If you're trying to lose weight, you might be using a scale to gauge your progress. It can be demotivating and upsetting to find that you’re not losing weight, even if you notice non-scale indicators like your clothes fitting more loosely or the need to tighten your belt. This article explores the reasons why you may be losing inches but not weight and explains what you can do about it.
Understanding the Discrepancy
The scale should only be seen as one piece of the puzzle, not the main factor that decides how healthy you are. This is because it does not take into account other puzzle pieces, such as muscle mass, bone density, and water weight when it comes to back body composition. There may be several reasons you’re losing inches but not weight. You could be simultaneously gaining muscle and losing fat through body recomposition or experiencing temporary water retention. You may have hit a weight loss plateau, meaning you may need to adjust your calories or better manage your stress and sleep schedule.
Weight loss can be complex; a registered dietitian can help guide you to a healthy weight. If you're in a calorie deficit and working out, you might notice your jeans fitting better, your waist looking slimmer, and your energy levels rising. Take a moment to appreciate that progress-it’s a sign your body is changing in a positive way.
Potential Causes for Losing Inches Without Weight Loss
1. Muscle Gain with Fat Loss (Body Recomposition)
If you're losing inches but not weight, you may be gaining muscle and losing fat, which is great news! When you follow a consistent exercise routine that includes strength training, your body builds muscle tissue while reducing fat stores. Since muscle weighs more than fat, you may notice your clothes fitting better before the needle on the scale moves. Along with these visible changes, this body transformation also brings significant health benefits, lowering your risk of chronic conditions like high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
If you only focus on your weight, you may miss out on all the wonderful gains you made towards better health. Try other ways to track your progress, including monthly photos from consistent angles, measuring your waist, hips, and arms, and monitoring improvements in blood pressure and blood sugar levels. These health markers often tell you much more about your progress than just a number on the scale.
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2. Water Retention
Stepping on the scale in the morning and then again at night can show you different numbers. That’s normal. Your body experiences shifts in water balance throughout the day. There are three key factors that influence your daily weight changes: salt intake, carbohydrates, and exercise.
Salt plays a crucial role in water management. When you consume more sodium than usual, your body retains extra water to maintain a balance. That's why salty foods like pizza or ultraprocessed snacks can temporarily increase your weight. Your body's response to carbohydrates can create similar effects. When eating foods like pasta, rice, or bread, your muscles store these carbs as glycogen for energy, and they need extra water to do it. This excess water being stored explains weight changes after eating a lot of carbs. Exercise may also impact water retention. During and after workouts, your muscles retain water to help repair and strengthen tissue. This post-workout weight increase signals that your body is successfully adapting to exercise. It’s a good sign; it means you’re building muscle.
Daily weight fluctuations from water are completely normal and expected. Consider tracking weight trends over weeks rather than daily changes, and focus on a balanced diet rich in vegetables, lean proteins, and small amounts of healthy fats. A weight loss dietitian can help you lose weight with 1-on-1 support.
You may retain water for a number of reasons, including:
- Standing or sitting in the same position for too long
- Eating too much salty food
- Being overweight
- Being pregnant
- Taking certain medications, such as some blood pressure medications, contraceptive pills, hormone therapy, antidepressants, and steroids.
3. Weight Loss Is Relative
People with higher baseline body fat can safely create a bigger calorie deficit. In people who are leaner, slower weight loss is better. Muscle burns more calories than fat does. When leaner people lose weight too quickly, they risk losing muscle, which slows down their metabolism and makes it easier to regain weight.
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4. Body Adjusts to New Weight (Weight Loss Plateau)
As you begin eating and exercising, your body initially responds with noticeable results. But over time, this progress might slow down or stop-even though you haven't changed your routine. This isn't a sign of failure; it's your body adapting and becoming more efficient, using less energy to perform the same activities. This adaptation, called a weight loss plateau, can last several weeks. Your body now functions efficiently at your current activity level and food intake. It’s just a signal that it’s time to adjust your approach. Breaking through a weight loss plateau often requires strategic changes to your routine.
