Why Is The Scale Not Moving?!?!
The scale is not moving.
WHAT…THE…ABSOLUTE…FUCK?!?!
After weeks of turning down normal people food for shit like vegetables and conquering your social anxiety by going to the gym and surrounding yourself with people, the scale isn’t moving at the pace that matches your Herculean efforts.1Yuck to vegetables and double yuck to people! Fuck, it’s even creeping upwards!
WHAT THE EVERLOVING HELL IS GOIN’ ON HERE?!?!
Well, are you certain that you’re actually in a caloric deficit, either by taking in less calories, burning more than you take in, or a combination of both? I mean, are you absolutely positively sure? So sure you’d bet your life on it?
Oh, you are?!
Hmmmmm…
Okay, did you start your diet by severely restricting calories and exercising balls-to-the-wall straight out the gate?
Nah, not you?
Then before you quit on the grounds that you’re one of thooooose people who just can’t lose weight, consider for a second that
(A) you don’t know the difference between weight loss and fat loss
(B) the scale isn’t the barometer of the one of those two that matter.
Shall I explain?
…
Don’t you dare shake your head no at me!
After weeks of deprivation, I know that fried donut ice cream sandwich has your name written all over it and you’re looking for any excuse to throw in the towel. Unfortunately for you, the scale not moving is one of the worst reasons to live up to your family’s history of bailing.2Sorry, I know I shouldn’t make light of your father leaving your mother to raise you on her own…but I will because I’m a terrible, terrible person. Don’t worry, he’ll return from going to get cigarettes any day now!
Stop me if this has never happened to you…
You go to meet a lunch date at a swanky restaurant and after waiting at the table by yourself for half an hour, you realize you’ve been stood up. Rather than risk further embarrassment by leaving and giving everyone the impression that you’re doing so because you were waiting on someone who didn’t show because you’re such a loser, you further embarrass yourself by staying as a table of one, with you ordering a heavy pasta dish to eat your emotions. Then when you get home and weigh yourself before bed, you see a number that isn’t close to the number you saw when you woke up.
Seeing that you didn’t stop me, that’s clearly happened to you!
So why did you weigh more later in the day than you did when your neurotic ass weighed yourself in the morning?
Well, we have to consider that body mass, what’s commonly referred to as body weight, is the sum total of your bones, organs, waste, stomach content, fluids, and muscle and fat tissue. Gravity’s effect on all of these things is what your trusty scale measures.
Of the items comprising body weight, the bones and organs are pretty much fixed variables. What isn’t constant are the amounts of undigested food, excrement, and water that you have in your system, all of which vary within any given day and time. With this in mind, we should be able to arrive at why someone who ate a heavy pasta dish for lunch is going to weigh more before bed than upon getting out of it.
…
Oh, you don’t understand?
Well, besides your being full of shit and what’s inside your gut influencing the scale, the carbs and sodium from the pasta and sauce are helping with the retention of more water.3As does creatine and hormones. Thus, you weigh more at night than you did when you had woken up earlier that morning with clear bowels and an empty stomach.4Facepalm!
Taken as a whole, all you have to do to lose weight is starve. Or shit your brains out. Or roll MDMA and sweat balls while dancing to EDM in your finest faux fur hood that matches your spirit animal. Fuck, the scale will reflect weight loss without doing a single one of those activities. But hey, where’s the fun in that by you doing something like just using slightly less salt than usual?!
We lose weight all throughout the day.
Because of that, what you want to lose when you diet or start an exercise program isn’t weight. What you really want to do is lose fat, the other variable in addition to muscle tissue that can change. Fat and muscle, however, don’t change with as much regularity as feces, food, and bodily fluids do, and therein lies the problem for the scale and most people.
It’s to be understood that when pairing exercise — primarily progressive resistance training — with a sound nutrition strategy, fat mass gets burned and replaced by calorie-burning muscle. This process occurs over a period of weeks and months. So if you’ve been at a caloric deficit and exercising for a while but the scale hasn’t moved for a few weigh-ins, you might want to consider that over time some muscle has taken the place of fat. This is of note because a pound of muscle weighs the same as a pound of fat.5 …or feathers, or flesh, or weed, or basically anything that weighs a fucking pound. The scale, however, doesn’t pick up on the difference between fat or muscle and instead reads that your body weight is the same.
Shit, the scale might even read that you weigh more.
Wha…why?
Ummmm, because muscle takes up 4x less space than fat. So if muscle takes up the same volume of space as fat, then you’ll weigh more but be smaller.
Yeah, that’s it!
Science, motherfucker!
Due to the volume of muscle, you may actually gain weight but be smaller. You won’t know this though if you rely on the scale. This is why the scale isn’t the best measure of success. It’s as trustworthy as the motherfucker you’re romantically involved with.6They had to work overtime last night…and you bought that shit?!
So what’s a good gauge?
You mean, besides progress photos, circumference measurements, general well-being, and people willing to be seen in public with you more?
Well, how about those “fuck me” jeans you’ve been hanging on to since college.
Yes, those whore mementos of your youth gone by!
Are they fitting looser each time you put them on? You’re on the right track then, though the scale might be recording little to no change. Keep doing what you’re doing and before you know it, you’ll be back to bar crawling and having your prime choice of random guys to hook up with in no time!
Oh, they’re NOT fitting looser?
Well, are you still writhing around on the floor and wriggling into your jeans to “fit” into them? Will you still have to wear a top that covers the unbuttoned waist that looks like it was let loose after a Thanksgiving blowout? Still have to MacGyver it?7You know, loop an elastic band over the button, through the buttonhole, and then back over the button?
Or can you still not fit into them at all? Like, no matter how much you contort your body to squeeze into them, you can’t even pull off the encased sausage look?
In either case, then you need to stay on track and give what you’re doing more time to work or make adjustments, such as taking in fewer calories by eating less and/or increasing activity to burn more calories.
Yes, it’s as simple as that!
Your bathroom scale isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, just like the scales of justice.
So just like justice for some members of society, stop placing so much faith in it.
Oooooooh, politics were injected into this out of nowhere.
I bet you weren’t expecting that, now were ya?!
Glossary: caloric deficit, calories, diet, exercise, gym, hormones, muscle, nutrition, program
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