What To Do If You Aren't Seeing Scale Changes

I wasn’t seeing scale changes so I said f*** it and gave up

When I was all about weight loss and being skinny, I was obsessed with the scale. I was impatient, didn’t understand that body weight fluctuate every single day and was doing all the wrong things.

I was ‘eating healthy’ and exercising so much, and nothing was happening. The simple method of eat less and move more. Should work, but it wasn’t.

Of course I didn’t see drastic changes straight away so I gave up (and this happened more than once I can tell you). I’d give up, eat everything in sight, stop exercising, feel bad and then eventually try again.

This is what I was doing wrong:

- Obsessively tracking food to the point of terrible restriction. Meant binges often and frequent snack on foods I ‘shouldn’t’ have. So I was eating a lot more than I realised because my diet was unrealistic to begin with. I would be great for a few days and then BAM had a binge. Of course I wasn’t losing weight.

- I was trying to work off any extra food I ate. This doesn’t work. To me, weight loss is all about nutrition. Of course regular exercise is a great tool to help it along and is ultimately what helps change body composition (more muscle definition etc) but all that exercise was just making me tired. Tired made me less happy, crave more, and be less patient.

- Weighing myself only once a week/ weighing myself at all- as I said before weight fluctuates every day. To get your true weight, you need to weight yourself every day in the same setting and then get the average at the end of the week (now if I’d done that back then it would have been even more detrimental because I was not in the right mindset). But also, your body can completely change its composition and still stay the same weight.

Now:

At this point, I weigh more than I did last year, and honestly would feel comfortable being a bit smaller. But do I look like my heaviest, no not at all! Because of my workouts, my body composition has changed, my muscles are more defined, and I am stronger. Muscle and fat weigh the same, but muscle is denser.

I now don’t cut out any food groups. At all. Sweets are a regular occurrence. There are foods I prefer not to eat but that’s just because they make me feel like crap.

I exercise because I actually enjoy it. I love weight training. I love cardio. I love the feeling I get afterwards and progressing each week. I still exercise heaps but now I also know when to stop and rest.

I am also aware that change takes time. Things don’t happen overnight.

Bottom line, if you are focused on the scale and that’s the only way you check progress, STOP. Instead, check how you feel, how your clothes fit, do you feel stronger, do you feel restricted in your food, do you actually enjoy what you’re doing? Only weigh yourself if you can see it as just data.