8 minute read

Are you trying to lose weight, or embarking on a body transformation journey?

Here are a few examples of why monitoring progress with more than just scale weight is key, especially when you’re weight training.

When it comes to body composition it’s important to note the difference between the density and appearance of fat and muscle. 1kg of fat is soft, lumpy and sits right under the skin, and it takes up around three times the space on the body as 1kg of muscle, which is tightly packed and close to the bone.

My clients use various measurements for progress tracking – scale weight, measurements of the waist, belly, hips and thighs, and they take progress photos.

Additionally, when your goal is to build muscle and ‘tone up’, your scale weight is irrelevant. You’re going for a look, and numbers don’t matter. Most often, visual changes are more significant than scale weight and when one compares these photos, they see the progress is much more dramatic than their check-in form states.

Proof That Scale Weight Does Not Matter When it Comes to Measuring Body Transformation

Listed below are some of my clients’ results over the past 8 weeks – you can see that the girth measurements (measured in ‘cms’) are pretty amazing, but the ‘weight loss’ does not look significant on the scales. You can also see that one client has actually ‘gained’ weight.

• 2.2kg lost > 20cm down
• 4.5kg lost > 34cm down
• 1.8kg lost > 20cm down
• 4.5kg lost > 34cm down
• 4.1kg lost > 35cm down
• 2.5kg lost > 19cm down
• 3.1kg lost > 22cm down
• 700gms gained > 15cm down
• 2kg lost > 14.5cm down
• 4kg lost > 23.5cm down

Crazy, right?

The truth is, although we are sold the ‘eat less, move more’ weight loss dogma, we have moved pretty far past that in the coaching space.

Modern body transformation is about eating as much food as you can, whilst building as much muscle as you can.

It’s not about shrinking yourself. It’s about building yourself UP; physically, and metabolically. You are also focussed on retaining muscle as you lose fat, which is the point to body transformation in general.

If you focus on just losing weight, it’s likely you’ll lose a lot of muscle, which is not good for long term wellbeing either.

So in summary, unless you’re overweight (in which case your priority is losing body fat whilst preserving muscle to begin with), it’s likely that your bodyweight will fluctuate constantly throughout a body transformation process. When it does, it can seriously mess with your head, but I hope this article helps you see how that is totally normal, and in fact, a desirable aspect of the body transformation process.

Jen X