SR Fit’s Guide to Understanding Weight Loss – Fat, Water or Muscle?

As you strive to lose weight, there is no doubt that you have gotten on your bathroom scale to see if your diet is “working” and everyday you’re thinking…”Damn this thing!” Do you torture yourself with the scale everyday? If so, you are doing yourself a disservice if you do and putting way too much pressure on yourself. Here are 5 steps you can take to help you understand weight loss and improving your relationship with the scale…

Scale back on the scale! Stay focused and keep going knowing that the scale is not your end all be all…your efforts are.

 

Put the scale into perspective. A scale measures how much weight you have lost, but it will never tell you where the weight loss has come from. When following a weight loss plan or changing your eating habits, your weight loss could potentially come from loss of fat, loss of water, or even loss of muscle. Unfortunately, many of the fad diets that claim rapid weight loss stand true because you are losing water and/or muscle. Generally speaking, if you are losing greater than two pounds a week you are likely losing muscle too.

Keep it simple, monitor your progress by how your clothes fit and by your weekly progress photos. To get more specific, outside the scale, measure your body fat percentage and your lean body mass. Lean body mass is your weight excluding fat. Lean body mass includes bone, muscle, and other tissues with the majority of this being muscle. By measuring both body fat and lean body mass, you will be able to determine how much fat you are actually losing and whether or not you are losing any muscle. Here is a link to “The Body Composition Assessment Guide” that was developed by the US Navy. This will give you a step-by-step guide, on how to determine your percentages.

Once you determine your percentages, you will be able to track your weight loss much more accurately than by simply using a scale alone. You will know exactly where your weight loss is coming from, so you can quickly make adjustments to your calorie intake to maximize your results.

 

Calculate your total daily calories needed for fat loss. A good starting point is to multiply your total weight by 12. Remember, spreading your calories out over 5-6 meals keeping to 5% complex carbohydrate, 30% lean protein, and 15% fat will give you the best chance of permanent fat loss. If you want to maintain your hard earned muscle, it is so important that you maintain weight training with your existing TBIT-15 workouts, while following our SR Fit weight loss challenges or any other program you are following.

As you continue to work hard with your daily workouts and staying on top of eating a healthier diet, we definitely encourage you to keep it simple when measuring your progress, don’t let the pressure of the scale bring you down. Keep pushing forward Tribe. At SR Fit, we strive for progress, not perfection.