Your Scale Doesn’t Give You the Full Picture so Stop Giving It so Much Weight

The number on a scale does not tell you all you need to know about whether you are achieving your fitness goals. While it can tell you if you are losing or gaining weight, it can’t tell you if those changes are due to changes in muscle mass or fat mass or normal daily fluctuations in water. This is true even of the best bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) scales.

Scale anxiety is real. And it could be sabotaging your success. You may see a jump in numbers and think your gaining fat. This could result in an unnecessary caloric restriction which could result in you losing muscle as your body starts to devour muscle as the only source of energy just to keep your body’s lights on. When it’s highly likely that you had a little bit more salt or carbs and you’re holding onto extra water. Your weight can fluctuate as much as three kilograms in one day because of what you ate, how much you drank, the intensity of your exercise and your quality of sleep.

If you feel the need to use a scale, it should be to watch for trends over extended periods and not for daily, or even week-over-week changes. This isn’t to say daily weigh-ins don’t have their merits. They are especially useful to help spot those trends. Especially because if you only weigh yourself once a week, it may appear that you’ve gained one kilogram when it could simply be water. But you need to have a certain mindset to not allow those weigh-ins to discourage you. Plus, it could very well be contraindicated if you have a history of disordered eating or are at an increased risk of developing an eating disorder because of a pre-existing anxiety disorder.

Be Clear About Your Fitness Goals

Before we get into other ways to measure success, we need to be clear about our fitness goals.

A lot of people say they want to lose weight when the reality is, they want to lose fat. Losing weight and losing fat are two different things. Weight loss can come from both fat loss and muscle loss. While fat loss means getting smaller because you’re losing fat while hopefully preserving muscle mass.

Maybe you want to gain muscle, in which case at some point you will start to gain weight even as you get smaller or stay the same size. This is because one kilogram of muscle is denser than one kilogram of fat, meaning it takes up less space on your body. For the first bit of your muscle gain journey, you may lose some weight as you lose fat. Or you may achieve true body recomposition, which means you gain one kilogram of muscle as you lose one kilogram of fat and the numbers on the scale stay relatively the same over an extended period as you get much smaller. This is extremely difficult to achieve but not impossible. But at some point, if you want to continue to gain muscle, you will have to gain weight. Gaining muscle mass is gaining weight and thermodynamics is a thing that governs your body.

Maybe your goal is to prevent falls or some other type of functional fitness goal. In which case, does your body composition really matter unless there is some weight-related aspect to your mobility goals?

Non-Scale Measures of Success

This is why non-scale measures of success are so important. Because you may give up on your fitness goals if you don’t see the numbers on your scale move the way you think they should, unless you can pay for and access a DEXA scan every three months. For the first seven months of my current fitness journey, my weight remained unchanged as I got smaller and stronger.

There are many ways to help measure success that don’t rely on the scale. Does this mean that you should never weigh yourself? Frankly, you don’t ever need to. For a lot of people, doing so would cause them to relapse into disordered eating, even if that number is trending in their desired direction. If weighing yourself is not harmful to your mental health, then there are a lot of tools that you can use in addition to the scale to help you measure if you are progressing towards your fitness goals.

Note: Many people use the term “non-scale victories”. I use the term “success” because, by definition, this is a measure of progression, while “victory” is the end goal. It’s much easier to achieve your goals if you take time to celebrate successes along the way instead of waiting for the ultimate victory. I’m sure people mean “successes” when they say “victories”, but my brain doesn’t work that way. Autistic pedant and all that.

Tools to Use to Help Measure Success

It is important to give all tools time. Your body isn’t going to change overnight. Many tools cost you nothing. Below are just some of the tools I use to measure success.

Existing clothing. It’s free. It may take a few months to feel that they are becoming loose. Give it time. How your clothing fits will be one of your best indicators about whether you’re reaching your goals.

A mirror and phone camera are also free. Take progress photos once a month. Wear the same clothes. Do them in the same room with good lighting. I wish I done this from the beginning of my journey instead of starting earlier this year when my trainer wanted them. Seeing the month-over-month changes is wild. I print mine off and paste them side-by-side into my health and fitness journal to really appreciate them. If you don’t have such old school technology, then create a digital collage.

I track how much I’m lifting. This is also free. There are some apps that charge but if you are happy using a website, then strengthlevel.com is great. You enter the weight you lifted, and the number of reps and it spits out your estimated one rep max plus shows a graph of your strength level over time. If you’re getting stronger, you’re gaining muscle.

I track my mood and energy. This is another free measure of success. Strength training may be linked to an increase in dopamine. Some people may tell you that this is definitive, but it isn’t. That said, the studies that do demonstrate a causal relationship are promising. Even if there isn’t a link, you may notice an increase in energy as your body gets smaller because it doesn’t have to work so hard to move and your mood may be better as you find yourself enjoying the changes you are seeing in the mirror or as you put on your clothes.

A tape measure is one of the most inexpensive tools to add to your arsenal. Not all tape measures are created equal. Overtime, many will stretch. I use a RENPHO tape measure. I recommend measuring once a month. Doing so more frequently may cause you to be discouraged and torpedo your progress. There are some exceptions to this, like when you are trying to figure out your maintenance calories or trying to gain muscle mass. This will be its own post.

A decent BIA scale comes with a lot of disclaimers. I have a WITHINGS Body Comp scale. I use it to track trends. While the weight is accurate, the body fat and muscle mass numbers are not. I add a couple percentage points to the body fat numbers because I know mine is artificially low due to extra water weight. I had a RENPHO smart scale, but it underestimates my body fat percentage by eight per cent.

Knowing that muscle holds water allows you to know that if you have a day where your weight is higher than usual and your body fat percentage takes an overnight dive, it’s because of water weight and not because you’ve gained a kilogram of fat overnight. It also means you need to be aware that you likely didn’t gain a kilogram of muscle overnight.

But it does allow you to see trends over time. If your body fat percentage is trending downward and your muscle upwards over a period of weeks and months, then that trend is real, even if the percentages are off. I do weigh myself daily to know how my weight and body composition is trending on average over the week. But this is a tool I only recommend in extremely limited circumstances. As I’ve already stated, get rid of your scale unless you need to be within a certain weight class for sports reasons.

A DEXA scan is the gold standard but unless you have specific fitness goals, like in bodybuilding, and have sports nutrition needs where knowing muscle mass is important to ensure adequate calories, why spend the money?

Those are my recommendations. Do you have any tools that you use to help measure your success? Tell me in the comments below!

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