Ditch Your Scale Obsession
For Good!
Your Bathroom Scale is From the Devil!
I'm totally serious! I think your bathroom scale is a torture device and I want to help you end your obsession with it. In fact I want us to end our obsession with weight all together! I know that sounds like a tall order but I promise it's possible! Imagine a life where you you don't care what the number is, where you never have to get upset or angry, or frustrated, or discouraged by that stupid number every day. Imagine how much mental energy it would free up? I can tell you, as someone who has overcome the battle with the scale, it's so freeing! I know, this is freaking you out a little, that should be the first sign that you need an intervention. In this episode I'm going to give you the science that backs this up, the mindset changes required, and what to do instead.
XOXO
Tara
Full transcription available at the bottom of this post
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Show Notes:
COMING IN APRIL!!!! Weight Loss & Wellness Coaching Program!!!!!
Are you liking what you're hearing on this podcast and feeling like it's YOUR time to Break Free? Are you tired of diet after diet only to end up in the same place or worse? Are you ready for real change, and to have a real coach in your corner every step of the way? Then you might be ready for the Weight Loss and Wellness Program! Click the link to check it out, and if you're ready, get signed up. If you still have questions, schedule a free coaching call to see if working together is right for you!
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Full Transcript:
Why do you actually weigh yourself... I mean, really ask yourself that question, Why do you do it? What are you hoping to see to prove to be... Are you tracking your weight, are you using it as a goal to measure up to how much value and self-worth are you assigning to that number on the scale? Can a bad number ruin your day? Today, I am going to talk about how the scale is not on your side, it's not a reflection of your progress and what you can do instead... Let's get down to it.
Hello friends. Okay, before we start talking about the scale, I have a really big announcement I wanna make, and I'm super, super excited about it. Coming in April is going to be the no nonsense weight loss and wellness coaching program. It's gonna be 12 weeks of live coaching, small group and individual workbooks and tools and all kinds of awesome stuff, everything that you are gonna need for mind and body to move you from where you are to where you want to be. So I want to encourage you to hop to the website, the link is gonna be in the show notes, so wherever you're listening to this, just scroll down and look for the show notes for the coaching link and check out the program. I'm super, super excited. It's really comprehensive. We're gonna talk about everything from what you put in your mind, what you put in on your body, how your body works, what you should eat, how you...
When you should eat, all of the things that are gonna help you with your health on every single level, and really, really excited about this, I've poured everything that I know into this thing, and I really want you to be a part of it, so... Hop on over to the website, check out that program, there's gonna be a lot more things coming up happening around that, so be on the look out, and if you have not signed up for the newsletter yet, make sure you do that because all of that information will be delivered right to your email inbox that you have it all, easy access. Okay, so I'm so excited. So if you are liking this podcast, you're thinking, Yeah, I'm ready to go like, Yeah, I wanna know more about really how to make this lasting change... Check it out, I'm so excited to bring this to you. Okay, I seriously don't think I'm being dramatic when I titled this podcast that your scale is from the Devil, I really do believe it. I think it was sent from hell to torment you. And we are so obsessed with it that it is just not healthy in any way.
Now, I am coming to you as someone who has overcome the scale obsession, and so I want you to know that I have been where you are, and you can be where I am, that place where I don't give a shit how much I weigh, I literally don't care, I don't own a scale. I haven't weighed myself for years, I have a guess of how much I probably weigh I could be off by as much as 20 pounds, I have no idea, because I legitimately don't care, and that's the place that I want you to get where you just literally don't care how much you weigh. I promise you, it's possible, but what I see most of the time is women that I know women that I work with are agonizing over this number on the scale, they are just addicted to what that number says, honestly, to the point where we could be like borderline Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, about getting on the scale and looking at the number, you feel like you have to do it, you get obsessed with what that number is, the number is dictating how you are then operating your day...
If you weigh yourself every day and you get discouraged, I know so many women who are like, I just put on two pounds, I've already cut out sugar, I've cut out carbs, I've cut out fun, I've cut out happiness, and I still gain two bounds. I hear this so often, and I see it on every Facebook message or to a part of a group, and it said, I don't want you to live like this, I don't want you to be so attached to this number, so today, I'm gonna give you science and I'm gonna give you a mindset and I'm gonna bring those two things together, and I'm gonna tell you why what you're doing might not be working on, why it's probably making things worse. And then what do we do about it? What's the solution? So don't worry, stick with me to the end. I'm gonna give you the solution to this scale obsession. Okay, first, let's talk about weight... Truth Bomb right here, weight is not an accurate measure of health, it never has been. It never will be. The number on the scale is not telling you anything about how healthy you are, and what do we really wanna know, do you really care if you at 142 or 143, or do you care if your pants fit and you can walk up the stairs without huffing and puffing.
