Exericise, exercise...but the scale won't move!

Actually people put on 5 pounds of fat training for an Ironman all the time. Sometimes more.

There are two causes. One is that they over-estimate how much food they need and/or they constantly are eating junk with the idea that they will burn it off. I see this a lot with my friends. Oh, we just biked 50 miles, we can have this donut. And this other one. And a bear claw. Haha. We're triathletes, we'll just burn it off! Only not for some of us.

The other is that the training takes up so much of your time that people tend to cut out some or all of their strength training to make room for all the swim, run and bike training. Too much cardio and not enough strength training is a good way to get skinny fat. Or even gain weight.

I'm not training for an Ironman, just a Sprint, but early in the season I also put on 5 pounds just because I wasn't careful about my eating and I had some stuff going on that made me think I was hungry when I probably wasn't. Luckily that settled down and I lost the weight but it's definitely something people have to be careful about.

Rachel Cosgrove, a fitness professional, wrote a fairly famous article about this after training for an Ironman and gaining fat (but not weight): 

http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/most_recent/the_ final_nail_in_the_cardio_coffin

Great article, thank you for sharing! My half marathon training includes speed work, tempo, long runs and easy runs.  I'm also doing some strength training.  Hopefully, that will help!

Great article.

This is quite an inspirational story. I started with my workouts 2 years back. I didn't felt any weight loss for about six months. But another fact I noticed was the importance of dieting. It is a truth that food journal can double our weight loss. I started keeping a food diary after some recommendations from my friends. Also some online informations helped me through this.

http://www.velocitysportsmed.com/keeping-a-food-journal-can-double-our-fat-loss/ is one of the blog I found in connection with this. Food Diary helps us to note what all things we should ate and what we must avoid. In the beginning we may hesitate to do it  but in my experience it will definitely help you a lot.