Muscle is denser than fat, and as it is more compact within your body, as you gain muscle mass, you end up looking thinner, no matter your physical weight. So, if you've been doing a lot of strength training lately, it's likely this is the reason that you're looking fantastic but not dropping those numbers.
If you're losing inches but maintaining your weight and you regularly strength train, you may actually be losing fat and gaining muscle. The process of gaining muscle and losing fat at the same time is called body recomposition. Most scales don't differentiate between the amounts of body fat and muscle you have.
As you work out, you are building lean muscle which weighs exactly the same as fat but is leaner. if your clothes are looser but the scale is the same, this is because of the lean muscle you have built.
It's possible to gain muscle and reduce body fat without actually seeing a change in your weight. This happens when you lose body fat while gaining muscle. Your weight may stay the same, even as you lose inches, a sign that you're moving in the right direction.
One of the reasons a person could gain weight but look leaner is from working out and gaining muscle, explained Larry Weilland, MS, an exercise physiologist at Northwestern Medicine Delnor Health and Fitness Center.
If you're trying to lose weight and better your health, don't let yourself be discouraged by the scale. If you're losing inches, you're making progress! Use the inches or the way you feel or other factors as a guide, and keep working toward better health and a better life for the future.
Daily weigh-ins.
If you're really committed to losing weight, weighing yourself every day can be helpful. Research shows that people who weigh themselves every day have even more success with weight loss than those who weigh in once a week.
The first place men typically lose weight is the belly, while women tend to lose weight all over, but hold onto weight in their thighs and hips, Dr. Block explains.
Body composition is used to describe the percentages of fat, bone, water, and muscle in human bodies. Two people of the same sex and body weight may look completely different from each other because they have a different body composition.
Muscle is heavier per volume than fat. You might look fatter because you have lost muscle mass and replaced it with fat. This could be for a variety of factors. One factor could be less physical activity and/or combined with a diet that causes you to build up fat rather than muscle.
All in all, it can take anywhere from one week to several months to see noticeable weight loss results. It all depends on your daily activity level, your exercises, and how much you eat each day.
"By the time you hit 10 pounds, your jeans will feel differently, absolutely," Blum says. "Just a little looser. Theoretically, 10 pounds is considered one size." Once you get past that first couple pounds where you might not be able to tell, Blum says, you really do start to lose body fat.
While everyone loses weight differently, dropping as little as 3 to 5 pounds can show up on your face first, Eboli says.
Women tend to lose weight all over, and experience fat loss first in their belly, breasts, and arms. Generally the last area they lose weight is from their lower body (hips and thighs). Depending on body shape, men generally tend to lose fat first from their trunk, followed by their arms and then their legs.
Body-weight loss is usually noticed around the belly, waistline, and thighs first. This is because your body stores fat in different locations. For instance, men hold more fat around their belly, while women store it on their thighs and hips. Weight loss gradually starts with a reduction in belly size.
Your Metabolism Will Slow Down to Store Fat
The more you work out or manage your calorie intake to lose weight, the more your metabolism wants to compensate by slowing down to maintain your current weight, this is called metabolic compensation. It kicks in to preserve and store fat for future energy.
"The biggest thing people do that slows their metabolism down is eating too few calories," said Fiore. 1200 calories per day is roughly the amount you need to perform basic functions, she suggested, and when a person eats fewer than that, the metabolism slows down to conserve energy.
You should step on the scale first thing in the morning. That's when you'll get your most accurate weight because your body has had the overnight hours to digest and process whatever you ate and drank the day before. And you should try to turn that step into a regular part of your routine.
Since you're not eating or drinking during the night (unless you get the midnight munchies), your body has a chance to remove extra fluids (that's why you pee so much in the morning when you wake up). So weigh yourself in the morning ... after you pee. 2.
“Your skin is the largest organ in the body and absorbs fluid easily,” says Dr. Keith Kantor, a leading nutritionist and CEO of the Nutritional Addiction Mitigation Eating and Drinking (NAMED) program. “After a swim or a shower, your body can absorb 1 to 3 cups of water, increasing your true weight by a few pounds.”
How quickly will you lose weight? The volunteers reduced their waist sizes by an average of 1 inch for every 4lb (1.81kg) they lost. So if you lose 1lb (0.45kg) a week you could hope to reduce your waistline by an inch after four weeks.
Multiple regression tells us that on average, for every 8.5 pounds lost, people dropped an inch off their waist. (And for every 1.5 kilograms lost, people dropped a centimeter off their waist.) Every 10 pounds lost was accompanied by 1.18 inches of waistline reduction.