If we're really talking about the scheme of things, what's actually important here, it's probably not that number, it's what your body is doing it... Those are the things that we need to pay attention to. And we do just such an inaccurate measure, you guys, your weight in the span of one or two days can fluctuate seven pounds, just based on where you are in your menstrual cycle, like has nothing to do what you ate or you being a horrible person because you're putting on weight, it's literally just where you are in your cycle. You can retain water, you can fluctuate seven pounds in two days. Your way also will fluctuate based on things like how much water you drink, how much salt you ate, how much fiber you've eaten, how much sleep you've gotten, how stressed you are, and a million other things that are in no way a reflection of your worth or even an accurate reflection of your progress or your health. Here's another example, if you work out, especially weight training, or if you are new to working out, when you work out, especially those resistance exercises, what you're doing is causing tiny little micro-tears in your muscle, well, what happens to an injury in our body? We create inflammation around that injury 'cause we're trying to bring fluid and blood and minerals and protein so that we can heal that injury right.
Well, those tiny little micro-tares and your muscle... The same thing happens. So if you have a really strenuous workout, you can gain two pounds in just a day of pure water weight that's gone to your muscles to heal those tiny little micro-tears, that's why when you see body builders and they're like, Oh, I got the pump, I got the pump and their muscles actually do look a little bit bigger while their muscle isn't actually bigger, it's because there's more fluid in their muscle because it's healing those tiny little micro-tears, so if you have ever reached out of like, Oh, I'm working out so hard and I gain two pounds. That's why it's a normal, healthy, amazing. Wonderful process in your body. The number should not be the thing that's freaking you out, which you should be excited about, is I just worked out so hard, and Oh my gosh, my muscles are gonna get stronger. It was amazing, right? So these little things that we freak about, this pond here, in this two pounds there, and even this 10 pounds, you can fluctuate 10 pounds in a week and it would be considered totally normal. Did you even know that you could carry about 10 pounds of poop and you're colon right now, like literally 10 pounds. I've read up to 40 pounds. I feel like I can't imagine 40 pounds.
I can not even believe that that's true, but I have read 40 pounds, tampons was a little more like, Yeah, probably a normal person has 10 pounds of pop, 10 pounds a poop in your body, if you pop that 10 pounds out, just lost 10 pounds in a week, big freaking what? You're not healthier, you didn't change anything really physiologically in your body, you didn't lose fat, you just lost 10 pounds of pop... Congratulations. If that makes you happy. Is that a scale win for you? I just wanna put these things in perspective, this is what we're getting so hung up on, and it literally, you lost three pounds this week, sweet, it might have just been poop, we've got to bring this back down to reality for ourselves, your weight to the number on the scale is not a measure of your health period, end of story. Okay, we clear. Okay, so you might be asking, Well, what is a measurement of my health then maybe I should measure my body that maybe that's a better measure of my health... Well.
Yeah, it is, it is a better measure of your health, but it's still only giving you part of the picture, so when you weigh yourself... What do you really want to know? What you wanna know is not so much that, Oh, I weigh 141 and now I weigh 140. That doesn't really tell you anything. What you really wanna know is, Have I lost fat? Right, I don't care if I'm losing this same five pounds of water weight over and over again, gaining, losing, gaining, losing the same five pounds, it's not fat that I'm gaining and losing and gaining and losing, it's water weight that I'm gaining and losing some...
Who cares? What I really wanna know is, am I losing fat? That's what I really wanna lose. So let's get a body fat scale so I can meter it... Well, not so fast, sister, body fat scales, especially the ones that you have in your house are super inaccurate. So here's what they do. The ones that you probably have in your house, it's got the little foot pads on your scale, you stand up on it, so what it's doing is sending an electrical current through your body, up one leg through your body, and then down your other leg back to the machine, and then what it's measuring is resistance, so your body is mostly made of water, and the more body fat you have, the more resistance there is, so fat has more resistance than muscle, and so then it takes that information along with the other data you've inputted, like your height, your weight, your age, your gender, it takes that information and calculate a body fat percentage for you, but there's a lot of things that affect the results of this body fat percentage, there's tons of variables that just aren't taken into consideration by this little body fat scale, you have in your house.