Basically, what got you here may not get you to your next milestone. Try varying your workout intensity, incorporating new movement patterns, or adjusting meal timing. Every person experiences weight loss differently. So, for personalized guidance, consider working with a weight loss dietitian to help you through a weight loss plateau. Weight loss may cause your metabolism to slow, significantly decreasing the rate at which you lose weight. It can help to track your calories for at least 1 week to determine whether your calorie intake is too high based on your needs. Remember that you’ll need to continuously adjust your calorie intake as you lose weight, based on factors like your age, gender, and activity level. If you find that you’re maintaining a calorie deficit, other factors such as stress or a lack of sleep can increase hormones that can prevent weight loss and even promote weight gain.
5. Hormonal Imbalances
Your body's hormones play a significant role in regulating weight, fat storage, and water balance. It's common to experience weight fluctuations due to hormonal shifts. Understanding these changes can help you manage your health more effectively.
Let's take a closer look at some key hormones and conditions that can influence your body’s weight, fat storage, and water retention:
- Cortisol: Known as the "stress hormone," cortisol can lead to increased water retention and more fat storage, especially belly fat, when it's elevated. Ongoing stress can keep cortisol levels high, which may contribute to these effects.
- Insulin: This hormone helps process carbohydrates, but when insulin is less effective, it can lead to insulin resistance, raising blood sugar levels and potentially causing weight gain.
- Menstrual Cycle: Your menstrual cycle can lead to temporary weight changes. Women may notice water retention and bloating before their period, causing a slight increase in weight, which usually resolves once menstruation begins.
- Menopause: Menopause can make you retain water and cause temporary weight gain and bloating.
- Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS): PCOS affects women of reproductive age. PCOS can contribute to weight gain and make it harder to lose weight, particularly belly fat. Managing insulin levels through a balanced diet and exercise is key.
- Hypothyroidism: An underactive thyroid reduces the production of thyroid hormones, slowing metabolism and sometimes leading to weight gain. Treating hypothyroidism with medication may reverse some of the weight gain.
6. Scale Inaccuracy
Even good digital scales can get wonky over time. It’s worth doing a little test to eliminate one source of doubt. Here are some ways to tell if your weighing scale is accurate:
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- Put your scale on a hard, flat surface and weigh something you know the weight of, like a 10-pound bag of flour.
- Try weighing yourself at your doctor's office, gym, or a friend's house to compare.
Importance of Self-Monitoring
Weighing yourself is a good way to monitor your progress. It can also reinforce the idea that factors like diet and exercise move you closer to your weight loss goal, while others, like a lack of sleep and excess stress, push you farther away. Indeed, people who weigh themselves and engage in other self-monitoring behaviors, like tracking diet and exercise, seem to be more successful at both losing weight and maintaining the loss in the long term. Despite daily weight fluctuations that may occur due to factors such as water retention, research suggests that daily weighing is more effective for weight loss and maintenance than weekly or monthly weighing. This may be because people who weigh themselves more often are more likely to engage in healthy behaviors like reading nutrition labels, eating whole grains, drinking less soda, and exercising vigorously.
While weighing yourself has not been strongly linked with body image, disordered eating, or anxiety, some people may experience these effects. If you find that daily or even weekly weighing leads to discouragement or obsessive behaviors, it may be better to monitor your progress in other ways. Remember that your weight is not always a reliable indicator of your health.
Alternative Ways to Measure Progress
Tracking your weight is a good first step, but it’s important to look beyond the scale for a fuller picture of your health. If you’re not losing weight, consider tracking:
- Monthly body measurements
- Progress photos
- How your clothes fit
- Energy levels
- Exercise performance
- Sleep quality
Additionally, consider checking your blood pressure, blood sugar levels, triglycerides, and cholesterol levels at regular intervals. You may notice improvements if you’re eating well and exercising regularly.
