THE SCALE-"Friend or Foe"

I had a client once when I worked as a weightloss consultant who really put forth alot of effort. When she first started dieting her weight was dropping really fast. She was losing between 1-2 pounds a week consistantly for about a month and a half. As time went on her weightloss seemed to stall. She was working out hard 5 days a week but the scale wasn't moving. She was getting so angry because she wasn't cheating on her dieting and she surely wasn't skipping on her exercise. Although she wasn't happy I could see the changes in her body. Eventually she got so frustrated that she said she was just going to give up. She said she was never going to get to her goal weight if things kept going so slowly. Now this lady was so focused on getting her weight down that she would always weigh in the same clothes each week to make sure her weight was accurate. As she stood up getting ready to leave I noticed something, a huge wrinkle in the side of her shorts. I asked her what was going on with her shorts because she had a safety pin in the side of her shorts holding them together. She had lost quite a bit of inches in her waist. Overall everything on her looked alot better. I asked her what size she was wearing when she was at her goal weight before and she said that she was 2 sizes smaller than she was last time she was at that weight.

Why was she not losing weight but her body was getting smaller? That is the question she asked me. Well, her workouts consisted of jogging and strength training. When you strength train you build muscle. Unlike the average person that walks or runs for exercise she was doing strength training for her whole entire body in which she had toned herself from head to toe. Muscle is more compact than fat. So instead of her not changing on the scale her body was getting more lean. She was losing fat and gaining muscle. The more muscle you have the more efficiently you will burn fat. I'm going to post a picture of this so you can see what exactly what I mean. So, the next time you decide to diet and you know you are exercising properly, don't get discouraged if the scale isn't going down the way you want it to. More than likely your body is changing but the scale isn't showing it. Instead of focusing on the scale try having an article of clothing around that wasn't fitting right a few weeks before around. Try it on and if it feels better than what it did before then you are on the right track. The scale is not always correct when it comes to what is going on with your body. It truly can be a foe instead of a friend when you are dieting and strength training.

They both weigh 5lbs, but look at how much bigger the fat is compared to the muscle.