Losing weight and fat loss are often two very different things. See how to ditch the scale for healthy weight loss and weight control.
Shift the conversation from weight, scales, diets, and calories to prioritize discussions on food quality, hormones, strength training, and stress.
This article on how to ditch the scale for healthy weight loss discusses why fat loss doesn’t revolve around weight loss, cardio, and calories.
Your Scale Holding You Back
Instead, healthy fat loss involves regulating fat-burning hormones through good nutrition and increased muscle mass.
Prioritize food, exercise, and stressors impacting hormones for lasting body shape changes, which are more significant than mere scale readings.
Consider the fact that 95% of diets fail, and 66% of those who do lose weight on a diet end up gaining more weight back.
When we diet (restrict calories), we lose not only fat but also muscle, water, and organ and bone tissue as a result of limiting calories.
The Key to Losing Fat is to Focus on Muscle
Why is having more muscle mass so important? See, in our pursuit of weight loss, we seem to be missing one very important fact:
Muscle is more dense tissue than fat; thus, 1 lb of muscle will take up less space than 1 lb of fat. That means better-fitting clothes and improved body definition.
Increased muscle mass provides hormonal and lifestyle advantages, optimizing fat loss beyond what typical dieting achieves.
1. Improved Insulin Sensitivity
Being insulin-sensitive means you handle sugar (glucose) well. It means that less sugar is being stored as fat, and less insulin (the fat-storing hormone) is needed to modulate this process.
2. Age-related Muscle Decline
After the age of 20, you lose approximately one-half pounds of muscle per year. That means for the average American, each pound gained thereafter is fat.
Maintaining muscle mass each year would offset fat gains and improve health outcomes later in life.
3. Hormone Enhancement
Having more muscle mass will increase the number of calories burned at rest. Strength training boosts fat-burning hormones, such as growth hormone and testosterone, fostering continuous fat loss throughout the day.
Scale weight tracking is inefficient for fat loss; reliable progress indicators involve assessing body fat and muscle mass for accuracy.
To Ditch the Scale for Healthy Weight Loss
Strength training boosts muscle mass, valuable in fat loss, even if the scale doesn't show immediate weight change. Focus on composition.
Often, this depends on the client and the amount of body fat as well as their previous training status. Employing these assessment techniques can be a more valuable way to track change.
1. Take Pictures
Visually seeing physical change is one of the best ways to track progress. Compare pictures taken every couple of weeks.
Optimal for visibility, men can choose spandex shorts, and women can opt for a swimsuit, spandex shorts, or a sports bra.
2. Circumference Measurements
Using a tape measure to track around the neck, shoulders, waist, hips, arms, and thighs can be a great way to tell if you’re losing inches.
3. Calipers
Pinching fat from specific “sites” on the body can be a reliable indicator of the total body fat percentage.
It will also gain insight into some possible hormone imbalances based on where and how body fat is dispersed.
Typically, this gives insight as to what we’re consuming daily and how it affects our blood sugar. Once body fat is known, fairly simple calculations can be used to estimate fat mass and lean mass.
You know you’re on the right track when you see fat mass going down and lean mass staying the same or increasing.
The first step should be to understand that scale weight is an ineffective tool for tracking fat loss or muscle gain.
4. Scale Weight Tracking
Shift focus to body composition rather than weight scale for a comprehensive understanding of true fat loss and overall body transformation.
Prioritize muscle building and hormonal improvement through intelligent training and personalized nutrition for an effective fat-loss program. Scale weight is an unreliable indicator of fat loss and/or muscle gain.
Shift focus from body fat assessment techniques like pictures and clothes fit key methods. Fat calipers and circumference measurements are needed for tracking successful body composition changes.
Muscle mass and heavy weight lifting offer hormonal benefits, enhancing blood sugar handling and increasing calorie burn during rest.
Shift focus from the scale to body composition for accurate progress tracking; understanding changes in muscle and fat is crucial.
Here’s what You Need to Know
Losing body fat is not always easy, but consistency and the right mindset can be very realistic for anyone.
Here are a few guidelines that we have complete control over in our daily lives that can contribute to optimizing body composition:
1. Exercise Daily
Try to accumulate 60 minutes per day or at least 5 days per week. This is one of the most neglected aspects for those trying to improve body composition.
It doesn’t all have to be done at one time and can be spread throughout the day, as in, a 30-minute weight training session in the morning and a 30-minute walk after dinner at night.
If you haven’t been doing any exercise, then simply do some (maybe 10–15 minutes per day). And if you’ve only been doing some, then step it up a notch!
The Scale for Healthy Weight Loss
Strength train (lift heavy weights) at least four times per week, focusing on major muscle groups like the legs, buttocks, chest, shoulders, and back.
Couple this with "cardio,” involving short bursts of intense efforts followed by a longer recovery.
For example, using the upright bike at moderate resistance (after doing a 3-5 minute warm-up), “sprint” as fast as you can for 10–20 seconds. Take the remaining minute to do a slow recovery pedal and repeat for 20–30 minutes.
2. Replace Your Grains with Greens
Enhance meal nutrient density by incorporating colorful, leafy green vegetables into every meal throughout the day for overall nutritional improvement.
Swap bread, pasta, rice, oats, and potatoes for fibrous vegetables for increased vitamins, minerals, and fiber with fewer calories.
If you can envision your plate being more than half full of vegetables at every meal, then you’re on the right track.
The Scale for Healthy Weight Loss
Consume more vegetables than fruit; reserve grains and starchy foods for post-intense workouts when the body is primed to utilize sugars.
If you haven’t exercised, then you’d better stick with veggies or get your butt to the gym and earn those carbs!
3. Achieve Adequate Protein Intake
Protein is essential for fueling metabolism, improving muscle mass and recovery, and stimulating fat loss. Without adequate protein intake throughout the day, body composition will suffer, plain and simple.
Protein-dense foods (lean meats, fish, eggs, dairy, and beans) should complement the predominant serving of vegetables on the removed plate.
Men need more protein than women, and those who are strength-trained need more than those who don’t. The quality of the protein source, i.e., free-range, organic, grass-fed, etc., matters, so choose your proteins.
The Scale for Healthy Weight Loss
To keep things very simple here, women should aim for one serving of protein per meal (20–30 g), while men should have closer to two (40–60 g).
A serving of protein is often described as roughly the size of a deck of cards (4oz). The more muscle mass you have or want to have, the more protein you will likely need to consume at every meal.
4. Compliment Your Plate with Healthy Fats
The majority of your plate is now filled with veggies and one or two servings of lean protein.
Don’t forget the fat sources, whether it is cooking with coconut oil or butter or the use of raw olive oil, avocado, and/or nuts and seeds.
Either way, you’ll be adding healthy fats to help with vitamin absorption as well as the production of necessary fat-burning hormones.
The Scale for Healthy Weight Loss
While the importance of adequate dietary fat exceeds this article's scope, the author emphasizes caution against prolonged "low-fat" eating for sustained fat loss and hormonal function, especially with aging.
Having a better idea of the differences between weight loss and fat loss now allows you to put our goals into a more complete perspective.
Utilize exercise and nutrition for fat loss, tracking changes to understand your body's needs and responses, irrespective of the scale.
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