Ask the Trainer: Why won't the (bleep, bleep) scale move?

A friend of mine asked a great question.  Ok, ok, she called it a pity party-- but we've all been there, so it's completely legit.  She has been following a meal plan (and since her trainer is the guy who helped me lose all this weight, I know it is spot on-- he doesn't play!) and killing it in the gym. She's been pretty excited about all of her progress... until...

Until she stepped on the scale today and it showed her UP two pounds.  That's enough to make anyone say impolite things, especially when you are working so hard.

So what gives?

Well a couple of things, possibly.

1) It's water weight.  This could be from several things including higher than normal salt or carbohydrate intake.  Yeah, we know that salt often makes our bodies hold water, but I bet you didn't know that for every gram of carbohydrate that your body stores, it also stores 3 grams of water! Have a carb heavy meal and poof! A grouchy scale.  But if you happen to be of the (o, so...so... lucky) female type, you know that hormones can be pretty horrendous. Yup.  You know what I'm talking about!   The good news is that no matter the cause of the water weight, it will usually come of pretty quickly. It's water, not fat, so don't go into freak out mode just yet!

2) You're gaining muscle.  Yup, you've heard that one too.  But if you're busting it in the gym, it's possible! (Depending on your caloric intake-- it's very rare to be able to build muscle in a calorie reduced state.) I'd been whining to my trainer about a five month plateau.  The scale didn't look like it was budging (ok, I lost seven pounds...but that didn't feel sufficient given all the seriously hard effort I was putting in.)  But when we did a skin-fold analysis, we discovered that I had actually put on 4 pounds of muscle.  Everybody and their dog has heard that muscle weighs more than fat!

3) The body is pretty excited by what I now call "horrible homeostasis". Basically the body gets comfortable at a certain place, and panics when things start to change.  It's kind of a control freak that way.  So in its panic, it does everything it can to maintain the balance it likes so much.  Two year olds have nothin on the body when it decides it wants to throw a temper tantrum.  This is what's happening when we hit those nasty plateaus. Sorry.  I don't have anything useful to say about plateaus.  They are terrible, horrible, no good, and very bad!  But they are a completely normal part of the process.

So what's an eating-right, busting-it person to do?

Best answer:  Don't watch the scale.  When I first started with my trainer, he made me swear that I wouldn't weigh more than once a month-- for exactly this reason.  Some days, I think I probably need to go back to that plan.  But the tendency is to focus on the number on the scale instead of on how much progress you are making, how much healthier you feel, how much better you look in your clothes.  (Or uhem.  Sans clothes.  Whatever floats your boat.)

Trust pictures and trust friends when they tell you how good you look.  Friends might lie, though not usually about things like this.  Pictures can't lie.  Take pictures when you start and once a month thereafter.  Be really gutsy, move Jr.'s artwork, and hang them on the fridge.  You won't believe your eyes!

But most of all, hang in there. And well, this: