The Scale Is Lying to You (Track This Instead!)

Stop letting this, your bathroom scale, tell you whether you're succeeding. Because you can lose 5 pounds and actually become weaker. Or you could stay exactly the same weight while losing fat, gaining muscle, and dramatically improving your health. Oh, and that random 2-pound jump overnight? It's not fat, but it can still ruin your entire morning if you let it. The problem isn't weighing yourself. The problem is treating your weight like a grade. So today we're turning the scale from a judge into a tool. I'm going to show you the 4 measurements that reveal what's really changing inside your body, including your muscle, visceral fat, waistline, bone density, and functional strength. I'm going to show you exactly what to measure every day, every week, every month, and every year, and some simple tools you can have at home to do it. And by the end of this video, You'll have a body composition dashboard that tells you far more about your weight and your health than just your weight ever could. So ditch your obsession with that number on the scale, please, and start tracking the numbers that actually matter. So if you're ditching the scale, what are you going to need? Let's talk about how to test and track your body composition and muscle quality and which tools you need. And we are going to be tracking using 5 different things. And these are things except for one that you'll be able to do at home. All right, the first thing you're going to need at home is a bioimpedance scale. This is different than that traditional scale I just showed you. A bioimpedance scale is called this because it sends a little bioimpedance wave up your body and checks your body's resistance to it. The more resistance, the more body fat. The better ones also have a little handle that you can lift. So not only is it getting the wave through your body, it's also through your arms as well. And by doing this, it's going to be able to give you a guesstimate, and I'm going to use those words very carefully, of how much your body's fat and how much your body's fat-free mass, and then how much of that is skeletal muscle and where it's located. All right, why am I saying guesstimate? It sends a wave up your body. It checks the resistance from this. From this, it predicts your total body water. Your total body water correlates with your fat-free mass. You basically have fat and everything else. Now, from your fat-free mass, it's going to use another equation to guesstimate, estimate how much of that fat-free mass is actually skeletal muscle. Depending on your age, how much you work out, your sex, it might be 30%, it might be 50%. So that varies. Okay? The other thing it's going to do is it's going to tell you not just how much fat is on your body, but where that fat is. It's going to give you a guesstimate of how much is around your organs. But I'm gonna give you a better way to look at visceral fat. The ones when I've looked at all of these different units, I've had a bunch of them. I have a very expensive segmental Tanita at home. I have a PATH scale. I have a Renpho. I have an Oxylean Pro. Some of this is gonna depend on your budget, right? Renphos you could get as cheap as, I have a travel one for $20. You could spend more on a scale and spend $300. I will tell you that I've found that the PATH scale is the most accurate compared to a DEXA than any of the other ones that I've had at home. Path is a great brand. Oxlean Pro reads me a little bit high because again, they're going to use an equation in there. But really, that doesn't matter, and I'll explain why. I want you to get on the scale every day. I want you to have a habit. It's interesting, Dr. James Hill, who did the largest weight management registry in the world— I think he's the only one who's actually done this— who's looked at over, I think it's, I'm not sure how many thousands of people now, maybe 10,000 people over 7 years who've lost 70 pounds and kept it off. And one of the things that he found that they do consistently that helps them maintain that is by getting on a scale every day. Now, he didn't say body composition scale, but I'm going to tell you body composition, BIA, because it's not what you weigh, it's what your weight's made up of. And I want to make sure that you're not just staying at the same weight, you're staying at or improving your body composition. Because you could stay at the same weight— I'm going to give you an example of this— and be losing muscle and not know it if you were just using a traditional scale. So that is the one of the big beauties of this bioimpedance scale. Now, Here's the caveat. Because this bioimpedance scale is looking at total body water, what do we know about that? It fluctuates. One day you might be up a couple pounds, next day you might be down a couple pounds. If you're dehydrated, your weight goes down. If you're holding onto water, your weight goes up. If you're holding onto water, it looks like you've got higher muscle mass. If you're dehydrated, it looks like you've got lower muscle mass. So this is why I tell you to get on it every single day under the same conditions, like Get up in the morning, go to the bathroom, step on the scale. And then what you're going to do, because these things read to a Bluetooth in your phone to keep a chart, is once a week you will look at the trends. Please, Pinky, please, Pinky promise me this, please do not look at it one day, look at the next day and try to make any kind of judgment. That will just make you crazy. Look at it over a week. And what you wanna see is if you are trying to change your body composition, I'm assuming you want to improve it. Right? You'd