In this candid, profanity‑laden monologue, fitness coach Eric Roberts explains why the bathroom scale often fails to reflect visual progress. He breaks down what the scale actually measures—body fat, muscle mass, water weight, bone mass, and even gut contents—and highlights two short‑term factors that can cause the number to stay static or even rise despite hard work: increased muscle glycogen (which stores extra water) and post‑workout inflammation (which also retains water). Roberts debunks the myth that muscle “weighs more” than fat, clarifying that a pound of each weighs the same but muscle is denser, taking up less space. He uses two client case studies, Melinda and Bremer, to illustrate body recomposition—simultaneous fat loss and muscle gain—where the scale barely moves while physiques transform dramatically. The core message urges viewers to stop basing progress on the scale and instead focus on health, strength, and how clothes fit, concluding with a call to join his online training program (erfclubhouse.com) and watch more videos.
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All right, you listen here, motherfucker. Now I better see this number go down tomorrow or something bad is gonna happen. What was that? Oh, stop screaming, nobody can hear you anyway. Listen, I get it. More than anything, you want to see this number go down, and you're probably pissed off because you're lifting weights, you're eating healthier, you're getting your steps, getting walks, getting more cardio, but you're just not And honestly, you might even be a bit perplexed because you might even be seeing progress in other areas. I just realized I looked down at my— that's not, that's not the kind of progress I meant. I meant things like your jeans might be fitting better, for example. Also, who the hell wears dress pants with a tank top? I think I might bring this into fashion. Or you might even be walking by a mirror sometimes and being like, Damn! You see some progress there. And yet this thing just isn't moving. Why not? Well, let's first actually remember what this scale measures. It measures your body fat. That's one part of it. It measures your muscle mass. That's one part of it. It measures your water weight. It measures your skeleton and your bones. It measures how much poop is inside of your body. It measures so many more things than just if you gained body fat or Or lost body fat or not. So with that being said, if you're somebody who's lifting weights, trying to get nice and jacked up, lifting weights can actually make you store some short-term water weight that you might be noticing on the scale. And there's 2 main reasons why. Is something inside your muscles called your muscle glycogen. I want you to just think of muscle glycogen as like energy for your muscles so you can go and work out. When you start lifting weights, your muscles are going to store more glycogen. Now, what more muscle glycogen can do is— I want you to think of it like this paper towel and this water that I'm about to pour on my countertop. So your muscle glycogen acts like this paper towel to the water because it is going to absorb and hold all of this water inside the paper towel. This is what your muscle glycogen does when you start lifting weights and working out. Paper towel brand kind of sucks. So your muscles will store some extra water weight, which can show up on the scale. This is not a bad thing. This is a good thing because you want your muscles to have more glycogen so you can do your workouts, and it gives them that more defined defined look that you're going for. In the second part, when you work out, you create inflammation inside of your muscles because essentially what you do is you like beat your muscle fibers down, you create damage inside of your muscles. Then the inflammation comes along and says, hey body, we need to repair these muscles so we can get stronger, more defined muscles. So again, this process is a good thing, but again, the inflammation may cause some short-term water weight. Hint, this is actually why if you've ever had like a really hard intense workout and you weighed yourself the next day and your scale spiked up, this is why. It's because of inflammation inside of your muscles. So as you can see, neither one of those 2 things is bad. Those 2 things are actually what you want to have happen to change the way your body looks. But it might be why this scale isn't necessarily reading what you want it to read right now. It's being a little fucker. All right, so now that we've covered the short-term water weight aspect, let's also talk about building muscle. and losing fat. You may have heard before, oh, muscle weighs more than fat. No, muscle does not weigh more than fat. A pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat. They're both a pound, just like a pound of feathers weighs the same as a pound of bricks. The composition of them, the volume of them might be different, but the weight would be the exact same. Muscle and fat are the same exact thing. Muscle is more dense than fat, which means it takes up less space on your body. So if let's say you gained 2 pounds of muscle and you lost 3, maybe 4 pounds of fat, throw in some of the extra water weight on the scale that we just covered in the previous section. This is how this number might not read any different, but your clothes would fit differently. You would look different. You would feel healthier, you would look better, changes would be happening even if the scale isn't moving right now. Now, if you're somebody who has a lot of body fat to lose, like 30, 40, 50, 60 pounds, then yeah, as long as you're in a calorie deficit, the scale is going to go down eventually. So please don't freak out. But if let's say you're someone like my 2 clients right here, Melinda and Bremer, if you're someone like these 2 people who were— you don't really have like 30 pounds of body fat, 50 pounds of body fat to lose, You just need to do what we call body recomposition, which is lose fat and build muscle at the same time. Your weight might not move at all, but your body can look completely different like these 2 right here. Melinda, her weight didn't change at all, but maybe she went down about 2 pounds on the scale in between these 2 pictures. And the same goes for Bremer. His weight only went down about 4 pounds on the scale, but as you can see, both of their physiques look completely different. If I were you, I would ask yourself, why are you basing your entire progress off of a number on the scale? When do you really even care about what the scale says? Or do you care about getting healthier, getting stronger, and looking good naked? Most of the clients who I ask that question to, they tell me the latter. And if that's your answer too, stop living and dying by this number on the scale. You got it? I hope this video helped. If it did and you want some more help in your fitness journey, like the 2 clients I just showed you earlier, you can head to my online training and nutrition program, erfclubhouse.com. Or if you wanna watch some more videos, you can do that right here as well. Hope this helped.
