I lost track and gained

I've put on 0.2kg this week, which is essentially a glass of water. I did drink a lot of water this week thanks to my Drink Water app. I was only drinking 1-2 glasses a day with 1-2 cups of tea and maybe a diet soft drink before, so it's possible I'm a lot more hydrated now and this has affected my weight. But there could be something else going on too...

All those people who say they have no idea how they put on weight can soon work it out if they recall a few key factors.

I always ask myself:

• Did I follow my meal plan (or did I even make or use one)?
• Did I track (write down) what I ate?
• Did I watch the size of my meals?

Then if I still can't work it out I look at:

• The amount of exercise I did compared to the amount of food I ate
• Whether I ate less on some days to allow for days when I ate more, for example when I've gone out to dinner
• Whether there was any health reason that might stop me from losing weight, or make me temporarily retain water
• Whether I changed something about my weigh-in

For those that have been losing weight for a long time, it may be that they've hit a plateau. This is where your weight doesn't change for several weeks despite doing everything right. At least you haven't put on weight! Try some new meals, a new exercise, or change the time of your meals and you might see the situation improve.

Once again, don't forget to check your measurements. For some reason, while gaining 0.2kg, the only measurement that went up was my chest, and all the others dropped. For the life of me I can't explain the chest measurement, so I suspect I've mucked it up. At least my boyfriend will be happy!

Considering the questions above, it's blatantly obvious to me why I didn't lose weight this week. I might have exercised, but I only followed a meal plan for about half the days, ate out three times in one week (going back for seconds of salads at a barbeque when I didn't really need to), didn't track what I ate, and ate about 500ml of ice-cream (I gave into a half-price special). I'll talk more about supermarket specials in a future blog...

The thing to do is not dwell on it, forget that week (apart from lessons learnt), start fresh and try again :)