Why Isn’t Your Amazing Weight Loss Workout Showing on the Scale?

You’ve been keeping up an amazing weight loss workout routine. You’ve been sticking to it every day and have been pouring your heart and soul into it. You’ve even seen performance improvements since you got started. You feel fitter but when you get on the bathroom scale, little to nothing happens. What’s going on?

This is among the most frustrating experiences when you’re trying to burn fat through a great weight loss workout. It can feel as though you’re doing everything right but the bathroom scale refuses to acknowledge it.

A recently published review of previous research in the Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases journal took a closer look at why this frequently happens.

Why Does Your Weight Loss Workout Seem to be Underperforming?

You’re Losing Fat but Gaining Muscle

Depending on the type of weight loss workout you’re doing, you may indeed be burning through a great deal of fat. However, if you are also building lean muscle, this body composition shift can make it appear as though no weight loss is happening for several weeks at a time. Remember that a typical bathroom scale measures only the weight of every part of you at once. It can’t tell if you weight more because of build muscle, retained water or additional body fat. If you are getting fitter, keep doing what you’re doing and the results will eventually show up on the scale.

You’re Eating More

Remember that what you eat plays the biggest role in what you’ll see on the bathroom scale. Therefore, if you’re doing an incredible weight loss workout only to eat more calories, you will only end up working against yourself. Pay just as much attention to your diet as you do to your exercise.

You’re Expecting Too Much from Your Weight Loss Workout

The type of exercise you do will play an enormous role in the impact of your weight loss workout. Just because you’re active doesn’t mean you’re doing the most you can to burn fat. Consider the average recorded results of these different workout types from the aforementioned study:

• Just resistance training – 0 to 1 percent total body weight lost.
• Just aerobic (Cardio) training – 0 to 3 percent total body weight lost.
• Both resistance and aerobic training – 0 to 3 percent total body weight lost.
• Calorie restricted diet and aerobic training – 5 to 15 percent total body weight lost.