Get off the scales. They don’t tell you anything helpful! Because…
Scales don’t show your fat mass
If you’re concerned about your health and want to lose weight for that reason, your goal should be fat loss, not weight loss. You might do a week-long ‘cleanse’ (I wouldn’t recommend it) and lose five kilos, but that wasn’t 5 kilos of fat. You lost water, glycogen (carbohydrate stored in your muscles), some muscle mass and a tiny bit of fat.
Fat takes longer to lose. It starts to decrease when you make small, repeatable habits a part of your everyday life. Like moving and eating vegetables daily. You need to consistently create an energy deficit to lose fat by consistently choosing healthy, nutrient dense foods.
At The Healthy Eating Hub, we’ve recently started offering body composition scans with our InBody570. This is a highly precise piece of technology that measures your exact body composition (muscle, bones, fat, water) and is the BEST way to track fat loss over time.
When you repeat healthy eating habits daily, your 4-6 weekly scans will pick up the changes, no matter how small they are!
Scales don’t show your muscle mass
I’ve had clients want to lose weight and get to a certain number on the scales, which after measuring their body composition, is impossible to achieve. This is often because they have a high amount muscle mass. The only way they’d get that small would be to lose so much body fat that they’d be dead!
You see, body fat is not bad. We’re supposed to have body fat. It’s a vital part of our anatomy and physiology. It only becomes a problem when we start to store too much of it. And unfortunately, the body doesn’t have a stop button. It’ll just keep on storing fat so long as we keep consuming an excessive amount of energy.
It’s actually super important to know what your muscle mass is doing. When you’re moving regularly, eating a healthy, plant and protein rich diet, your muscle mass should be staying stable or even growing. You don’t want it to decline! Muscles make up the bulk of your metabolism. They burn stacks of calories. Give you good posture, keep your bones strong and they help keep life fun! You can’t walk up mountains to see sunsets, or dive into the ocean or play with your children without muscles! They are amazing!
The Inbody570 can accurately track your muscle mass over time and ensure that as you’re losing weight, you’re maintaining your muscle mass and not losing it. Maintaining muscle will keep you healthy, but also make it easier to keep your weight off long term.
Scales don’t show your water levels
Your salt intake, whether you’ve exercised or not, your menstrual cycle, whether you’ve urinated or not and a bunch of other factors will affect how much water your body is holding. The day to day fluctuations in your home scales have more to do with water than they do with your eating habits. You may feel that this happens but when you ate that doughnut, 100% of it didn’t instantly go to your butt. The bad eating habits yesterday is not why you’ve put on weight today!
A body composition scan will show your current water levels, which is important when comparing your weight measurements over time.
Scales don’t show your mineral and bone density levels
Your bones actually weigh a few kilograms and everyone has a different sized skeleton. Our InBody scanner will show your total bone mass. Which, if anything, is super interesting to know. More sophisticated measures are required to measure bone density, but this initial test can be a good place to start.
Scales don’t show you your worth as a person
They don’t.
Here at The Healthy Eating Hub we believe that you are a valuable and important person regardless of how much you weigh. No exceptions. We’ll encourage you to focus on your healthy lifestyle from a position of self-love, not from a position of self-loathing. This is not always easy to do, but you’ve got the rest of your life to work on it!
My parting words
1. Ditch the scales and stop weighing yourself all the time!
2. Come and get an InBody scan with us. Let’s get an accurate picture of where you’re currently at – a starting point to track positive changes in your body over time!
3. Break down your big health goals into small, realistic goals and habits. Things that you can easily repeat every day:
- Add two cups of vegetables/salad to your lunch
- Grab a protein rich snack for afternoon tea
- Hit your 10,000 step a day (you’ll need to plan exercise or a walk to achieve this)
- Get 8+ hours of sleep every night
- Swap dessert for a piece of fruit and train yourself to enjoy eating that after dinner
There are HEAPS more I could help you with!
4. Lastly, start to develop a healthy acceptance of yourself and your body.
You are a valuable, important, beautiful person, regardless of what the scales say! Make healthy choices because you LOVE who you are, rather than because you hate who you are!
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