Answer

Thank you for your email. I can understand why you are puzzled about your weight gain despite trying to lose weight. The human body is extremely efficient in that only a few calories are burned off despite taking fairly vigorous or protracted levels of exercise. Because of this, exercise can sometimes stimulate the appetite, which more than compensates for calories lost during the physical activity itself. Furthermore, if the kind of exercise you are doing involves resistance training, ie the use of weights, then your muscles tone up and can actually increase in weight despite the fact that you are burning off fat. The trick is to concentrate on aerobic type exercise which involves you getting out of puff for more than 25 minutes at a time rather than doing weight resistance exercises and cutting back on calories so your body has to burn fat and cannot bulk up it's muscle. It's worth persevering with this type of regime and would guarantee you losing weight, unless of course there is a medical problem, which has yet to be identified. These medical causes of failure to lose weight however are very rare and only warrant investigation when you have been doing as I say for more than six weeks without success. Keep up the good work and persevere.

Yours sincerely

Dr Hilary Jones, GP