Do you weigh yourself on a regular basis? Weekly? Daily? Morning and evening?
It's understandable; you start doing some exercise, eating a little better or just want to track your weight to make sure you are not gaining weight. That is all well and good.
However, it is easy to get into bad habits regarding weighing yourself which may only derail your progress and hard work.
Say if you have started doing some regular exercise, lifting weights for example, or doing more weight bearing activity. You measure yourself at the start of the week and then again at the end of the week, and to your horror you have gained weight! Does this sound familiar?
If so, what may have happened is 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. This can be very demotivating and cause you to discontinue your training all together.
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?
First of all, you would want to look at what you are wearing. Is it exactly the same as the last time you got on the scales? If it isn't, the results of the measurement you have taken cannot be deemed accurate. With any type of testing you want to make sure that you are measuring under exactly the same conditions (or as close as possible) every time.
Talking about measuring with consistency, 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.
One of the best ways to measure your weight loss, if you haven't got access to a pair of scales which breaks down your body composition into body fat and muscle tone, is to do it by how you feel. Do your clothes feel looser? Have people commented on a change in your body shape?
Don't rely on your scales as they may not paint a truthful picture of what is happening.
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 transformation experts 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!
