I got sick about a week ago (Bad head cold). I was sick for about 4 days and I had to go out of town. I wasn't able to exercise for about 8 days and I ate some pizza, french fries and chocolate chip cookies while I was laid up and traveling. This week I noticed that my pants seemed to fit loser and it looked like my stomach had flattened out some. I thought it was just my imagination until this morning when I stepped on the scale for my weekly check and found that I had lost 6 pounds and I'm now down to 220lbs (I'm 6feet 2inches tall).

How could that happen when I wasn't exercising and I had been having small cheats? Is it possible I was exercising to much, or did the exercise just take a while to show results?

If you ran any sort of fever, you were probably dehydrating a good deal. And it seems when we're ill, we eat less overall. You mention eating some off-plan things, but you didn't say how much.

There are more reasons to exercise, etc., than to lose weight. If your regime was working before, I wouldn't take anything that happened during your illness as a sign you were doing something wrong when you were well.

I would take it as a fluke, thank heavens for the whoosh, and keep on. When you start changing things too much, you can create more problems than it solves.

I've had a couple of weekends where I spent hours in the sun and heat doing rigorous activity, and on Sunday morning weigh-in day, I'd lost 5 pounds. It's a sure thing! But I also know it is due to dehydrating in the sun, not a real weight loss, and over the next day or two much of it will come back. The only way to keep it off would be to continually dehydrate myself.

Mikeyrat

Started Atkins 5/30/2003
337/275.5/237 - 6'2" 43 YO
Wife: 224/194/165 - 5'11"