So how hydrated you are? When was the last time you ate? When it was the last time you exercise, exercise, are your feet dirty or Callahan can be the electrical signal, there are lots of things that are happening in your body that are not being measured by this little electrical signal going through it. And also not all body fat scales are the same, some are definitely better and a little more accurate than others, in fact, in a study published in a journal called obesity facts in 2008, scales with only foot electrodes, so what you have in your house underestimated body fat consistently in people with lots of body fat and overestimated and body fat consistently in people with less body fat, so even the manuals that come with these scales, we'll say things like, it's less accurate for elderly people, it's less accurate for highly trained athletes or children or people with osteoporosis because of bone density, lots of different reasons for this measurement to be really inaccurate, in fact, consumer reports, do you know the magazine that takes all the different gadgets and compares and reviews them and tells you what's the best... Consumer reports doesn't even test body fat scales anymore because they're so inaccurate and so useless, that consumer reports was basically just like, they all suck. So whatever, it doesn't matter what you get 'cause it's gonna be wrong, so your home body fat measurement, if that's what you are using to track progress or to understand what's happening in your body, I'm telling you right now, it's not giving you reliable information, period, end of story, it's just not.
Okay, so are there more accurate ways then to measure my body fat? Well, yeah, there are, but you gotta pay for it and you gotta find a professional to do it. So if body fat is something that you are concerned about, for whatever reason, we're gonna talk about that and has that gap, but if you really wanna know... And if you really wanna track again, this is not something you need to do weekly or even monthly, I would say maybe every 90 days, quarterly, even just twice or even once a year, just like a check-in like, Oh, hey, what's up? How was my body? Do it. Oh, I'm up 1%. No big deal. Who gives a crap? Oh. I'm up 23%, that could be a problem. Right. Okay, so what are some more accurate ways to measure body fat, these ways are all within about 5% accuracy
but again, if you... If worst, you're just a normal person, that maybe isn't such a big deal, but I don't want it to give you the wrong idea, I say in February, you went in and your body fat was 25% and it's got a margin of error of 5%, the next time you go in, you're 30%. You might not actually be at 30%, you might still be at 25, who really knows... So again, don't take these numbers that you're getting from body fat test as the gospel truth, is it as one single metric in a plethora of other metrics that are showing you what's happening in your body, okay, what are these other body fat test you could do...
One's just the good old calibers that your trainer at the gym does, you're gonna take... Those things are gonna pinch your fast, so you definitely need someone who knows what they're doing and is trained to use them. These are actually kind of helpful, just in the sense that they measure individual places on your body, so you can track my right thigh versus my right side now versus my right... or your abdominal fat to be able to test and really track just what's happening in that one area, that's actually pretty useful information. Another option is the DEXA. So the Dexa uses x-ray technology, it's kind of cool, it measures bone density and muscle and fat mass, but again, it's a full body x-ray, and there is literally no time where I am going to recommend to you just for fun, is to get a full body x-ray, just don't do it. If medically, there is a reason for you to get a DEXA test X-ray, and that is what your doctor is recommending because they wanna see something... Okay, great. But just for fun, I'm not gonna ever tell you to go get a full body x-ray because that's just that's coming with too much to me downside and not enough upside, it is fairly accurate, but again, not worth it to me, another option is an in-body scan, so it's using that same electrical impulse, that same bio-impedance. As your scale at home, just a little up leveled, a little more accurate, but still, you're still within that 5% in accuracy range, so take it or leave it. Right. And then another option.
So the DEXA and anybody, you can actually just look them up if you really wanna do it, you can look them up places like gyms and health food stores and universities, they usually have them, sometimes doctor's, due to your doctor office might have it, the other option is the hydrostatic, so that's where they put you in the water, they submerge you... You push all the air out of your lungs. That's probably one of the most accurate, but again, not super convenient, mostly you only could access that at a university, and I don't know if they just do that for anyone, you might have to be part of a study or something to even get that... That wasn't about a 2% accuracy range, so better. But again, why... Who cares? Which leads me to the question, Do you even really need to measure body fat, like honestly, why do you need to know your exact body fat percentage, what guidance... How does that change anything for you? If you know that you're a 36% body fat versus 35% body fat, really, What does that change for you? Unless you are training for an MMA fight or you're part of some kind of scientific study, you really don't need to know, and there's really no accepted standard for ideal body fat in women, in middle-aged women, the healthy range, and I say that with air quotes, the generally accepted, healthy range is 23 to 33% body fat, so if that means that I have 34% body fat, I all of a sudden not healthy, no.