Lifestyle Factors Affecting Weight
1. Poor Sleep
Not getting enough quality sleep leads to weight gain. Our body’s hunger hormones get out of whack, leading to increased hunger and cravings for high-calorie foods. A common factor in weight gain and stalled weight loss is how well you’re sleeping.
2. Hidden Calories
Empty calories in drinks can cause the pounds to creep up.
3. Sugar Substitutes
Artificial sweeteners, such as aspartame or sucralose, trick your brain into thinking it’s getting sugar even though it’s not.
4. Body’s Setpoint
Our bodies naturally gravitate towards a certain weight, referred to as our "setpoint." This is the weight where hormones and neurotransmitters in the gut and brain are most comfortable.
5. Focus on Nutrition
You must look at what you’re putting in your body. You can’t out-exercise a poor diet.
6. Gut Health
Giving your gut time to recover helps improve its function and supports weight-loss efforts. Specifically, rethink any snacking in the evening.
Medications and Weight Gain
Many medications, while effective in treating various health conditions, have unintended side effects like weight gain.
- Antidepressants: While it’s not a significant amount, some antidepressants cause weight gain, and others actually help with weight loss.
- Gabapentin: Traditionally used to treat conditions like epilepsy, nerve pain, and restless legs syndrome, Gabapentin is prescribed for anxiety or mood disorders, too. Some people gain weight on the medication.
- Lexapro: On average, Lexapro causes minimal weight gain - about 3.5 to 5 pounds after taking the medication for two consecutive years.
- Prozac: Prozac doesn't cause weight gain for most people.
- Trazadone: Used to treat depression and insomnia, Trazadone is unlikely to cause weight gain.
- Wellbutrin: Wellbutrin doesn’t cause weight gain.
- Birth Control: The best birth control options to avoid weight gain are intrauterine devices (IUDs) and low-dose combination birth control pills. Significant weight gain is seen with the Depo-Provera shot and Nexplanon, a little device inserted in the arm.
- Insulin: Insulin can lead to weight gain.
- Levothyroxine: Prescribed to treat hypothyroidism, levothyroxine doesn’t cause weight gain.
- Spironolactone: Used to treat high blood pressure, heart failure, and hormonal disorders, Spironolactone doesn’t cause weight gain. It helps regulate fluid balance in the body and decreases water weight.
- Beta Blockers: Some older versions of beta blockers are linked to weight gain, but it's minimal.
- Steroids: Used to treat inflammation, steroids cause weight gain when used long-term.
- Creatine: While you may experience some initial water weight, creatine doesn’t make you gain weight and won’t cause an increase in fat.
- Protein shakes: If it's low in carbohydrates and sugar, protein shakes don’t make you gain weight.
- St. John’s Wart: There's no evidence St. John’s Wart causes weight gain.
Other Factors
1. Age-Related Changes
Our metabolism slows down as we age. It’s especially noticeable during menopause when muscle mass begins to decrease and fat mass increases. In women, certain underlying conditions affecting the pelvic organs sometimes lead to weight gain, too.
2. Inflammation
Inflammation and weight gain tend to feed off each other. If not addressed, this can lead to an endless cycle in the body. A diet high in simple carbohydrates, like what's found in processed foods and sugary drinks, fried food, alcohol and high fructose, significantly impacts weight gain.
3. Diet Soda
Most research shows diet soda can make you gain weight. In fact, people who drink diet soda versus regular soda consume more calories in a day and weigh more.
4. Coffee
By itself, coffee won’t make you gain weight. In fact, coffee has a ton of health benefits and can slightly increase your metabolism. You just have to be careful of the amount of sugar and sweeteners you add to it.
5. White Rice
If you eat a lot of white rice, it can increase the number of fat cells in your body and lead to weight gain.
6. Post-Workout Weight Gain
One potential reason for feeling heavier after a workout is increased water weight. When you exercise, your body loses fluids through sweat. As you rehydrate, you may retain water, leading to a temporary increase in weight. Additionally, as you gain muscle mass through strength training, you might see an increase on the scale, even if your body fat decreases.