I’ve been talking about weight loss with a few friends and coaching clients recently. They’re standing on the scales every few days and are so disappointed that despite all their hard work, they aren’t seeing their weight go down. This can feel so demoralising. I’ve written about this before but as these chats seem to be increasing I wanted to highlight the topic again.
Weight can be a bad metric
What the scales are saying is really such a rubbish metric when it comes to exercise and health. We’re conditioned to think that if the scales are going down that must be a good thing because lots of health conditions are linked to being overweight. Being lighter will therefore mean we are healthier – right? Well, no, not always.
If you’re overweight there are certainly some health benefits from losing weight. BUT, using weight loss as a marker for your fitness and how effective your exercise is, is a bad idea.
Lots of the benefits of exercise are independent to weight loss. Even if the scales aren’t budging, if you’ve done eight weeks of exercise, you will be healthier. You might feel disappointed that you aren’t seeing any weight loss with all your efforts. Your hard work isn’t showing in weight loss and it’s tempting to think it isn’t working and to give up. But honestly, it will be having an impact in your body that you can’t see. Before you lose subcutaneous fat you’ll lose visceral fat, that’s the harmful fat deep inside you that causes inflammation and raises your risk of lots of conditions such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease. This visceral fat is very responsive to physical activity and it will reduce as your activity increases.
Also, you need to bear in mind that with exercise you’ll be gaining muscle mass. Muscle does weight more than fat. Your weight might actually go up but you will still be healthier.
In peri and post menopause in particular we need to change our thinking. We need to find a better marker of our health and exercise. We may or may not lose weight but we can feel better and healthier and these changes might not be reflected in the scales.
Alternative markers to weight
What markers can you use instead? Here are some suggestions:
- How you feel in your clothes
- How your menopause symptoms are
- How much energy you have
- What your mood is like
- How strong you feel
- How confident you feel
- How out of breath you are (or aren’t) when you go upstairs
- How easy it feels to lift the shopping out of the car
- A waist measurement – this may be a better way to reflect you losing viceral fat than the scales and this is therefore a marker of health
- Your muscles and fat mass percentages – sadly most scales that give you body fat and muscles mass stats aren’t very accurate but the over all trend of a falling body fat and rising muscles mass percentage can be motivating).
Remember though that you may feel different day to day and it’s much more important to look at trends. Keeping a diary of your chosen markers can help you to follow your progress and see the trends.
By all means hop on the scales every now and then if you want to. You might see some loss but if you don’t then if your other markers are improving then don’t be disappointed. Just be curious that you can feel so much healthier without always seeing a drop in weight.
I’d love to know how you feel about this. Do you weigh yourself? What other markers do you use? How do you track your progress?
If you’d like to download my free ‘Perimenopausal Weight Control – a Runner’s Guide’ then just click here.
Featured image: Joa70 at Pixabay