What if I have 35? Yeah, it could still be super healthy, so again, it's just not that great of a tool to determine or predict health, there's a lot better ways that we could do this, especially because overall fat isn't as important as where your fat is... You've probably heard that that abdominal fat is going to be the biggest predictor of health outcomes, and we're gonna talk about that in just a second, but
Knowing more about abdominal fat, that overall, that is gonna be more helpful to you in determining your overall health or predicting your overall health. Okay, so the scale suck some body fat measurement, kind of sucks. We'll have about BMI, because my doctor, when I go in there, he talks about my BMI, so I need to know that right
Now, let's just talk about BMI for a... Like the body mass index is a severely flawed mathematical formula based on a ratio between your height and your weight, it was developed 20 years ago by a mathematician, not a physician. Its basis is a mathematical formula, and it's not based on actual humans, it's just based on mathematical formulas. The BMI results are skewed towards assuming that all people have low muscle and high fat mass, that's how they developed their ratios and their formulas, assuming that everyone that they measured BMI had low muscle and high fat, So mathematically, they would conclude that the most muscular and fit among us whose weight is relatively high versus their height are actually overweight and obese, and when I go get my BMI told to me by my doctor, that's what they tell me, that... Don't forget the fact that I could probably put you doctor on a squat rack and squat you... Right. That doesn't matter because you're telling me that I am overweight, borderline obese. No, not true, because it's a super flawed mathematical formula, it's total nonsense, honestly, to suggest that the difference between ideal weight, overweight and obese, have these distinct little boundaries that are decimal points away from each other.
It's asinine. I can't believe honestly that doctors even use BMI at all, that anyone would use BMI, so if you read about BMI, you will find that some people actually think that it's an insurance scam, so that healthy people that have a high BMI have to pay more in premiums, but we'll never have to be paid out by the insurance company because they're healthy, so it keeps insurance from the time...
Okay, I don't know, that's a little conspiracy theory ish, but it makes sense it... Insurance companies do to make money, if I can charge high premiums of healthy people by calling those healthy people OBS, well, that I'm never gonna have to pay out 'cause they're not gonna get it 'cause they're not actually obese, then I get to make money as an insurance company, I don't know, I'm not saying that that's true. I'm just also not saying that it's not true, something for you to look into or plunder. Okay.
So where have we left off, your scale way is a terrible measure of your health, it's not a predictor of your health, and it's basically useless information that we get totally obsessed about for absolutely no viable scientific reason. Your body fat is slightly more informative, but getting accurate measures of your body fat are really tough and again, not super useful in determining or predicting your overall health, and BMI is absolutely useless and stupid and should never be spoken of again. And yes, I'm serious. You can tell your doctor... I said that. Okay, so what should we do instead? How do I track progress? What are better predictors of health. Okay, let's talk about weighing yourself, we're gonna go back to that. So many of you are hopping on the scale every day or even every other day, I always tell my clients, I don't want you on a scale more than once a month, that is your absolute max amount that you are allowed to weigh yourself and... Yes, I said aloud, you are not allowed to weigh yourself more than once a month now, when you weigh yourself, you are going to make sure that each time you do it one time a month is on the same day of your cycle. And at the same time of day, so get up in the morning, go to the bathroom, get naked, stand on the scale.
You have to pick the day, like if I was gonna wait myself, I would pick day 10 probably in my cycle because that's like the least a bloated day, right? So pick the day of your cycles and then every single month you're gonna do a day ten of your cycle, and that's the only day you get to weigh yourself, and then you can track yourself month to month, we are not tracking day-to-day, and we are not tracking week-to week, that is entirely inaccurate information. Okay, so if you must weigh yourself once a month, the same time of day... Same day of your cycle. Every single month. Got it. If you can just put the scale away, so you're not... When it's not that day, put it away, put it in the closet, put it in a covered... You don't wanna look at it, you don't need it out, you're not weighing yourself. It doesn't matter. No temptations. Okay.
