How do you mean that?
I think I have written some long posts about this in the past so I will try and be somewhat concise. But basically when it comes to body composition there are usually two camps (and as always neither is totally correct). One is the IFFYM camp that insists calories are calories and if you have a deficit you will lose weight and if you have a surplus of calories you will gain weight. The other is this camp that believes in a lot of voodoo like "you can actually get fat from not eating breakfast" and things like this. The first camp usually scoffs at the second camp by reminding them that their claim violates the laws of thermodynamics and that they are obviously fools. From a physicists perspective this is a silly thing to say because the human body isn't a thermodynamic energy harvesting machine... Water/minerals and a million other things we put into our bodies clearly have energy but since we can't break the bonds of water and store it as energy but can store the raw materials as bodyweight - we are not a great model for thermodynamics. The simplest example being this: If a human lives in space for 3 months and eats a caloric surplus the human may come back weighing less because of mineral bone less - this is weightloss despite a caloric surplus which will make a leangains IFFYM parrots head explode.
Back to you. Of course I don't know exactly why your seeing the scale go up... It could be unaccounted for oils in your food although unless you recently switched your food sources (say now you get your gyros from a new restaurant or the old restaurant changed their tzatzki sauce recipe) it probably won't make a large enough change that you can see it in a couple weeks... Even if your error is always off in one direction and your consuming 300 more calories than you think this will take awhile to make a difference. Since this isn't your first rodeo I highly doubt it.
Personally, if I had to bet I would look at what is probably the only variable thats changed - your training. You are adding muscle. Well not really. You might say "but it takes way longer to build muscle" and you are right. It's unlikely your adding significant amounts of maintainable tissue - but you are adding LBM or at the very least not adding much adipose. You recently switched your training to GPP style training and have combined that with basketball. Your short rest interval but still relatively high intensity training is going to have a different effect that traditional weight training. It's been showing that in less than a day of a hard training session the body refills muscle glycogen stores provided carbohydrates are available - after glycogen is full the body starts ramping up the amount of muscle glycogen that can be stored in the muscle - however this happens slowly - unless of course there is an abundance of glycogen synthase in the body... Which is exactly what your training will do. Not only this but the GPP your doing is designed to increase muscle permeability to glucose and insulin sensitivity... Additionally, the inflammatory response cycle to your training will add some non-adipose weight to your body.
The good thing about all this is that your not gonna gain 20 lbs like this. You will however rapidly increase work capacity (which will pay dividends) and experience greater weight fluctuations because of the larger limit of glycogen in the muscle. I think some of the strongest evidence for this comes from how quickly it's lost - after knee surgery you often see athletes who lose 10-20 lbs in a month and their muscle tonus looks non-existent. The fact that they get their size and strength back quickly suggests that's it's not that they are losing and gaining muscle tissue but that the layoff caused some quicker adaption - glycogen storage capacity.
I think the best way to be think of this adaption is to think of the concept of "newbie" gains. If we divide the "newbie" gains into three categories we can consider the following quick gains.
1) Limit strength. Athletes who have never done bench press might add 50lbs in a month to their lift. This neural adaption doesn't involve the building of tissue but will improve tonus (which may appear as tissue). Once they get stuck and need to add tissue to add strength you will observe a plateau that 95% of the gym going population never makes it past.
2) Endurance. If you start long distance running you will massively increase your V02 max. This initial adaption is all peripheral (brain, lungs, etc) and will result in some water loss but will cause a plateau that requires that loss of fat or muscular adaptation.
3) Speed/Strength endurance (GPP). These newbie gains are the only ones to cause a massive increase in weight. The gains are quick. You will notice that what you thought was an absolute nightmare will become easy in a few weeks. These are the gains crossfitters live for. The problem is the stimulus from this type of training is good but not great for building limit strength or top speed. Best to train like this to increase work capacity and strength as long as it works and THEN transition to training more specific for strength/speed.
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As for what you should do... IMO advice like "throw away the scale" never makes sense unless the athlete is already lean. If your not lean (eg 20lbs over your desired weight) then by all means keep the daily weigh-ins. Sure you might freak out as you get a larger fluctuation and dial back on calories more than necessary --- but the fatter you are the harder it is to dial back TOO much. If your aiming for a 500 calorie deficit and freak out after a weigh in and up it to a 1000 calorie deficit for a few days... Ok your training might suffer slightly. But you will lose fat a bit faster which is the primary need for an athlete that much heavier than his ideal weight.
In your case I don't really have any frame of reference for how fat you are. You don't have pics online? From your posts it seems you are not lean enough but not that fat which is kind of nebulous. Probably wouldn't do that much harm to cut back on cals then even if it's just an overreaction to fluctuation. If you really want to avoid seeing these fluctuations you can cut back on carbs a bit to keep them in check. Additionally one piece of advice I would give you and everyone on this forum who is interested in body composition is this: buy a decent set of bodyfat calipers- they are cheap. It will drastically improve what you are trying to achieve with your waist measurement. Don't even use the skinfold formula to attempt to calculate bodyfat. Just grab four to five locations - side, upper arm, back if your partner is willing, chest, thigh, etc. Measure each and the sum of the measurements weekly. If these numbers creep up then you are getting fat. If they are going down then your leaning out.
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