…It’s NOT All About That Scale!
The question I get the most from my members now that I’m half way through the 21 Day Fat Burn Booster is Did you lose any weight? My answer is It is sooo not about the scale weight!
Everyone has a different body composition. Everyone has a an eBMI (enhanced body mass index) that is unique to their physical make-up. For instance, when I am in my Koko fit zone, my eBMI should be 28.9 or less. When I measure others on the fit check machine (which is NOT a scale and does not measure weight) and they have an eBMI of 27.1, I think Wow! They are probably in their fit zone already! Guess what? When I show them their website, it indicates they are a well above what should be THEIR fit zone. So now I tell people when they go home, log onto their own website that Koko provides them to track their fitness, and they will see a dial and Koko will show them where their fit zone is and plus or minus how close they are to it.
So there’s the skinny on the numbers. So, if it’s not scale weight, then what is it we should be focusing on? Easy – how we look, how we fit into our clothes, and how much energy we have (especially at 3pm). For energy, 3pm is a good indicator. That is my time I want to crawl into my easy-chair, curl up under my blanket, and take a 20 minute nap. I do have to say that eating differently and exercising makes a real difference in how I feel at that time – on weekdays. On weekends I do give in to some “chair time” as a reward, but also because I have a lot of things sitting there waiting to be read.
As far as looks go, when I look in the mirror, all dressed for my day, I think: this is MY unique body type. I eat well and exercise and for my age and metabolism, this is how my body should truly look. I am not 5’7″. I will never be a size 5 or 6. I have muscles and a more athletic type body than a model type. This reflection is me and it’s okay. Koko has taught me to stop chasing that image in a magazine and accept the image in the mirror. Once I stopped obsessing about this roll or that bulge, stood up straight, with shoulders back, I became more confident and better able to focus on all the other points of self-care not related to the scale. I buy food and clothes and eat and dress in a manner that makes me feel good.
Which brings me to the part about how clothes fit. Clothes sizes are a nightmare. A size ten in one store is a twelve in another and so on. I don’t worry about sizes anymore. As long as the piece of clothing fits well, not tight and constricting, I buy it. Once again, it’s not in the numbers. When I exercise and eat well, even the clothes I already have fit better and it has nothing to do with my scale weight. As a matter of fact, my scale weight, which gets checked yearly at the doctor’s and sometimes at my dad’s house (he has a real doctor scale), has not changed much in all my years of exercising, but I have changed. Muscles have been developed in places like my legs, making a size 6 jeans no longer possible, but I look just as good in a size 12 and my scale weight has not changed.
Now you might ask What did change? A lot. And none of it has anything to do with how much weight I lost. Proper diet and exercise lead to the building of lean muscle and loss of fat. A pound is a pound. I don’t care if it’s rocks or feathers, but a pound of rocks is going to take up a lot less room than a pound of feathers. So goes it with muscle and fat. A pound of lean muscle is going to take up a lot less room than a pound of fat on my body. Through the proper diet and exercise, fat is being lost and lean muscle is being built pound per pound and no actual scale weight is being lost, resulting in having more energy (your amount of lean muscle determines the speed of your metabolism, which in turn determines your energy level), how you look and how your clothes feel, regardless of what the scale says.
I have one piece of advice out of all this: Remember – the amount of lean muscle you have determines your destiny. You lose up to 10 pounds of it a decade. Guess what you replace it with? Correct! Ten pounds of fat per decade. By age 70 you need a cane just to hold yourself up. So my advice? Get off the scale and get to the gym. Get a good trainer and get on a program to start building that lean muscle. If you live on Cape Cod get to a Koko FitClub (we have 5 of them right here) and see a FitCoach about your customized program today.
And so, as another day goes by, once again I remember my old adage: If you don’t take care of your body, where will you live? And…I have written.
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