Why Your Scale Isn't The Most Accurate Reflection of Fat Loss

Plus, how to burn visceral belly fat without sacrificing muscle

I feel safe saying 99.44% of people use only the scale to track fat loss, AND they’re using it wrong.

In our arsenal of physique transformation tracking tools (DEXA, measuring tape, mirror, clothes size) the scale is the most vague with the highest margin of error.

Here’s how you use the scale if your goal is dropping body fat and preserving/gaining muscle.

Remember that scale pounds are the TOTAL weight of:

1. muscle,

2. water,

3. blood,

4. bones,

5. organs,

6. tissue,

7. skin,

8. waste, and

9. fat.

Fat is only one of nine things measured in scale weight.

So, when scale weight drops when excess adipose tissue (body fat) loss is your goal that's initially a good sign.

But I’ve had plenty of clients whose scale weight remains constant yet their body shape and strength morphs...

All while losing inches and dropping percentages of body fat -- not scale weight.

Why?

1. Nutrition that fuels for fat loss.

2. Training for muscle hypertrophy. Those gains weigh more than fat.

3. Muscle takes up much less space than fat.

It’s why you can tighten your body while dropping clothing sizes and still have your scale weight rise and body fat percentage drop.

Sometimes after an initial water weight loss, the scale number goes down then stays at a certain number. Yet you keep dropping pant sizes because of muscle gain and fat loss.

How do I know what my fat tissue weighs in pounds?

Let's say a woman (Fannie) weighs 157 lbs and is 40% bodyfat.

To know how much fat she’s carrying in pounds, we must first determine her lean body mass which is everything else in/on her body BUT fat.

It looks like this:

157lbs (body weight) - (157lbs x 40%bodyfat) = Her lean body mass is 94.2lbs.

This means Fannie is carrying 62.8lbs of strictly fat.

If her goal is fat loss, she wants to decrease this number and not the 94.2lbs lean mass number.

If the lean mass number (94.2lbs) drops by more than a couple pounds, it could mean Fannie's muscle wasting from suboptimal protein intake, starvation dieting/poor nutrition habits, age-related muscle loss, chronic endurance/high heart rate cardio, and lack of a muscle growth strategy.

How do I know if I'm losing fat or muscle when I step on the scale?

Let's say Fannie’s New Year resolution is to go from 40% body fat to 20% body fat over time.

If she can't consistently get a quality body fat test, we can determine how much she should weigh on the scale to eventually reach the desired 20% body fat while ensuring she's not also losing a lot of muscle.

We want to preserve that precious muscle at all costs, especially as we age.

So if Fannie's total body weight is 157lbs, and her lean body mass is 94.2lbs, determining her ideal scale weight goal to achieve 20% body fat would be:

94.2lbs lean body mass ÷ (1 - 0.20 bodyfat) = 117.75lbs

Fannie would ideally weigh about 118lbs to hit 20% body fat without wasting too much muscle.

This means she must lose about 39 lbs of FAT tissue if her total body weight -- including fat -- is currently 157lbs.

Make sense?

Why is some fat - especially around the belly - so hard to lose?

Besides visceral belly fat being one of the most dangerous, disease-inflicting types of fat we can carry, it can flat out make you feel awful… even when you believe you're doing everything "right."

To strip fat a couple things need to occur:

Lipolysis: mobilizing fat from their fat cells via lipase, a hormone-sensitive enzyme produced by the pancreas. It ignites the breakdown of fats to fatty acids to be burned for fuel.

Exercise like resistance training helps activate lipase, among other fat burning hormones.

Once mobilized, other cells use that liberated fat for energy, including muscle. Muscle cells are exceptional at burning up free fatty acids.

Hence, more lean muscle mass = easier to burn fat.

The process of lipolysis is set off by certain chemicals called catecholamines.

To keep from getting too technical and making your eyes glaze over, these catecholamines attach to receptors on your fat cells to get them to release the fat.

Think of them as a fat burning S.W.A.T. team trying to break down a door.

Where most alpha receptors live on women (generally)

There are two kinds of receptors on your fat cells:

1. Beta-receptors: respond well to the Fat Burning S.W.A.T. team and

give up the fat to begin lipolysis.

2. Alpha-receptors: Give the finger to the Fat Burning S.W.A.T. team. Very reluctant to give up the fat in their fat cells. Usually not until the cells with the most beta receptors have been emptied.

When you begin cleaning up your nutrition and resistance training, the areas of your body that have fat cells with more beta receptors are where you'll see your initial fat loss progress.

Normally it’s the face, legs, chest, shoulders.

The ‘stubborn’ fat spots like belly, inner thighs, caboose, back of arms are going to be the last to go until we've emptied out those fat cells that have a majority of beta receptors.

This is why crash/starvation diets and those expecting quick fixes to excess adipose rarely, if ever, succeed.

In fact, people who starve and waste muscle cause so much metabolic damage to themselves that they actually end up making their body's natural body fat set point HIGHER.

This is why you often see people on yo-yo diets gain back all their weight and then pack on even more fat regardless of how much they exercise/detox/cleanse/starve.

So, how we do get that stubborn belly (and other areas) of fat to go away for good?

I have a simple answer. This does not mean it's easy.

Here it is:

1. Always make body fat loss, inches lost by measuring body parts(esp. around belly button) and how clothes fit be your measuring stick. Use the scale sparingly as a tool to ensure you’re not muscle wasting (see the Lean Mass section above). The more muscle you have, the more fat you can burn (and also the more you can eat and not fertilize fat tissue growth!). But muscle will weigh more than fat so we cannot be solely focused on scale weight. It has its place but we go by body fat%, inches lost, how you FEEL (physically, mentally, emotionally), how your strength is progressing, and then the scale. People will notice the transformation before you do.

2. Listen to the signals your body sends and don’t override them. Prioritize:

   1. Ample protein. (Roughly 1g/lb)

   2. Phased nutrition strategies (don’t diet for more than 12 weeks, be sure to ‘seal and cement’ your fat loss results with a period of slowly increasing nutrition, etc.)

   3. Quality pre-, peri- and post-workout nutrition strategy. These are important fueling windows.

   4. At least 4 days a week of hypertrophy weightlifting like in 12 Week Physique

   5. Quality and quantity of sleep

   6. Recovery days and deload weeks.

   7. Massive reduction (or complete cessation) of alcohol. This makes or breaks fat loss, muscle growth and increased health biomarkers for just about everyone… especially women. From a strictly scientific perspective it’s just another combination of toxins that depresses your central nervous system and inflicts organ damage.

   8. Moderate-to-low intensity cardio.