want to see that either your muscle mass, your fat-free mass is going up, your fat mass is going down, or both are happening, but that you are making improvements. And I will tell you that improving body composition is a bit like watching grass grow. It's slow. So this is why we do this and just keep an eye on it over time. So we are catching the trend. We're not obsessing over daily swings because inevitably you will do everything right. You will have had a perfect day of eating. You will have exercised. You'll have gotten a great night's sleep, and that's the morning that your— the scale goes up. Now, another thing that can happen here, I think of one client that came into me, Vicki, who wanted to lose 10 pounds. And I remember looking at her going, this woman does not need to lose 10 pounds. Her BMI was like 19, so she was already on the lower end of weight for her height. So she was about 25% body fat, which for her body type— she was much more of a thinner body type— you would have thought she would have body fat more of around, say, 20%, 22%, because she was working out regularly. But she wasn't Doing resistance training. She wasn't challenging her muscles, and she wasn't eating near enough protein. So we flipped that script. And over the course of the year, remember, Vicky wanted to lose 10 pounds. She did. She went down from 25% body fat to 18% body fat. That is amazing. She dropped 2 inches in her waist. I'll tell you why that's important in a moment. And she dropped 2 clothing sizes. And she didn't lose a pound on the scale. Now, thankfully, I was using a bioimpedance scale. I was using a tape measure. I was not focused on the weight. I was focused on what the weight was made up of, and I could clearly show her that she lost 10 pounds of fat and put on, which is incredible, 10 pounds of muscle over the year. And this is why we must look beyond weight to what that weight's made up of and make sure we're tracking. But the reverse of this is also true. You can catch things if they're not changing well. And I'll give you a story now because the next thing that I want you to do is do a DEXA once a year. Now, a DEXA is a dual x-ray absorptiometry is what it's called. And it's where you lie down on a machine and it is going to put this scanner over you, and it is going to be able to look inside and tell you what's going on with your bones and your fat mass and your fat-free mass. So it will clearly tell you where your fat mass is around your viscera. So you'll be able to really give you a good visceral adipose tissue picture. It will also tell you how you're doing with your bone mineral density. It'll give you a T-score and a Z-score, and it will give you a prediction on your skeletal muscle mass. This is important because my husband Tim basically has weighed the same weight Most of his adult life. However, when we went and did a DEXA, we discovered that his body fat— now this is someone who's always been athletic— his body fat was 25%, where you would expect an athletic male to be somewhere in the 10 to 15%. So this was, was high for him. And you couldn't really tell by looking at him. And he looked a little soft without a shirt on. Don't tell him I told you. Once he got that information, it kind of gave him the kick in the pants he needed. I wasn't going to say anything, but the DEXA did the talking. And so with that, he started on testosterone. Therapy. He kicked up his resistance training, kicked up his protein, and over the course of a year— this is, this is, hey, results may vary— this is incredible. He dropped 27 pounds of fat and put on 24 pounds of muscle. This is unusual. A lot of that I would credit to adding in the testosterone for that. But anyway, it did happen. It was amazing. So a DEXA I love to have once a year because I can't tell what's going on with your bones. You will see these machines making predictions about bones they can't see. So So that's where the DEXA really comes into handy is to use it for that. Now, I mentioned visceral adipose tissue. The best thing for that at home actually is a tape measure, but I have a very specific tape measure I like. Now, the PATH scale comes with a Bluetooth tape measure too, which is really cool because this thing then will also be a way for you to track. But for tape, for doing the tape measure, I only want you to do this once a week. You do not need to do this every day. That would be silly. But once a week, I want you to measure your waist and your hip. And here's why. You're doing your waist right Your hips, you do it around your widest part. So you bring your feet together and then you do your hips around your widest part, your waist right around your belly button, the narrow part, and make sure they are both level. And the cool thing about these types of tape measures— I'm holding up this Bluetooth one. This is a Renpho Bluetooth tape measure. The Pascal comes with a Bluetooth tape measure— is it also has this little click in it so that you can't cheat it because you stick it into this hole, let it click, and then it will adjust itself to be at the right place, not pulling too tight. Right. And then you relax into it so you're not faking your waist or your hip measurement. Here's why these measurements matter. Your waist measurement is the best proxy you have for that visceral adipose tissue. I always like to say, if you're losing your weight but not losing your waist, you're making yourself worse, not better. This is a great way to see that, oh, I am losing some of that visceral adipose tissue because my waist is going down. Basically, you want your waist to be half the inches of your height. So you're half of your height or less is what your waist