Measuring your body weight sucks…
It really, really does. It’s a poor metric of what is going on inside your body, and use of it as a metric leads to many of our diet myths and fallacies.
Have you ever heard people say that they massively increased their calories and their weight didn’t budge?
I did that.
During my 7 weeks off from weight training, fasting and dieting, my weight barely changed, going from 176 to 174. Heck, when you look at those numbers alone you may even say I’m lucky – blessed with the genetics to eat whatever I want and still lose weight. Which is exactly what I did.
And that would be awesome if weight was all that mattered.
Unfortunately it’s not, and during those 7 weeks of inactivity and increased calorie intake I gained almost 5 pounds of fat while losing almost 7 pounds of lean muscle mass. Not so lucky when you look at those seven weeks with a better metric – that being actual body composition instead of weight.
In fact, during my seven week experiment I experienced a lot of the same things that many dieters experience. After a night of big eating I experienced the “whoosh” – that odd, hard to explain phenomena where you eat a large meal then the next morning you are 2-3 pounds lighter. Is it water? Fat? is it transient? The truth is it doesn’t really matter, because after 7 weeks it didn’t matter at all. The point is I was up 5 of fat, and down 7 of muscle.
On some days there were weird weight fluctuations I simply couldn’t explain – up to 182, back down to 179…that type of thing.
In the right mirror I thought my muscles actually looked ‘fuller’ like my muscles where somehow growing from all the extra rest. After all, maybe I was over-trained and this was the break I needed to pack on an extra 3-5 pounds of muscle… But that was only in the right mirror and me trying to convince myself good things were happening. When I met a group of friends a couple days after the 7 week experiment one of the first things that was said to me was “What happened to your arms?”
So the mirror is almost as bad at the scale when you’re looking through desperately hopeful eyes!
About a month before I started my experiment my friend John Barban took on a new client – a guy about my size, new to training.
During the entire process John’s client grew frustrated at his lack of progress, despite all his work his weight had only dropped from around 179 to 175. He didn’t feel like he looked any leaner or any bigger from when he started.
I saw John’s client the day he first started his program and then again 10 weeks later the day before they went to get his final DEXA measurements; and I was BLOWN AWAY by the transformation – John’s client new he was bigger and leaner, but he was still stuck on the fact that he actually lost weight when his goal was to gain weight… but gain what weight? He (like all of us guys) wanted to gain muscle, but was tricked into thinking this automatically means also gaining total body weight.
Of course his DEXA showed a 7 pound increase in lean mass and an almost 12 pound loss in body fat in 12 weeks (he ended at around 9% body fat!). Phenomenal change in 12 weeks!
When you see yourself in the mirror on a daily basis, you can miss the changes – they happen slowly, especially muscle growth, but after 6 – 12 weeks those little changes add up – but those changes might not be detectable if you only use the simple metrics of weight on a scale which can never tell you how much of you is fat vs muscle, or the look you see in the mirror, which you only see with your own biased eyes…after all I was looking in the mirror trying to tell myself I looked better than I really did, and John’s client looked at himself in the mirror and didn’t think he looked as good as he really did!
Let’s get to the point of this ramble – there are many things that can happen to your body composition that you may not be able to detect with your scale. If you want to track your progress you need better metrics. At the very least you should know your circumferences and weight and match them to a photo of what you look like at those exactly metrics and weight. At best you should have all of these metrics plus a DEXA scan of your body to find out what you’re really made of.
If you’re not measuring, you’re guessing.
BP
