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Why am I gaining weight?
Health & Fitness Tips | Tue, 09 Apr 2024
Do you seem to have the same activity level but you are gaining weight ?
Have you been training regularly but your weight is going up ?
Why is this all happening?
As we get older if you are not doing at all or not doing enough of strength training like body weight squats or push ups or lifting some weights, After the age of 30 years old we start losing muscle every year.
As muscle uses more energy at rest than fat does, if your muscles level are low, you ar burning less calories at rest than when you had more muscle. This can result in weight gain happening when you feel your input ( eating ) and output ( daily activity ) is the same each day.
Also even if ure training, weight gain can occur if ure doing the same thing over and over with no change for months or years and it is no more a challenge for you.
For example, when you first start training , you run 30 mins and that results in about 300 calories burned based on your fitness tracker. As you are are just starting out, you ar less fit , your stamina may not be as good and you are not used to running, it will be challenging and as such your heart rate is high which your fitness tracker uses hear rate to estimate your calorie expenditure during that exercises session.
But as you add running to your schedule more often and do it regularly, you will get fitter and your stamina will get better, so your heart rate won’t go up as much as before when you just started. This will result in your burning less calories during that session. So if your intake (eating ) stays the same and now your output ( activity ) does run as much calories as before, this can result in weight gain.
The solution – either reduce your intake ( amount your eating ) or you increase your output ( activity )
To increase your output ( activity ) , you can either run faster during the 30 mins, do other forms of cardio that ure not so used to, or just do different activities that challenge you.
I used running as an example but it works the same with your strength training. We need to always slightly challenge ourselves to continually keep our output up.
Of course there will be days where we have less energy or just feel less motivated where we can do activities that are easier for us to maintain consistency but I am talking about in general we should be alwyas be mindful to keep our workout challenging us so we maintain or improve our strength , stamina, agility and flexibility
