Should You Throw Out the Scale?

You now know that focusing on fat loss is much more important than focusing on your weight.  When you lose body fat, you’re making permanent changes in your body, shifting your body composition so that you have less fat and more muscle.  When you lose weight, you could be losing water or even muscle.  It’s impossible to know if you’re seeing real results or just the product of your daily habits, hormonal shifts and changing hydration levels.

            When you first start a program, you may need extra encouragement to keep going, proof that what you’re doing is working and the scale may not give you that.  Other ways it can work against you are:

-It measures everything: The number on the scale includes everything - Muscles, fat, bones, organs, fat, food and water.  For that reason, your scale weight can be a deceptive number.

-It doesn’t reflect the changes happening in your body: If you’re doing cardio and strength training, you may build lean muscle tissue at the same time you’re losing fat.  In that case, the scale may not change even though you’re getting leaner and slimmer.

-It doesn’t reflect your health: As mentioned above, the scale can’t tell the difference between fat and muscle.  That means a person can have a low body weight, but still have unhealthy levels of body fat.

-It isn’t always a positive motivator: If you step on the scale and you’re unhappy with what you see, how does that make you feel?  You may question everything you’re doing, wondering why you even bother at all.  Focusing on weight may overshadow the positive results you’re getting such as fat loss, more endurance and higher energy levels.

Change How Your Measure Your Success

            Even if you’re not ready to stop weighing yourself entirely, using other ways to help you realize that you are making changes, no matter what the scale says.

•         Go by how your clothes fit.  If they fit more loosely, you know you’re on the right track.

•         Take your measurements to see if you’re losing inches.

•         Set performance goals.  Instead of worrying about weight loss or fat loss, focus on completing a certain number of workouts each week or competing in a race.

            If the scale is making you crazy, taking a break from weighing yourself may just open your eyes to other possibilities.  Your weight isn’t the only measure of your success.  Put away the scale and you may just see how far you’ve really come.