People who gain weight on BP (and don't want to) page

[shannonstoney]

What if you switch to BP and you start gaining weight? That seems to be happening to me, although I cut carbs to 100 grams or less a day, walk an hour every day, and sprint once a week.

I wasn't overweight when I started, but I'm certainly not underweight. I am a 55 year old woman, 5'3", and I weigh about 136 most days. This varies a pound or so either way. This morning I weighed 137!

Maybe weight is not the best measure of fat loss, so I am also measuring myself, and I seem to have lost about half an inch in my waist measurement, so that's good. I have a small tummy roll that developed around menopause.

[NicoB]

Don't pay to much attention to the scale. Trust the tape, and as Robb Wolf would say: "Check on how you look, feel, and perform."

I monitor my scale daily, but I'm a database nerd. I don't really care about the day to day numbers just the overall stats.

[shannonstoney]

I think I may be eating more carbs than I think. This morning my breakfast added up to 55 grams of carbs!

[tooround]

I have a theory about women "our age" and all the years we've spent dumping a few pounds ... those pounds probably included muscle. I'm not losing much weight but I sure am shrinking and I've got muscle that shows! All we have to do is work away at undoing our damage

[Funkadelic Flash]

I can't weigh-in on the whole "being a woman" thing, but when I started the Primal BP, about 4 or 5 months ago, I was right around 180-185 lbs at 6'0". I thought I was a little bit over-weight, because I have "healthy" friends at the same height and 160 lbs. I also had a bit of a tummy as well. Throughout my primal living I hadn't stepped on a scale once, but was happy with the way I was changing in the mirror. i.e. more muscle, less fat, more defined abs, etc.

I stepped on the scale the other week...194.5 lbs. I just about sh*t myself. At first I thought that it was a bogus scale so I stepped on another one at my gym...194.5 lbs. It turns out that eating and exercising in a primal fashion had packed on close to 20 pounds of muscle (added about 4 or 5 pounds to make up for the lost fat as well). I feel great and I'm an absolute animal at the gym. Here I thought I'd actually *lose* weight.

If I had been weighing myself the whole time, I would have been very depressed to see my numbers go up and probably would have given up on the whole primal lifestyle a month or two in. Moral of the story: Trust the mirror, not the scale.

[MichaelA]

Sharon, 1lb is nothing you have to get alarmed on but first a few q: how you count your carbs? What is the rest what you eat? For how long are you doing this? And lastly... it's PB not BP

[batty]

do not worry about a pound! your body can fluxuate between 3-4 lbs throughout any given week. you are absolutely right about that scale number - don't pay attention to it. pay more attention to how your body looks in the mirror, use the fit of some article of clothing as a reference, or yes - use a tape measure, or invest in some calipers.

i was a big girl growing up. right now i'm the same weight i was when i was in college...except i'm now 8 clothing sizes smaller

[BarbeyGirl]

Yeah, scrap the scale. I weigh 12 lbs more than I did a year ago, but I'm significantly smaller and more cut. Muscle, baby!

Sounds like you should consider tracking your intake on Fitday or similar for a while, just until you get a feel for how many carbs different foods contain. It's easy to underestimate when you're getting started.

[shannonstoney]

For some reason I can't reply to individual posts, so I'll reply to all these ideas in this post. I use nutritiondata.com right now to track carbs, and it's giving me more insight into how carbs sneak in when you're not paying attention.

it probably is silly to be alarmed at "gaining" one or two pounds, but in the past that was how the "insidious weight gain" that Mark talks about started, a little at a time.

I'm relieved to know that other people gained weight too, but have more muscle now than fat. I don't work out with weights but I do Bikram yoga three times a week, which is pretty intense yoga, and I've started doing some sprints in addition to my daily walks. In the summer I garden a lot and that is weight training with shovels, compost, buckets of water, etc. So maybe this summer I'll see some real visible changes. For now I think I still look about the same, which is a little bit overweight, or on the edge of tipping over into being overweight.

[shannonstoney]

Right, Primal Blueprint, not British Petroleum!