If you are measuring, if you're doing body fat on that scale, same process... Okay, same for both. And then when it's not that day, put it away, I should tag line that it's not your way and you put it away, or you could just never weigh yourself again, literally you could... You won't die. In fact, it's so freeing and wonderful and amazing, you will never look back and you'll be like, Why was I so obsessed? I do not give a shit. I can tell you personally, I do not give a shit how much I weigh and it is the most beautiful feeling... You know what I do care about, I care about what my body can do, I care about... Can I still fit in my jeans? I care about, can I pick up my kids? Can I still do all the activities I wanna do? Can I get up the stairs without huffing and puffing, I care about what my body is capable of, I do not care how much I weigh, that's Where I want you to get some freedom.
Okay, so we've talked about weighing yourself only once a month and the body fat, if that's what you're gonna do on your body fat scale at home, other really useful ways to track and measure, like if you're on a weight loss journey and you wanna track and measure your progress, take pictures. That's the best way, just take a dang picture or take out your tape measure and take actual measurements of your body parts, your thighs, your, your shoulders, you're everything, and record it, and then do that once a month if you must, but I would actually prefer once every three months, give yourself every like 90 days quarterly, just take out that tape measure, see where you're at, because what we try to do so often is if I weigh myself today and I went up a pound, now I need to... I know that I need to eat less today, so that I lose that pound by tomorrow, that's physiologically not how your body works when you work in much longer time as band than that, if I wanna make a lasting change, I have to think long-term. So weighing myself every day or measuring myself every week, I just honestly don't believe in it, I believe in checking in monthly at the most, but quarterly better.
So take your pictures, take your measurements, track them, and use those instead of scale away or body fat scale. Okay, sound good. Especially, I want you to do that waste measurement, so you could have a normal weight, a normal BMI, but have a waste measurement that is shown to be a predictor of heart disease and death, so this has been barred out in tons of studies. One of the largest and longest studies called the Nurses Health Study, followed women something like 40000 women for 16 years, and found that normal weight women with a waste of 35 inches or higher have three times the risk of death from heart disease compared to normal weight women whose waste were smaller than 35 inches, so scientifically speaking, this is a very good predictor of future health, your waste measurements, so that if you're gonna keep track of something... That's what I would keep track of. If you really want those numbers to mean something to your overall health, I would keep track of waste measurement, other numbers that you could keep track of if you really wanna track to measure health and predict health for yourself, cholesterol, blood pressure, blood glucose, hormones...
These are all numbers that actually are going to tell you what's happening in your body weight, body fat percentage, especially as measured on your scale at home or BMI, none of those measurements are going to give you any real information about your health or predicting your health, what you really wanna pay attention to is your waste, your measurements, your cholesterol, blood pressure, blood glucose, hormones, all of those numbers are the ones that count. So if you wanna track, track that.
So again, numbers in a formula based on numbers, from inaccurate scales and fat measurements are largely useless in determining what really matters to your health and overall functioning, I promise it is so freeing when you stop focusing on the bullshit numbers that don't matter, and start focusing on the numbers that actually do matter, that is how you make progress. That is how you move forward in your health, being obsessed about a number on a scale is going to keep you stuck. Period, how do I know that? 'cause you're stuck right now. That's why you're listening to this, because that obsession with a number is keeping you stuck, get rid of it, you don't need it, it has no bearing on your worth, it has no bearing on your health, it has no bearing on your progress, it has no bearing on anything that has anything to do with you and your health, who you are and what you're about, what does matter is what's actually happening in your body and what's actually happening in your head and skill cannot measure that, a body fat percentage. Cannot measure that. A BMI chart cannot measure that. Alright, friends, I hope I was super helpful and I hope I did my job of convincing, you gotta get rid of the devil scale.
If this information has been useful to you, please share this podcast, take a screen shot, post it up on your Instagram stories and tag me. And also, I wanna make sure that you head over to the website. I will link it in the show notes. I have a coaching program that is opening up in April, and I want to work with you, so if you like the ideas that you're hearing here, You want more of that, you want some individual time, you want some small group time, I want to help you go to the next level in your mind, in your body and your health and your journey, I wanna do that with you, so check out the coaching program. It's opening in April. I'm very excited to bring this to you. It's very comprehensive. Hopefully it's not too much, hopefully, it's not a fire hose, but there's just so much that I wanna teach you and help you learn in this journey, so check that out, until then I will see you hopefully over in the circle or open our community. And I will talk to you next time. Be well, my friends.