Scales – friend or foe? Both maybe …
Are you worried about your scale weight? Do you obsess over it even? To the point of getting depressed if it’s even a little bit up from yesterday?
You’re not alone, and there is a cure.
The first thing to realize is that bodyweight overall fluctuates enormously from one day to the next, due to retained water, lack of bowel movement, or the opposite of these two things. For us women, there’s a natural jump up of the scale weight once a month – water retention coupled with that crazy chocolate craving!
The second thing you should consider, is not so much your actual scale weight, total body weight, but your body composition. What is that weight made up of? You feel you are fatter than your best friend and you know you are heavier, but is this really true?
I once had two girls come to my gym asking me to check their bodyfat percentage. Not with these electronic scales or hand-held things, I use calipers. One of the girls was a skinny-looking little thing, coming in very confident and certain that she was lean. The other was rounder-looking and obviously just doing this because her friend was, she was more apprehensive and nervous about the outcome. Who wants to get it confirmed that they “are fat”?
The funny thing was that the rounder girl left my gym smiling from ear to ear and her thin-looking friend looked like she’d been kicked to the curb!
It turned out that the skinny-looking girl carried more bodyfat than her round-looking friend.
Why care if you are “round” if this is due to natural, womanly curves? Who wants to look skinny, if this is just an illusion and they carry hidden fat around their vital organs – yes, including the heart! This won’t show necessarily, but it’s just as dangerous as if it did show.
The thing to do, is a mental reprogramming of your brain, your mind set, the way you look at your self and your body, what you really want, why you want it. Soul searching, but on a different level than usual. Is this easy? Heck no! Try it by yourself, and you may never get to the bottom of it, or get the optimal solution. Or you do it in 48 weeks with the M-Power Series (http://tinyurl.com/M-Power-Series ).
48 weeks? Almost a year? Yikes!! Not “yikes” J this is one of the best gifts you can give yourself. You’ll be your own “shrink” and probably a much better one than those who put you on their couch too, because you care about you and you know you, they want your money (overall and generally speaking, I guess some do care).
One “lesson” or session a week, but unlike your shrink (assuming you’d even go to one – I know I’d resist and even refuse!) the audio is available the whole week, as many times as you want to listen to it. You can – and should – go over it a few times to get all the angles, the subtleties, do the exercises – even re-do them, you may give different answers and get different results after having listened to the audio a few times.
Another thing to know about the scales … yes, you do need them, although some “gurus” say throw them out, I don’t really agree. Without the scales, you don’t know what’s going on. The trick is to see it only as a part of a whole.
I completed a 3-week pre-contest-type plan and dropped a lot of “weight” – about a 50/50 mix of water, sh(beep) and fat. This was 3 weeks ago, and since then the scales keep showing a steady increase in numbers.
Now, I could panic, get depressed, jump back on the 3-week plan right away … but I don’t. Why? Because I’ve been doing 7 Minute Muscle (http://tinyurl.com/7MinMuscl) every weekday morning for the past 3 weeks. I know from my calipers, that the bodyfat percentage is not going up at all, the added weight is
- Muscle
- Some water
- Some not-yet-eliminated “matter”
I care more about my body composition than my overall weight. I look at how my clothes fit. I check that waist chain for tightness, I look for visible muscles – not just abs, delts, biceps, triceps, quads, calves … the back is harder to check unless you have access to a 360º mirror, but you can get someone to take a photo (or do a self-shot).
Am I still following Every Other Day Diet (http://tinyurl.com/myEODD) ? You better believe it J frankly, you don’t throw out something that works. Ever since Jon Benson “threw” that e-book out over the Internet in January 2008, I’ve been convinced.
First that it was a great idea – and with 3 different plans to follow there was no problem finding the one that suited me the best – following it I saw the results and was even more convinced it was the best thig I’d ever done. With the 2.0 version SNAPP, there are now 4-5 different Plans, no way not to find a match to anyone’s lifestyle and preferences!
Where most diets and nutrition plans tell you to eliminate all the things you like and enjoy eating, EODD works these into the plan, you can still enjoy … I don’t know, grandma’s brownies, dad’s cheese steak, a pizza from the Italian guy down the street, even a burger from you-know-who! Now, if that’s not a cool nutrition plan, I don’t know what is! Cool, and it works!
So no, I “don’t care” about the scales anymore. Or at least I don’t obsess or get depressed if it goes up. And I know that when I do do the 3-week plan again in July, it’s going to reveal a lot of new, lean muscle! So I may never see 130 lbs (59 kilos) on the scales, so what? 14-15% bodyfat is a much more gratifying goal, and healthier!
Check your goals, check your tools and “maps” for getting there, set out to conquer and don’t let anyone deter or stop you.
To your success!