Why didn't the scale go down this week on your diet?

Dec 13, 2022

9 min read

So you're reading this and you might have been following the diet for one week, two weeks, three weeks, or four weeks. You've been diligently following the plan. You've been doing exactly what you need to do. You've even been going to bed early. All of those good things will help to make you look, feel and be more healthy overall one thing though, even though you've made all this effort, the scales have gone up instead of down. Let's discuss this.

First and foremost, let's look at why you might be really disappointed. One of the main reasons people get disappointed is because they've put in so much effort into changing their life. That's not an easy feat. So congratulations on making this big change, because it's not an easy process. If you want more tips on how to make exercise a habit, check this link. Sometimes we see a big drop in the first week and we see a drop in the second week or, maybe just the first week, and then all of a sudd

Hormone fluctuations. Hormones are one of our best friends. It gives us the ability to be able to reproduce. It gives us our lovely shape. It gives us our skin tone and complexion and helps keep us healthy. At the same time, fluctuations in our hormones, due to a number of reasons can actually cause the scale to look like it's gone up. But it's actually not true weight gain. So you can hold more water as a result of your hormones going up. It's very unlikely that in a week if you put on two kilo

Ironically, let's talk about food in your gut. So if you have a whole bunch of food in your gut, maybe you've started eating more fiber that fiber sitting in your gut, first of all, is going to be holding more water within it until we pass it out in the form of a number two and also it will be increasing the weight that's on the scales.

Another reason why you might have increased in weight this week is the time you ate your last meal. So if you usually eat your meal at 6 pm and then you usually weigh yourself the next morning at 9 am. Then the next week, if you eat your last meal at 11 pm and you've had to get up early at 7 am for a flight, all of a sudden you've lost extra time sleeping and on top of that you've actually had your meal closer to the time that you're weighing. So, therefore, there's less time for your body to di

The number of carbohydrates that you have. So if you add more carbohydrates the day before, your body will hold more water. So for every gram of carbohydrate, your body holds an extra three grams of water with that. Now, that doesn't mean we stop eating carbohydrates. In fact, the opposite is true. We need carbohydrates for healthy hormone function. But remember, for every extra one gram of carbohydrate your body is actually four grams heavier, which means that we can easily put on a little bit

The fifth point, you had a bit more salt the day before. So it's not such a bad thing and it's actually quite essential for our bodies. It's the amount of salt that we have that can change the amount of water that we're holding for the day. Now unless you've been told by a GP or you have high blood pressure, you don't usually have to heavily monitor the amount of salt that you're putting into your food. But we still want to make sure that we don't have big fluctuations from day to day as well. S

The sixth point, then picking a new exercise or doing a new exercise regime. So whenever you do a completely new exercise regime, you're giving your body a completely new stimulus to work with, which is great because it's going to be adding more results if you've been on the same program for a little while. Check out our other blog post on progressive overload. If you want to see how often you should be changing your program because it's different than what you think it might be. When you create

You haven't been eating a specific, consistent diet. I don't mean to point fingers here. It may be that your diet is one where you're supposed to carb cycle for instance, or where you have a day where you're eating more carbs than another day. If you're following the plan, that's great. But if you end up having a day where you potentially (like on the five two diets) where you've got a fasting day and you weigh yourself the next day, compared to the next week if it falls on another day and you'r

But overall, there's not a linear trend, as in, each week, it doesn't incrementally go down to the same extent. There will be some weeks that you jump up a little bit higher than the week before but overall the trend over weeks and months should be at a downward angle, and that's what you're looking for. You can't panic every single time you've increased on the scales, because all of these factors that are outside of your control are going to increase the amount of weight on the scales, and yet

Then they get into this kind of vicious cycle where now they're getting on the scales and it's heavier, of course, and then they get upset and then they eat more. Then they're like, that didn't work for me when really it was just their resilience being tested towards the things they can control.

To make a fair experiment, you need more than your weight to measure, and you need to be following a plan. That way you can show that potentially something might need to be changed, but nobody knows what they can change if you have changed what you're doing without telling your coach. One more thing, there’s a useful tool if you are somebody who gets very confused with how the scales are working. If you're able to weigh every day, put the measurements into a free app like MYweight and see how th

Moving forward, the best thing to do is to make sure that you're focused on the things that you can control that really matter, which is following the plan of someone that you trust and being accountable, and sandboarding the ideas off your coach if you're in doubt because our mind plays tricks on us all the time. And your coach knows what's best for you. Side note: Do not become that person that tries to fix it themselves by deleting some of the foods of the program. The goal is not to eat as l

Anyway, I hope these ideas helped you.

If you have any concerns or if you want to chat further about this sort of thing, just reach out to us. We're always happy to hear from you.