JJ Virgin describes a client who lost 10 pounds of fat, gained 10 pounds of muscle, dropped two clothing sizes, and lowered her body-fat percentage from 25% to 18%, but stayed unhappy because the scale didn't move. Virgin argues resistance training boosts metabolism and insulin sensitivity in ways cardio doesn't, and recommends tracking body composition instead of weight.
Women have really bad body dysmorphia anyway. Yeah. Like, we cannot be trusted. Yeah. You know, we can't. I will tell you a story about a woman. She came in, she wanted to lose 10 pounds. I have a bioimpedance scale, so I did the bioimpedance scale with her, looked at her body fat. It was 25%, which is in the range of normal for women. She wanted to, you know, want to lose 10 pounds. She, over the course of a year, she lost 10 pounds of fat and put on 10 pounds of muscle. So she dropped the 10 pounds of fat, but she put on 10 pounds of muscle. She went from 25% body fat to 18, and she dropped 2 inches off her waist, and she dropped 2 clothing sizes. Like, she looked like an entirely different person, and she was still upset because the scale didn't say what she wanted it to say. Even though if I'd asked her at the time, well, what is it you're looking to achieve? Like, do you want to drop clothing size? Do you want to drop waist size? Because if you're losing weight and not losing your waist you're making yourself worse, not better, right? And so it was interesting, back when I was in grad school, they taught us that people should not lift weights till they lose the weight. I completely 180 degrees disagree with that. First of all, doing resistance training is very metabolically costly anyway, so you're going to burn a lot of calories and burn calories after you work out. If you go for a walk, you're not burning calories after you walk. You don't have to recover from it. You're going to become more insulin sensitive. You're not going to be as hungry. You do a lot of cardio, you're hungrier. And so I would wonder about how you felt, if that was just more how you felt versus what the reality was. If we could look at inches and we could look at the scale and we could look at, you know, what was going on with your body composition. If you'd been using a bioimpedance scale, you could track your total body water and your weight. And if your weight was staying the same but your body water was going up, then you would have known you were putting on muscle and losing fat.
