Want to lose weight? Throw out the scale and the diet plan. Really.
Are you one of the millions of people stuck in that endless “diet yo-yo” and continually gaining and losing weight? Or just trying to lose weight at all and continually frustrated? Join the club! However, here at About Exercise we want you to renounce your membership, and in order to do that you must cast away some of the sacred rituals and poisonous “common knowledge” about diet and exercise that are incorrect. The biggest two? The concept of a “diet”, and the obsession with regular weigh-ins. We’ll touch on both, but for today, we want to convince you to throw your bathroom scale out the window. Actually don’t, that’s rather dangerous, but you really shouldn’t give it so much attention.
Those of you trying to reach an ideal weight know of the solemn weigh-in routine. Step on the scale daily, read a number, have emotional reaction. More often than not, said reaction is frustration. Your diet and exercise regime has been hard work, and the results are slow in coming. Constant weigh-ins like this tend to be terrible for your self-esteem and motivation. Moreover, getting healthy is a life-long process. You need to learn how to eat properly, and incorporate routine into your life, and obsessing over short-term gains and losses is terrible at reinforcing that. Even worse? Weight really isn’t a great indicator of how healthy you are. Building muscle will make you look and feel better (and burn more fat) but the scale can’t tell between healthy, heavy, flattering muscle and unsightly and unhealthy excess body fat that is comparatively lighter.
If you’re caught in the endless diet loop, you need to address the root causes of what got you to where you are. Over the years, you have developed habits and formed ideas that have caused an imbalance between how much food you intake compared to your activity level. It’s also likely that the quality of what you’re eating is less than ideal. Most people have a terrible concept of what a proper serving size is, and eat too much fat and empty carbohydrates. You simply cannot expect to ever be able to remain at a healthy weight you’re happy with and carry on like you have been! Short-term diets aren’t how healthy people maintain their ideal weight, they do it by learning about proper nutrition and portion sizes, relative to their activity level, and training themselves to enjoy eating this way every day. The best part is that it’s not as hard to do this as it sounds!
The scale is just distracting. What will help you look and feel like you want to is changing your habits to eat properly and get exercise regularly in a way that you enjoy and can keep up. The focus should be finding a healthy lifestyle that makes you happy, and the constant depressing news from the scale brings you down and makes you feel like these efforts are wasted because there is no immediate effect. Exercising and proper eating, meanwhile, feels good and continues to reinforce that your new habits are good for you.
Since our bodies are complicated machines, using the numbers on the scale to quantify your efforts are a bad idea. Losing weight is more of a side-effect and motivation to do something more important: feeling healthier and happier about yourself. The perfect example of this is something I touched on earlier. Many people who are trying to lose weight balk at the idea of strength training, as they fear that it will make them “bulk up” and get even bigger and weigh more. Women sometimes fear that it’s not “feminine” and that they don’t want to look like a bodybuilder. This is a very bad attitude! For starters, bodybuilders don’t look that way on accident. Trust me, unless you want to look like that, it won’t happen. Second, muscle burns fat even at rest, so the more you have the more extra calories you can burn every day, which will help you lose weight much faster. However this may not translate to lower numbers on the scale. It’s very possible those numbers will stay the same, but you’ll drop several sizes. This is something to get excited about! Ruining that by getting upset about numbers is a waste of time and energy, and could very well be detrimental to your progress. So forget the scale, worry about your body composition, and looking and feeling good.
So do you really want to be healthy? Do you want to look good (even in that swimsuit!) and feel good? Forget the scale. While you’re at it, throw out the elaborate diet plans. Go find physical activity you love doing and doesn’t feel like a chore, and pick up some reading on proper nutrition and a cookbook or two full of delicious and healthy recipes. If you don’t know what to do with those recipes, learn! About Exercise has many resources and advice to help you do this, so check them out.
Don’t base your self-worth on numbers, base your self-worth on how you feel. It’s OK to want to improve where you are and how you look while feeling good about yourself because you are heading in the direction you want to go.