luckily, all our training plans come will full email support and if you are getting disheartened by what you see on the scales, you can get in touch at any time and we will analyse your progress to work out your best course of action!

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Water Weight

Water weight can have a significant effect on your body weight. There are many factors which affect the amount of water that your body holds including too much salt, too much sugar, dehydration, alcohol, too few calories and, for women, your monthly cycle.

There are a few things you can do to keep your water weight in check:

  • Stay hydrated
  • Reduce salt intake
  • Reduce sugar intake
  • Minimise alcohol intake (zero if possible)
  • Avoid cutting your calories drastically

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Carb Weight

There are tons of factors that influence your body weight, some of these involve bodily tissues like muscle and fat and some involve external elements like carbs and water.

Your body can store carbs in your muscles as muscle glycogen, which will increase your bodyweight. In addition to this, those stored carbs can hold water which will also increase your body weight.

This can be especially noticeable when you switch from a low carb diet to a higher carb diet. You might notice a sudden weight increase when you switch your diet but just remember this is not body fat – it’s just carbs and water! As soon as you reduce carbs again, you can lose this extra carb and water weight and you weight will drop back down to its previous level.

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Conclusion

Your body weight can be a good indicator of whether you are making progress towards your goals but you need to take all the factors into account.

If you are sticking to your diet and nutrition plan but not seeing the weight loss you would expect, trust the process and give it time before jumping to conclusions!