Lose the obsession with pounds. Focusing too heavily on the numbers can be a big mistake. Here's why.
by Alexa Joy Sherman
Jen Singer, 38, has always been athletic. She was a soccer player most of her life and, more recently, played tennis at least once a week as a way to stay fit and have fun. In March, 2002, she began strength training 2-3 days a week. After two months of exercising with free weights, the Kinnelon, N.J., writer had dropped from 150 to 145 pounds.
Over the course of the next 18 months, as Singer's regimen continued, her weight didn't budge—but she found that she could no longer fit into her size 10 clothes, and she actually dropped to a size 6. Furthermore, she experienced a noticeable increase in her energy and a decrease in her stress levels.
Plus, she says, "I looked great with the additional muscle tone and was in the best shape of my life—even better than when I played college soccer."
But her weight: stubbornly consistent. Not that Singer cared.
The moral of her story? The scale isn't always the best way to assess your workout progress.
Why the Scale Lies
"There's so much fluctuation in body weight due to fluid that you lose or gain, and that can represent two, three, sometimes four pounds," notes Harry DuVal, Ph.D., associate professor of exercise science and director of the fitness center at the University of Georgia in Athens. "You get all excited, thinking, 'Look what I lost!' and then you go and replenish your fluids and, bingo, you're right back up to where you were—if not higher—so you get discouraged."
The scale can also be inaccurate, particularly if you're strength training, because of the change in your muscle mass.
Of course, you’ve probably heard a million times that muscle weighs more than fat - but just how much does that affect the number on the scale? "If you're doing a vigorous form of resistance training at any age, you can gain lean muscle mass," says DuVal. "And it takes very little gain in muscle mass to equate to pounds gained. You can still be losing significant body fat, but if you're gaining just a little bit of lean muscle mass, it doesn't show up as a loss on the scale."
In fact, say DuVal, if you're doing an intense iron-pumping program 2-3 times a week, it could show up as a gain.
What About Body-Fat Testing?
You’ve probably heard that body-fat testing is a better way to assess your progress, but that’s not entirely true, either. While keeping track of your body-fat percentage can be more effective than the scale when trying to gauge the changes in your body as you exercise, DuVal notes that it's a mistake to focus too heavily on those numbers as well—largely because body-fat tests tend to give inaccurate readings. "Even when a tester is well trained and exacting, there could be a lot of error," he says. "Normally, the skin-fold calipers are probably within 5 percent, but if the tester is sloppy, it can be off as much as 10 percent.”
Therefore, DuVal stresses that it's not the exact percentage you should focus on so much as the change you see as you progress: "It doesn’t matter if you have 35 or 40 percent body fat.
The real thing we want to see is a decrease in that percentage. If possible, have the tester run the same test on you twice, and see if they get the same results the second time, suggests DuVal. "Then, you've got reliability," he explains. "If you go back after a month or two, whether it's down from 40 to 35 or from 35 to 30—what's the difference? You've lost 5 percent."
Tape Measures Aren't Great Either
You’d think that a more accurate way to assess your progress would be by taking your measurements with a tape measure—waist, hips, chest and so on. But, again, DuVal notes it's tough to get accurate numbers. "There's variation in how tight you pull the measuring tape," explains DuVal. "You have to be extremely skilled to get accurate body measurements with circumference and diameter and so forth."
So What Should You Do?
Ultimately, paying attention to how your clothes fit and how you feel are your best bets for tracking your progress and, more important, staying motivated. "If your clothes are a little looser, you've got to tighten your belt a little bit, that means a lot," says DuVal. "Even if the scale doesn’t indicate any change, you’re obviously changing your body composition."
Just keep in mind that you shouldn't only focus on how one particular article of clothing fits. "You don’t know where you’re going to lose the weight," explains DuVal. "People know where they want to lose it, but invariably they lose it in a different area. So, I ask them, 'Generally, are your clothes looser?'"
Beyond how your clothes fit, you also need to tap into why you're exercising in the first place. Are you doing it to hit some magic number, or for improved health, a better quality of life? "It's important to notice how you feel about yourself," says DuVal. "Are you more confident, do you have more energy?"
DuVal suggests writing down these details when you first begin your exercise program (or flash back and try to remember how you felt if you've been training for a while), and rate those feelings on a scale—perhaps 1 being that you feel awful and 10 that you feel incredible. "Then, as you go through your exercise program, continue to rate how you feel, and hopefully you’ll find you feel a lot better about yourself, and you have a lot more energy as time goes on," says DuVal.
After a while, chances are you'll forget how bad you felt before you started exercising. Then you can look at your ratings, see how far you've come and know that if you keep exercising, you’ll maintain or even continue to improve how you feel. (And if you don’t exercise, you’ll fall back down again.)
Whatever you do, don't let the scale be the ultimate gauge of your progress and your mood.
Alexa Joy Sherman is a freelance writer in Los Angeles, Calif.
