The scale is a liar!
When your child was born, what was one of the first things the nurses told you about your new baby – their weight. When a friend has a baby, what is one of the first things you ask – how much did he weigh? When you took your child to the doctor for their 1 month, 3 month , 6 month, 1 year check ups, what did the doctor track on a norm chart – their weight. Every year when you go to the doctor what is one of the first two things they measure when they call you back – your weight. So it is no wonder that everyone is obsessed with that number. But the number on the scale in NO way defines you. Who you are on the inside defines you and your goal is to be healthy!
Women and men alike confess to getting on the scale every day, hoping to see a number smaller than the one the day before. Some even confess to getting on the scale multiple times each day. A confession of a client really made me take pause. She casually mentioned that she flushes the toilet each time she gets on the scale so that her husband wouldn’t know that she was weighing herself again. She weighed herself up to 3 or 4 times per day. It was then that I realized, I need to explain that getting on the scale and expecting it to reflect what you did the day before or the few hours before. Exercising and eating right today may not show up on the scale tomorrow, it may show up 72 hours later. But within those 72 hours you may have eaten poorly and not exercised. Bottom line is this, what you do today is not reflected on the scale tomorrow. Results are not immediate. They come overtime and with consistent effort – eating clean and exercising daily. Period. Stop weighing yourself each day. Stop weighing yourself each week. Monthly weigh ins are often enough to track what you are doing on a consistent basis.
In fact, take measurements instead of stepping on that scale. Measurements will be a far more accurate assessments of changes that are happening in your body. Take a look at what 5 pounds of fat versus 5 pounds of muscle look like. Do you see that muscle takes up 1/3 of the space that fat does. So the scale may not have changed, but your measurements can be drastically different!
Stop the scale insanity. You are playing a game where there are no true rules. Today does not show up on the scale tomorrow. Eat clean, control portions, drink water, exercise daily.
Here are the measurements I recommend for tracking body changes. Note that each measurement is taken at a bone landmark, do not measure “at the biggest part” because in just a couple of weeks that “biggest part” might have moved! Always measuring at these bony landmarks will insure that you are comparing apples to apples.
Chest – right up under the arms
Waist – at the belly button
Hips- across the hips in front of the pubic bone
Thigh – half the distance from your hip bone to your knee cap
Upper arm – half the distance from your shoulder to your elbow
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