Thursday, April 17, 2008

Anyone up for working out and gaining weight???

A scarey thing happened the other day...
I got on the scale and found that although I had been losing weight, I had gained 4 pounds! "How in the heck did I GAIN weight by excercizing and cutting calories so much"??? I was horrified! My clothes were fitting better, especailly around the waist, but I did notice in my favorite jeans...the ones which I always use to see if I can feel a difference...that the tops of my thighs heading into the bottom of my rear were a bit snug. Time to panic and time to wonder when the way I was feeling (which is GREAT by the way) was going to show!! So I went to my usual circuit training class and I was talking to one of the gals that works there and she laughed! She laughed at me...can you believe that?? When she was done laughing, she told me how that same thing happened to her 4 years ago when she started circuit training and weight bearing excercizes. Okay, so how did I go from walking and losing, to adding circuit training (thought that was a good thing) and gaining? It all made sense when she explained it to me. Doing all the walking is working the cardio (knew that) which burns fat. Doing the circuit training builds muscle (knew that). And since muscle weighs more than fat (about 3x more in fact), I was adding pounds with the muscle. Okay, makes sense, but still, when people start doing this stuff they LOSE WEIGHT, I thought. Okay, so building more muscle will enable me to burn fat quicker and after my body is over the initial shock of thinking I am not feeding it enough anymore, it will start to drop the fat. Turns out when you are doing weights also, you see an increase in your weight for about 8-12 weeks. Nice. Wish I had known that earlier! But the good news is that once that initial period is over, "you should see the fat melt away" she assured me. I'll believe it when I see it!

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