I often hear this complaint from clients: „My belly measurements go down week by week but my weight is not changing. What’s wrong?“
Here you are going to learn why weight is only an indicator of how you are doing on your way to changing your body, but weight alone does not necessarily tell you the whole story. Let me explain:
For our purposes and extremely simplified, your body essentially consists of muscle and fat.
Obviously there are bones, ligaments etc. but muscle and fat are the things that we can manipulate through training and nutrition.
Big changes in muscle and fat mass have a huge impact on how we look.
So you can have 2 people who weigh the same on the scale, but look completely different.
If you want to improve your body composition you should aim to gain muscle mass and minimize your fat stores.
In my experience there are 3 categories that people fall into when they are trying to change their body for the better:
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Obese: Generally needs to lose weight, mostly fat.
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Slightly overweight: Most likely needs to lose some weight, again, most of it fat.
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„Skinny fat“, i.e. someone who looks skinny, yet is not in good shape and has a little belly: Likely needs to build muscle and lose fat and the same time, resulting in weight staying the same or slightly going down, depending on their body fat percentage.
So let’s say you fall into one of the three categories above, now what?
Focus on stuff you can control!!!
In life, it makes sense to focus on the things that we can directly control.
These are the actions we take daily and the thoughts and mindsets that we cultivate in our mind.
It does not make much sense to focus on how bad the weather is on a given day – you cannot change it. The same goes for your body weight.
By hyper-focusing on your weight you divert your attention from the actions that matter to actually change it.
It makes a lot more sense to do your best every day at every meal, every workout and every action that if repeated over time will get you to your goals.
Measures like your weight and belly circumference are therefore merely a reflection of your daily habits.
If 95 times out of a 100 you made good choices, it will show differently than if you made 40 good and 60 bad choices.
This is the perspective I want you to take:
Focus on getting stronger in the gym and on bettering your lifestlye choices. The rest will fall into place!
-Thomas
