Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains why weight on the scale misleads you. Gaining 15 pounds of muscle improves health; losing 15 pounds of muscle harms it, even though the scale says you're winning. Track body composition instead to know if you're losing fat or muscle.
I think one of the biggest mistakes I see people make is that they actually focus on their weight. And, you know, everybody wants to quote unquote lose weight, but it's really— we try to coach our clients that it really doesn't have anything to do with weight. It has to do with body composition. It's really— we don't care if you put on 15 pounds of muscle, right? That's weight, but it's weight, right? You're metabolically healthy. Whereas if you lose 15 pounds of muscle, you lost weight, but you're worse off than you were. So it's really not about weight, it's really about body comp. And it's interesting how fixated people are on weight, however, as if that's a metric, you know, it's really hard to get that through. So sometimes even getting— if you're listening to this and you're wondering, well, geez, I'm focusing on weight— if you can even get a scale in your home that gives you, uh, you know, an approximation of body composition, that's going to be a big step forward for you in terms of how you're thinking about this. And you can actually, from that, you can see, okay, I'm losing quote-unquote weight, but what kind of weight am I losing? Am I losing good weight, or am I losing the weight I actually want to lose?
