Do you often find yourself checking your weight on a regular basis? Weekly? Daily? Morning and evening?
Weighing yourself regularly is something that many people who have either just started their fitness journey, or are focusing on their nutrition, turn to as a measure of success. It's understandable; you start doing some exercise or start eating a little better and want to make sure you are not gaining weight. That is all well and good.
However, it is incredibly easy to slip into some bad habits when weighing yourself which may only derail your progress and hard work!
SHOULD I WEIGH MYSELF?
Firstly, as we said, weighing yourself is fine, but when an obsession with weight develops, it is that you need to watch out for.
Let’s use this example: Let’s say that you have just started doing some regular exercise, lifting weights and doing more weight bearing activity. You weight yourself at the start of the week and then again at the end of the week, and to your horror you have gained weight!
This is incredibly common and what (most likely) may have happened is that you have burnt body fat but also built muscle. Say if you lost 1 lb of fat and gained 1.5 lbs of muscle, your scales would read a higher weight than when you started to exercise.
For those who are purely focused on the number their scale says, this can be very demotivating and cause you to discontinue your training all together. Here we can see that just because your scales tell you one thing, your body is telling you another! None of us can say that burning fat and gaining muscle is detrimental to your health!
Here's another scenario: You weigh yourself in the morning at 7am and you weigh 179lbs. 3 days later you weigh yourself in the evening at 8:30pm and you weigh 181lbs. Have all those changes you made been in vain?
Firstly, we should next analyse the time difference between those measurements. Measuring your weight should always be done around the same time of day. So many things happen during the day which can affect your total body weight, mainly intake of water and food. So when weighing at different times of day, you should expect completely irregular and unpredictable results.
Here’s a better way to measure weight loss. Unless your scales are able to break down down your body composition into body fat and muscle tone, base your results on how you feel. Do your clothes feel looser? Have people commented on a change in your body shape? That should be your indicator to showing that you are making fantastic progress!
At the DVCC, every centre has a state of the art Inbody analysis machine which breaks down the amount of fat and muscle a person is currently storing. This allows our team to see exactly what is happening in terms of body composition change rather than looking at just one number, which when looked at by itself means very little.
If you want to start losing body fat, a great tip would be to have some natural fats and protein at breakfast. This has been proven to keep you feeling fuller for longer and regulate your hormones in the correct way, which will then make it easier to eat for fat loss for the rest of the day.
So go ahead - have some eggs and good quality bacon for breakfast - its good for you!
