Help! I Feel Fat

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Q. I’m trying to lose more weight. I'm a 25-year-old female, 5-feet-7-inches and 153 pounds. My body mass index is 24 (on the verge of being officially overweight.) My body fat was evaluated at my gym recently and it was 20 percent (not horrible, but not great either).

Five days a week, I weight-train and do cardio workouts at the gym. I previously lost 45 pounds through Weight Watchers and didn't work out at all. I’ve joined again but am concerned that lifting weights is interfering with losing. Last week, after I had increased the intensity of my weights routine, I found that I had gained weight.

I suffered from an eating disorder in the past. I still have a somewhat screwy relationship with body image, food, and exercise, but running marathons and focusing on fitness has helped.

Ever since I resumed eating somewhat normally, I’ve done nothing but fight my weight. I realize this is to be expected, as my body was in "starvation mode." But I've been fairly healthy for about three years. How can I "recover" my metabolism so that I can lose weight again?

A. First let’s do a reality check:

• You are not overweight

Because you are highly fit, even if you were to creep into the lower end of the “overweight” BMI range (say, 25 or 26, for example), the number would not suggest that you are overfat—BMI numbers are not as applicable as a fatness reference tool for fit or muscular people. Read my articles about it here and here.

Your own body fat estimate suggests that you are leaner than a higher-end BMI number indicates.

• You are not overfat

The typical body fat test given at most gyms uses a skinfold caliper (the pinchers) or a bioelectrical impedance scale (such as the Tanita body fat scale). Both of these techniques have a margin of error, which means that you might be slightly higher or lower than the estimate you are given. Even still, if you are registering around 20 percent, you are in the healthy, lean range for a young woman.

• You are not gaining pounds of muscle in one week

You mention that you upped the weights work one week and found that you were heavier the next week. There is no way that your workout caused you to gain weight from extra fat or muscle. Unless you were binging from one week to the next, it’s unlikely you gained several pounds in fat, either. Most likely what you saw was simply a normal water-weight fluctuation—fluid and hormonal shifts can make weight vary by several pounds up or down each day.

It takes months, or even years, of heavy-duty weight training while consciously trying to eat extra calories to gain pounds of muscle. One aspect of becoming fitter and stronger is that your muscles learn to store more glycogen, or carbs. This is advantageous because you are better able to provide fuel to your working muscles during a tough workout (or a long marathon). Since glycogen holds more water, a trained person holds more water weight. Even so, it’s not fat, and it doesn’t matter.

Address your body image struggle

When the body’s natural homeostasis, or balance, is perturbed, either through drastic yo-yo dieting, weight loss or disordered eating, it learns to preserve energy. So a formerly overweight person may always find it more difficult to maintain their weight loss, or to lose additional weight, than a person of the same size and weight who has always been weight stable.

Weight Watchers may not work as well for you now as it did when you were 45 pounds heavier because you don’t have as much to lose as you used to. Your body may be at its own preferred weight and body fat level. So it may be fighting you to keep you from going much lower.

If you run marathons, do serious cardio five days a week and lift weights on a regular basis—with no indicators, either by your BMI or your body fat level, that you are overweight—it seems like you need to focus on the “screwy-ness” that you admit still plagues you.

You could be distracting yourself from the issues you should really be addressing with superficial goals like how focusing on much you weigh or changing your shape.

If you feel like your self-worth is defined by what you look like, or that your life is on hold until you can deal with your perceived body-shape problems, and if your thoughts and time are mostly preoccupied with your weight and everything that has to do with losing more, then you should seek a qualified counselor for help. One good book that you can read in the meantime to help you to put things into perspective is The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf.

More Expert Fitness Advice From Martica:

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Martica is a Manhattan-based exercise physiologist and nutritionist and an award-winning fitness instructor. She has written for a variety of publications including Self , Health , Prevention , The New York Times and others. Martica is the author of seven books, including her latest, - Cross-Training for Dummies . (Read her full bio.)