should be. And then when you compare your waist to your hips, for a woman, 0.8 or below, really 0.7 is better. And for a man, less than 1, really 0.9 or less is better. So that's where you want your hip and waist ratio to be. And that's why these are so important for you to test, because it's a great way for you at home to ensure that you're making a difference. I've literally seen clients over the years, and this is when I first started to realize the role of hormones shifting to visceral adipose tissue or insulin resistance. I had a client who'd gone through menopause, was not on hormones, As we know, estrogen when it goes down can cause visceral adipose tissue gain. Some of it's because cortisol is going up. Some of it's becoming because you're becoming more insulin resistant, and you can get what's called my mom called the shifting sands. Basically, the fat in your butt seems to jump into your gut. What I remember with this one client was that she was losing fat in her arms and legs, but nothing around that waist. It was like she was a potato on stilts. Best way to describe it, and she. You couldn't really pinch an inch because it was all that deep internal fat. That is super dangerous. So this is a way to look at that. And here's one thing I'll give you as a little pearl. If you are struggling to lose visceral adipose tissue— now I've got other videos about this, look for my videos that talk about how to drop belly fat and also specifically how to look at how to do high-intensity interval training. That's a very good way to hit your visceral adipose tissue. So is cold plunging, by the way. But the other things to always look at there are to look at cortisol and to look at insulin, because those two— having issues with either of those, insulin resistance or chronically elevated cortisol— can lay down more of that visceral adipose tissue. All right, so we talked about the bioimpedance scale because it's not what you weigh, it's what that weight's made up of. We've talked about doing the DEXA so we can get the better picture that will correlate at home with the bioimpedance scale. I always like to do the DEXA, you know, I'll get up in the morning, do my bioimpedance, go do my DEXA, and then I see how close they are. Then we're going to use the tape measure to really look at that visceral adipose tissue trend. But there's one other piece. And I already mentioned that when you're looking at fat-free mass, they're going to do an equation to give you skeletal muscle mass. And you've probably heard about this in context to the GLP-1s, that when you're on a GLP-1, you can lose 40% of your muscle. Actually, it's 40% of your fat-free mass. That's different. You don't want to lose skeletal muscle. You want to do everything possible to protect it, and you really actually want to pack on as much as possible, which is not easy. If you've been doing resistance training for quite a while, you might be lucky to put on a half pound of muscle a month. So it's hard to put on, it's easy to lose. We don't want to lose it. Doing resistance training and eating optimal protein and managing how much caloric restriction you do can help you hold on to that or even build it as you're losing fat. But there's another piece to this because Because as you're losing weight, you will lose some fat-free mass that you should lose. Your liver might be fatty and you might lose some of that. Some of your organs might be a little bit distended. You might have more blood flow to those areas. You might have fat inside your muscles. So some of that stuff will look like it's fat-free mass as you lose it. And so some of the fat-free mass loss is actually good. It's just hard to tell. The only real way to tell is through a DEXA, but— And actually the only really The only way to tell that fat and the muscle is to do something like an MRI. So we really can't guess it. So here's what you have to do instead. You need to know the quality of your muscle, right? Because if you're losing weight and you're losing more body fat than fat-free mass, but you do lose some fat-free mass, but you get stronger as you're going, you got better, right? Because it's the quality of the muscle. So you might have lost some fat inside the muscle. You might have lost a little fat around your liver. You might have lost some of those things, and that's great. We want that gone. In fact, you want your visceral adipose tissue, by the way, to be as low, as close to zero as possible. But how can you monitor your muscle quality? Well, one obvious way is just to see how you're doing on working out. If you're able to do squats with more weight, if you're able to do a heavier leg press, if you're able to do more pushups, your muscle got stronger, your muscle quality improved. But there's also a very clear objective test that you can do once a month. And again, this is one of those things that's super inexpensive. I am holding up— ta-da!