Killer post, Jag. Listen to everything he said about the fats.

I take 6 g fish oil daily, sometimes as many as 15 if I feel I need it.

Coconut oil is really wonderful stuff, too, but olive oil is good too. How about this: use olive oil in your salads, fry in coconut oil.(edited to say Jag doesn't like the idea of cooking with coconut oil. How come Jag? Some problem with the effectiveness of the oil?) (re-edited to say no problem with cooking with coconut oil, but FLAX oil should stay raw)

And the bike riding/muscle thing - you really won't build up much muscle riding a bike. You won't burn THAT much fat, either, but it does help a bit. I suspect that newly-used muscles get a bit inflamed, though, and this inflammation is basically your tissues holding water. It WILL pass as the lactic acid works its way out of your muscles, and as it leaves, the water will also.

If you start exercising and you GAIN weight right away, it's not muscle. You really can't gain muscle faster than you can drop fat - not when you first start, anyway.

A woman doing EVERYTHING she can to deliberabely TRY to pack on as much muscle as she can MIGHT be able to put on 10-15 pounds of muscle in her first year of HEAVY resistance training (I know, because I've done this). On the other hand, I lost over 30 pounds of fat in my first year on Atkins.

Stalls don't always mean what they seem to mean - you CAN be tightening up at the same rate you are dropping water and fat from time to time, so use a pair of tight jeans as a goalpoast.

Your weight WILL fluctuate, and for women, this is particularly irritating since we have "tides" lol!

But if you are cutting (IE NOT deliberately bulking) and your weight goes UP and stays there for over a week, it's probably not muscle, and it's probably not water either.