onceagain wrote:
I started walking everyday at the beginning of October. At the end of October I weighed myself and I had lost 10lbs. I was 238 at the beginning of October and at the end I was 228. I have continued the walking and the MWL plan, but I weighed myself recently and I have not lost a single pound. Yet my pants and other garments clearly indicate that I am losing weight. I can also see the loss.
So my question is could I have gained enough muscle mass to offset any fat loss I may have had? Or is something else going on? Thanks.
Onceagain,
In Octover you lost 10 lbs. We are 2 weeks into November and still maintaining the same schedule, no change in diet, your weight has stabilized - am I reading that correctly?
If you are still experiencing the same calorie deficit, and not knowing how much closer to your ideal weight you are, weight loss can slow down the closer we get.
Small off-target additions to the diet can stall progress as well.
And if none of that is true, then you may well be experiencing a natural plateau according to the scale. You notice your clothes fitting differently, which can be evidence of body composition shifts. And if you watch, it may be that in the next week you'll see another downward drop. Our bodies seem to have their own schedules about these things!
Unless you are monitoring body composition - percentage of bodyfat - it's hard to say exactly what is happening in your body composition shifts. Yet muscle is hard to build and takes time. If you were really inactive before starting to exercise, you would experience the most gains early on as the exercise would be challenging. Then it may slow. But it is hard to build more than 2 -3 lbs of muscle a month and that's with some pretty intense resistance training.
Give it time, be consistent, and congratulations on these changes!
Lani