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When it comes to quantifying your health, many people often use the number on the scale as an overall indicator of their wellbeing. Weight loss is boiled down to numbers, and it can be easy to lose sight of the physical changes you may be seeing or feeling in your body in favor of making the scale dip.
However, the reality is that while your scale does inform you of how much you weigh, it is not indicative of a variety of other factors that may be more telling of your health than that number. If you’ve found yourself hyperfocused on using the scale as an indicator of how healthy you are, and are seemingly doing everything right but frustrated by the lack of change, there’s one primary reason why weight loss means so much more.
Your body naturally fluctuates between 2-5lbs each day, so if you find yourself weighing a different number from morning to night, this may be the reason. However, it’s not only weight fluctuation that makes the number on the scale an inaccurate marker of your wellness. If you’ve been following a healthy lifestyle, exercising, and building muscle, there’s a chance that it's this muscle which may be keeping the scale stagnant or even making the number go up.
It’s a well known fact that muscle weighs more than fat, and as you move through your weight loss journey you may also be working to put on lean muscle which can replace fat on your body, consequently making the scale appear not to be moving in the “right” direction. “Muscle can definitely impact the scale as you exercise more; for example, it might actually increase slightly,” notes Keri Gans, MS, RD, CDN. “If that is the case, probably a better indicator of weight loss would be how your clothes are fitting since you can be losing inches while gaining muscle.”
Boiling down your healthy changes to your weight on the scale diminishes the work you may be doing to improve your lifestyle, and there are so many other factors which have more bearing on your well being. “Instead of only focusing on the number on the scale a person should look at other important numbers; such as, blood pressure, resting heart rate, cholesterol and triglyceride levels, and glucose levels,” suggests Gans.
“Also, how fit a person is counts; for example, how long can they walk, run or bike? How quickly does their heart rate recover from strenuous activity? The longer the walk, the quicker the recovery, are also important indicators,” she adds.
As a baseline indicator of your health, the scale can be useful in determining if you fall within a reasonable weight for your height. If you have a significant amount of weight to lose, it can help track this over time, but if you’re already at a weight where the largest change to occur will be muscle gain, this is where the scale loses its value.
Thinking more about the healthy habits you’re creating and whether or not they play into the changes in your body you would like to see will mean so much more than stepping on the scale every morning, and an even better indicator of your health is how your clothes fit and how you’re feeling in your body instead. Are you able to run further or get less winded when walking up the stairs? These are signs that your health is improving that would not necessarily be reflected on the scale, and are more telling of your wellness than just a number.
It can be easy to get carried away in trying to get your weight down to a certain point, but focusing on implementing healthy habits and being aware of how your body looks and feels is a much better long term strategy to weight loss. Weighing yourself to ensure that you’re staying on track can be useful every once and a while, but even your BMI isn’t really a great indicator of your overall well being, and you’ll be better served keeping the scale out of your home so as not to create obsessive patterns in your weight loss journey.
At the end of the day, feeling good and fueling your body with nutritious and satisfying foods will be much better for your health than setting a number goal on the scale, allowing you to improve your health without getting caught up in the minute details.
