I’m going to preface this post by saying that there are a number of people who can benefit from tracking weight loss through monitoring that little number that blinks up at you from the screen underneath your feet. These are people who are severely overweight, in situations where their weight is putting them in a highly at-risk category for all sorts of health complications. These people should probably also be seeing a professional and monitoring other measures of their health than just the number reflected on the scale.
For everyone else reading this – STOP TORTURING YOURSELF.
There are SO many other ways to measure if you’re improving your health and moving towards your fitness goals than by waking up every morning and determining the mood of your day by the number that indicates the relationship between your mass and the gravitational pull of the Earth.
Every magazine and new diet that comes out screams:
“LOSE 10 LBS BY THIS WEEKEND!”
“HOW TO FINALLY DROP THOSE LAST FEW INCHES!”
“DROP THAT BABY WEIGHT!”
“HERE’S HOW YOUR FAVORITE CELEBRITY DRANK ONLY THE NECTAR OF MAGICAL ORCHIDS FROM THE RAINFOREST FOR A WEEK AND LOST 3 INCHES!”
“SUMMER’S AROUND THE CORNER, BETTER SLIM DOWN FOR BIKINI SEASON!”
It’s no wonder that we have a society full of people, and women especially, constantly calculating their self-worth based solely on the judgment of an inanimate object.
If you’d allow, I’m going to share with you a personal story. If you’re not interested in the personal stuff, feel free to skip to the end to find out other ways you can learn how to measure progress and value your health.
I’ll start by saying that I have never been severely overweight.
Going through puberty added a few pounds to my tiny frame, and when you’re 5 feet tall and earn this baby-weight before all of the other girls, you can start to feel a little self-conscious. Naturally, this weight gain will even out as you grow taller and your body matures, but it can be a little bit startling for someone like me, a type-a personality, who thrives on being the best that I can be.
Unfortunately, this type of personality also naturally lends itself to eating disordered tendencies. After my freshman year of college, I returned home a few pounds lighter than when I had left. This was a total accident, and probably the result of walking to class every day and not having food at my fingertips at every waking moment. When people started to comment on my weight loss in a positive way, I loved it! Wow, people think I look good! Next logical step for me: if people think I look good now, I’ll lose even more weight and they will think I look even better!
This is so wrong. Especially for me, when I was already down to about 120lbs and didn’t have a whole lot of weight on me to lose.
So, what did I do? I started running. Daily. The weight flew off, because I had never been much of a runner before. Pair this with starting to be more conscious of food and the pounds dripped off like the sweat during those torturous miles.
When I returned to college for my sophomore year, I was primed to develop an eating disorder, and that’s exactly what happened. I was so afraid that the weight I had lost over the summer would quickly come back on, and I started weighing myself daily to make sure that didn’t happen!
Every morning, I’d faithfully check the scale, and if it wasn’t going down (even .02 lbs), then I needed to do something more that day to fix that. This led to more cardio, less food, and a wardrobe that I was swimming in.
Not only does this obsession creep into your own mind, and ruin your self-image, it ruins your relationships with others. I started to fear group settings where I might have to explain why I was only eating half an apple or a few bites of a sandwich, and if any event might interfere with my “progress” there’s no way I would think about going.
Fast-forward about 6 months and I was at my lowest weight ever. I was weak, cold, exhausted, and the only way that I could feel good about myself was if all of my efforts were reflected in that damn scale. What a sad waste of time.
Then I met someone. I met a guy who was caring, compassionate, and who was able to help me temporarily break out of this dark place in my life. Through his friendship and love for me, I started eating more and I gained weight, but my mindset didn’t really change for at least another year. I avoided the scale like the plague until one day, I decided to hop back on, “just to see.” It set me back. Hard.
That number on the scale meant failure. I had lost control. Even though everyone around me thought I looked better, I felt like I had messed everything up. I got back on the treadmill and cut calories again, not satisfied until I saw that number drop.
Finally, I reached a point where my body could not physically take the demands that I was placing on it. The number of miles that I was running was ruining my knees and the muscles in my quads. I had to stop.
This is where weight lifting began to save my life. Through the help of a friend who is a personal trainer, I learned different strength movements. I started using the dumbbells instead of the treadmill, bike, and stair master, and the changes I saw in my own body were INCREDIBLE. I started to be able to do things that I never thought were possible. I became my own inspiration. I learned that strong beat the hell out of skinny, and I have not looked back since then.
In the last month alone, I have seen a dramatic increase in my strength and overall health with a combination of lifting heavy weights in the gym (I mean REALLY heavy) and eating (A LOT OF FOOD).
If you’re wondering if I weigh myself still, I do. The reason for that is so that I can see how much muscle mass I’m putting on. I am no longer afraid of gaining, I crave it! I want to see my numbers go up, because those numbers increasing on the scale are a reflection of the strength I’m gaining in the gym.
Wow. If you made it through that whole thing, you deserve a round of applause. If you skipped to this point, you’ll find listed below a few ways that you can keep yourself sane and determine if you’re making progress in your overall health and fitness.
1. HOW DO YOU FEEL?! – your training and nutrition should make you feel better, not worse. being healthy feels good. you should have more energy, sleep better, think more clearly, and have a more positive outlook on life
2. HOW DO YOUR CLOTHES FIT? – this is a tricky one, because in my own personal experience, clothes becoming more loose may not always be a good thing. but, if you’re noticing that you have a little extra room in the waist, and a little more tightness around the glutes, that may be a good indicator that those squats are doing what they’re made for!
3. SET GOALS THAT DON’T SURROUND YOUR WEIGHT! – measure your health by little things, like being able to carry the entire load of groceries on one arm, walking up the stairs without getting winded, being able to do an extra push-up at the end of your workout, etc. the list is endless!
Below, I’ve added a link to another well-written blogpost by Nia Shanks, a “coach, health and fitness writer, and leader of the Lift Like a Girl revolution.” You can see what she also has to say about tossing the scale as a measure of progress.
http://www.niashanks.com/stop-weighing-on-the-scale-for-weight-loss/
One last thing to consider – why do you really want to lose weight? What does losing weight really mean? If you want to lose weight, think about the fact that you might not be losing fat, you might be losing muscle mass, bone density, and maybe even a few brain cells! How about instead of wanting to lose something, you start to think about what you want to gain?
I want to gain strength. I want to gain happiness. I want to gain confidence. I want to gain independence. I want to gain overall badass-ness.
(YES, I DREW THAT MYSELF!)
So, what do you say? Ready to make some gains with me?
❤
T&T
TreatsAndTraining 