— the handgrip dynamometer. We used to use these in grad school and they were a bunch of money back then, and the professional-grade ones still are. They're like $500. You don't need that. I bring these around with me everywhere because they're great party tricks. I mean, they really are. People love to do this. But you could get yourself a digital one, or this one's just a plain old one, $20 to $30. You could probably go all out And spend $100. You don't even need to. $20 to $30. They come with norms to show you what is optimal for your age and sex. And here's why this matters. We know that people who have the lowest grip strength quartile for their age and sex have the highest risk of dying of all-cause mortality. Now, that doesn't mean that if you have low grip strength, you should go use one of those wrist exercisers. Remember those? Or squeeze a tennis ball. No, the reason they're looking at hand grip strength is it's an indicator of your So there's a couple things you're going to do when you do hand grip strength testing. Number one, you do it to each side 3 times, and then you take the highest one. So what you want to see is where am I compared to what's average and what's optimal for my age? Obviously, we don't want to be average. You wouldn't be listening to this if you were a person who wanted to be average. You want to be optimal. So this just means you've got to challenge your muscles overall more, right? And I have lots of YouTube videos on how to do that, especially if you're just starting out. Use my 2x2x2 foundational training. So that's the first thing, is you want to be optimal, right? But there's another couple ways to use this. Number one is that. Number two, I'd love to see you improving too. Like, you know that whole, I'm gonna, you know, I'm, I'm gonna do a downhill slide into home as I age? No, we're getting stronger. And so I wanna see your grip strength improving. I also wanna make sure that your grip strength is within 10% on either side. If you've right hand and left hand a big disparity and it's not due to an injury or something, that can be a sign of early cognitive decline. Please go check that out. Go talk to your friendly neighborhood neurologist. If you notice that your grip strength, you, you're really fatigued, you know, you've been training really hard and you're fatigued. Do a grip strength test. If you notice that your grip strength's down by 10%, you might need to take a couple days off and go get a massage or something. So grip strength can be used for a couple different things, but really what I'm looking here for is I want to ensure that your muscle quality is improving as you're losing body fat and potentially a little bit of fat-free mass that might be the fat-free mass supporting that body fat, right? Which is okay to lose. So it's the biggest challenge we have right now in our world is we don't have a great way To figure all of that out. Now, I'm gonna share a story of Alina. I thought this one was really great, and it's where knowing how strong you are comes into play because this is someone who'd been stuck at 143 pounds forever. And she did a lot of those classes with the little pink dumbbells. This is something I've made fun of for years, I admit, but rightly so. But here's the thing, I'd rather you do that than nothing. But if you're gonna do that, why don't we do something that really makes a difference and challenges your muscles? So she and I were talking, She decided to like increase her protein and start doing some heavier weights because she used to do like the heaviest she could do was, was deadlifts with 20 pounds. Now she does deadlifts with her weight. And what was interesting was she immediately dropped down to like 120— not immediately, but over time dropped down from 143 to 124 and stabilized. Her body fat composition was insane. It went from something like 38% down to— 20. 24%. So she was a big believer, obviously. Then her weight goes up to 126, and she said, the old me would've gone, oh my gosh, freaked out a bit. But she noticed that she was getting stronger. She could deadlift more. Her pushups were stronger. She was doing heavier squats. Guess what she discovered? Her body fat had gone down more. She'd actually put on 2 pounds of muscle. Oh my gosh, what a win. I remember reading an article where Jennifer Aniston was saying, my goal is to pack on as much muscle as possible. I think it was her or Halle Berry. It's like, amen. So that's what she did. Now, she said the old me would've freaked out. The new me was celebrating. And that is why I want you to focus on muscle quality. Now, you'll be able to see it in how you're working out, of course, but this is a great objective thing that you can do once a month to go, look at that, right? So there you go. That is the handgrip dynamometer. Okay, so you're gonna use your bioimpedance scale every day, and you're gonna take the trend every week. Every week you'll do your waist and hip measurement. Once a month, do that hand grip test. And then once a year, you will do your DEXA. And that gives you the information that you need to see so that you are measuring the right things. You're measuring the things that matter because remember, you are not collecting numbers to obsess over, right? You're collecting data so you can make adjustments. Body composition is the metric that matters. That scale is a biometric tool. It's on your side. It's not a mean friend. Now, here's your new rule. You're not going to ask, what do I weigh? You are going to ask, what is my weight made up of? And is it moving in the right direction? But the numbers here aren't report cards. And I don't want you chasing perfection because it doesn't exist. These numbers are feedback. They help you recognize what's working. They help you protect the muscle you need for the future. And they help you make adjustments before months or worse yet years slip on by. So yes, you're going to be getting on that scale every morning, but stop giving the actual number the power to define your health or your success because your weight is only one data point. Your strength, your muscle, your muscle quality, your bone, your metabolic health, those are the real story. And now you know how to track them. If this changed the way you think about the scale, share this video with a who needs to hear it. And tell me in the comments which of these 4 markers that you haven't been doing that you will promise to start tracking right now.