“Lose up to 20 pounds in 6 weeks! Guaranteed!!”
“I’ve been eating clean and exercising six days per week for a week and I’ve only lost 3 pounds!”
“I’ve gained 5 pounds since last week! I’m giving up on healthy eating and exercise!!”
Do any of these sound familiar? If so, then you’re not alone.
I am passionately against dieting and scale watching.
For one thing, we know dieting doesn’t work long-term. There is only a 5% success rate for keeping weight off long term when following a diet. The other part of it is that the people who gain the most weight in adulthood are the ones who are always on diets and have the highest body fat. More on this later.
Then there’s the beloved scale.
Whether it is once a day or once a week, too many women find their worth and associate their happiness with the scale.
I recently heard a story about a trainer who was working with a woman who was nearly 60 years old had survived cancer and wanted to be 115 pounds because that was the weight she was when she was 22 years old. The trainer was at a loss because most people are not going to have the same body at nearly 60 years old that they had at 22 years old.
To me it sounded like this woman was associating the number on the scale with a time in her life where she felt happy, healthy, and beautiful.
Being in the industry for as long as I have had, I have heard so many people express their desire to be their High School weight or some other weight that they associated with a time in their life where they felt beautiful and were enjoying life.
It’s not the number on the scale…
In the above examples, it wasn’t about the number on the scale. It never was. Generally when we are younger we are more optimistic, we believe we can conquer the world, and let’s be frank: In our culture youth is more desirable and praised than being older. As we get older our expectations change, we realize that life isn’t fair, and as we age we worry about being invisible.
We must realize that the number on the scale is not the issue.
It’s about not accepting where we are NOW and placing false hopes in trying to get back to the “good ole days” which are represented on that scale.
We must focus on THIS instead: Changing Body Composition
As we age our body composition changes. We lose muscle mass and gain body fat. Instead of focusing on the scale which promotes losing even more muscle mass during dieting, we must focus on gaining muscle mass and losing body fat which isn’t always represented on the scale.
Let’s say we have Mrs Jones here who weighs 180 pounds and has 40% body fat so this means she has 72 pounds of fat on her body and the rest is Muscle, Bone, organs, etc.
So Mrs Jones goes on the latest low calorie/exercise your self to death fad diet and loses 40 pounds on the scale. For argument’s sake let’s say she loses 30 pounds of fat and 10 pounds of Muscle.
Mrs Jones is happy though because she is now 140 pounds but like all fad diets the weight comes right back on. She regains 40 pounds of fat.
She has now gained 10 more pounds of FAT bringing the total to 82 pounds of fat on her body and she’ll keep doing this until she finally gives up and she will be more fat than muscle.
This is why people who diet the most have the highest body fat.
Here are 3 Ways to Get off the Scale, Stop Dieting, and Change Body Composition
No more Fad Diets: Increase Protein, Vegetables, and Fat Intake. Lose the Refined sugars. Eat your carbohydrates around your highest times of activity
Focus on Strength Training and Conditioning. Building muscle mass is critical for women as we age. 3 SOLID strength training workouts a week along with high quality protein is the key to improving your body composition. Muscle is more dense than fat so that’s why you can lose 5 pounds but drop 2 dress sizes. Nobody needs to know what you weigh.
Total Fan Girl for Rachel Cosgrove! One of the top experts on sane fat loss for women in the fitness industry!
Be Consistent and Get off the Scale: Rachel Cosgrove (pictured here with me) runs a challenge called the Drop 2 Sizes challenge (that I offer virtually) and she forbids her clients from getting on the scale for 8 weeks! People are shocked that they drop 2 sizes but only drop on average….4 pounds!
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