calies in vs calories out having a hard time balancing

What is confusing to me is why I am gaining weight.
I know it's not muscle I can feel it in the belt line.  My pants are getting tight, and where I could see rib deffinition before, now I can't.

I can understand that the body wants to hold onto what it has if it feels like it is starving, but if I am working at a deficit or close to it, then shouldn't I at least be maintaining instead of gaining.

Thanks

I wonder if you are in starvation mode... You may have gained a few over the holidays, like most of the world, but if this is what a typical day looks like for your food, I would def reitterate what I posted above. You da man!!!

If you eat like that and gain over a 3 week period, then something is wrong somewhere. Bu****er weight can mask weight loss (and gain) when it's a shorter period.

You said you gained when you stopped tracking so I am assuming you weren't eating like that when you weren't tracking and were gaining, right? Now you are tracking again for a very short time. It's too short a time to even be weighing yourself expecting to see any difference.

But you should see a difference in a week or two.

We will see what happens when the training kicks back in next week.
Everythign has been kind of half assed or easy this last week because of the surgery.
Monday life should get hard again.

I hope that balances it all out.

Thanks for the suggestions

Scott

Seht,  there are probably several things that you could try -- have you tried varying your exercises? -- Perhaps you body are settled into a routine and this may impact your ability to balance.    I agree with what was said earlier, make sure that you up your B vitamins and iron to combat fatigue.  I'm guessing that you combining cardio and weight training, but if not, that's another thing to consider.

Lisa

This is what I do ....

First, I got my RMR tested. I had the test where you breath into a machine for 10 min. and it measures how much oxygen you are consuming. (Everything else is just an estimate.)

Once I knew my RMR, I multiplied it by an activity level NOT including my exercise. That tells me how many calories I burn a day just living and not exercising.

Then, I track my food eaten on a site like My Fitness Pal. I set it up so that it calculated my BMR to be my real one. (I got the BMR from the RMR and had to tell it I was 34 to get it to calculate my BMR to what it really is.

Then, when I exercised, I keep track of my average HR. I used this to determine my calories burned. (There is a formula... don't use the online formulas as they are estimates and averages.) It helps if you know your VO2 Max. But, if not, you can just use your VDOT that you can get yourself. I only knew my VDOT so that's what I used and it worked well enough.

I would jigger the exercise entry at MFP so it would come out to how many calories I really burned. Then I knew what my actually calorie intake and outgo was for the day.

Some days I wasn't hungry enough to eat all the calories, I burned, so I'd add any I didn't eat to the next day's pool. If I ate too many, I'd subtract them from the next day's pool instead.

Now I'm more relaxed about it. I know about what I burn at the different exercises so I don't measure my HR any more. I also use the BMR off my scale as I haven't had a chance to get my RMR re-measured lately. But I still track my food and I still track my exercise and I try to make it all balance out over a 2-3 day period.

If I don't do this ... and I have days I don't feel up to it ... what happens is either I eat mindlessly and go over my calorie allotment or I do the opposite ... I eat as little as I possibly can ... which leads to me being starving at some point in the day, which leads to major overeating.

Some day I'd like to be able to just kind of know what I can eat by feel and by listening to my body but I am just not there yet. When I don't track, I gain. Not a lot, but enough that it's worrisome.