Does Creatine Make You Gain Weight?

Short answer: the scale may not move at all — and if it does, what moves it is water inside your muscle cells, not fat.

This is the single most common reason women stop taking creatine, usually within the first fortnight. It's worth understanding before you start, because the thing people panic about and the thing that's actually happening are two different things.

What the fluid shift actually is

Creatine is stored in muscle, and it's osmotically active — water follows it in.

The direction matters more than most articles let on. A 2025 review in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition describes creatine as improving total body water by shifting extracellular fluid into the cell.¹

Read that again, because it's the opposite of what women fear. The puffy, swollen feeling associated with fluid is an extracellular phenomenon — fluid sitting outside cells, in tissue. The same review notes that it's extracellular fluid retention in the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle that has women reporting bloating.¹ Creatine moves fluid the other way.

And in the studies the review describes, that shift occurred without changes in body weight.¹

Where the scary numbers come from

The "I gained two kilos in a week" stories almost always come from loading protocols — 20g a day for five to seven days, split into four doses. Load fast, saturate fast, and any fluid shift arrives fast enough to be startling.

Daily Creatine Support is 3g per serve and there's no loading phase. Stores rise gradually over weeks rather than days, so any change is smaller and slower still.

Why the Australian dose is lower, and what that means →

Is it bloating?

No, and the distinction is worth holding onto because the two get conflated constantly.

Bloating is gas and fluid in the digestive tract, and the cyclical version is extracellular fluid in tissue. Creatine's shift is into muscle cells — a different compartment of the body entirely, and in the opposite direction.

Some people do get mild stomach discomfort from creatine, particularly at larger doses or on an empty stomach. If that happens, taking it with food and plenty of water usually settles it.

Does it go away?

If you stop taking creatine, muscle stores gradually return to baseline over several weeks and the associated water goes with them.

But think about that trade carefully. Stopping to lose a small amount of water weight also means giving up whatever you were taking it for — and in your forties and fifties, the tissue actually worth protecting is muscle.

The bigger picture, if you're 40+

Body weight is a famously blunt measurement, and it gets bluntest exactly when body composition is changing — which is what happens through perimenopause and menopause.

Muscle mass falls, fat distribution shifts toward the middle, and the scale can stay perfectly still through all of it. Two women at the same weight can be in very different shape.

So a small increase in scale weight that reflects better-hydrated muscle is not the same event as gaining fat, even though your bathroom scale reports them identically. More on what's actually driving weight change in menopause →

If the scale still bothers you

Reasonable, and there are better instruments.

• Take a waist measurement instead, at the same point each time. It tracks the thing you probably care about more accurately than weight does.
• Notice what's happening in training — whether the weight you're lifting is going up, whether the last few repetitions feel different.
• Notice how clothes fit, which integrates shape better than a single number.
• If you do weigh, weigh at the same time of day and look at the trend across a month. Normal daily fluctuation from food, salt and cycle stage is larger than anything creatine is doing.

Before you start

Daily Creatine Support is not suitable for children under 15 years of age or pregnant women. It should only be used under medical or dietetic supervision, and in conjunction with an appropriate physical training programme.