Your Relationship With the Scale Is Sabotaging Your Fat Loss

Have you ever stepped on the scale and let it ruin your mood for the day? Maybe you thought I’ve been “good” all week, why should I bother. Nothing changes. The scale stays the same. And then maybe you go eat like a jerk. You stop exercising. Stop getting steps. Stop tracking your food. Stop paying attention. Take your frustration out on your family. Maybe all the above!

The point is the scale is so deeply ingrained in women. You are either succeeding or failing depending on what the scale tells you. If you’ve ever spiraled over the scale, questioned if what you’re doing is “working” or even quit a weight loss journey over the scale then this episode is one you really need to hear.

I want to start by telling you, when I was 215 pounds, I did all the things I just mentioned. For years, I lived and died by what the scale said. I know a lot of you are doing this too.

When I began my 80-pound weight loss journey, I stopped focusing on weight loss and I began focusing on my habits. I told myself in the beginning that I wasn’t trying to lose weight anymore. I was trying to get fitter and that I was going to do things that helped me get fitter.

Do habits that fit people do and that is what I focused on and that mental shift really allowed me to lose weight because the focus wasn’t on obsessing about what the scale was or was not doing. I was focused on doing the boring basics, my habits, consistently. I was noticing what was happening with the scale, but I didn’t allow the number on the scale to get to decide what actions I did next.

For most of my life, I believed that to lose weight the scale should decrease every week, in a linear fashion. But that is not how fat loss works. That’s how crash dieting works and they are not the same. Many women have been taught to use the scale the wrong way based on crash dieting. Weight Watchers is a good example. They are not teaching women the correct way to use the scale. They weigh women once a week. That is not correct.

The correct way is taking weekly scale averages with multiple data points and comparing week over week along with taking measurements. This is something I discuss in my weight loss blind spots workshop. That workshop is $40 and goes over the common mistakes and misunderstandings women have about losing fat. The link to that is in the show notes if you want to grab that.

If you are getting on the scale once a week, that is not correct. Imagine if I ran my business by only looking at my sales one day a week and I made all my decisions about running my business based on that one day a week. One day a week tells me nothing about my business and how to run it, and it is no different for fat loss. One day a week tells you nothing about whether what you’re doing is working.

You need a lot more data to understand what is happening and if you’re losing fat, maintaining or gaining. I believe there are a large number of midlife women out in the world who are running their fat loss journey based on one weekly scale weight and are giving up because they don’t understand how to measure things correctly.
I also know there are a lot of women who jump on the scale daily and don’t track weekly averages or measurements.

I also know a lot of women don’t understand that you can see measurements decreasing and the scale staying the same for a long time. This is called body recompositioning. If you are under muscled and out of shape (for lack of a better term), the scale may stay the same number for a long while, but you may see measurements going down which means you are losing fat. I want to share an example from a client who quit last year.

This client’s measurements were decreasing month over month. She was losing fat. Her inches were decreasing month over month. This client was saying she didn’t feel anything happening. Her clothes weren’t changing but the scale wasn’t changing. Then she got very sick and stopped walking and tracking her food for a month, which is completely understandable. She was sick!

Then she had some family stress going on and for three months she stopped tracking her food. She had several months of not tracking her food and told me she wasn’t losing weight, so she quit.

This is something I have seen with clients in the last 11 years and it’s why I stress to clients so much that I am their support system and there to help them, but I can’t help if I don’t know there is a problem.

I think women treat nutritionists like a diet sometimes. Like, I can only see my nutritionist when I am being perfect. No! The most important time to see your nutritionist is when you are struggling so that you can work through what you are struggling with. If you don’t communicate with the person who is helping you, they won’t know you are struggling. Kind of like when someone is dealing with depression. The most important time for them to see their therapist is when they are struggling. It’s no different with a nutritionist.

But the point of sharing this is that many times women do not understand how fat loss works. Fat loss is supposed to be slow and almost unnoticeable in the first few months. That is normal fat loss. And sometimes women think they should be losing weight when they haven’t tracked their food in months.

That is the craziest thing I see. They tell themselves they’re not losing weight so why bother tracking food, it’s not working anyway and then they quit because they convince themselves nothing’s working when the reality is they don’t understand how fat loss works and they’re not understanding that you can lose fat and see the scale stay exactly the same for months.  

Most women (most of you) have it so ingrained in them that if the scale is not going down linearly, it’s not working. But that is not true. You are used to rapid results because of the fad diets you have followed.

But those fad diets have taught you to do weird things with food, manipulate foods you eat, have a bad relationship with food so you can micromanage the scale and get it to show you a number you want to see. Then you can’t sustain all that or the weight loss and then you feel like a failure, yet you keep trying to do the same methods to get the scale to decrease.

I was speaking to a woman recently who was complaining that the scale goes up when she eats carbohydrates like rice and oatmeal. I told her, yes, you should expect to see the scale to increase from water. For every 1 gram of carbs you eat, you store 4 to 5 grams of water.

That’s normal and just water weight. Not fat gain. And this woman asked me, how do I get the water weight to not show up on the scale?

This is an example of what a lot of women do. Women have a toxic relationship with the scale. They’re looking for validation from the scale. Proof that they are succeeding, but then they do weird things with food to get the number to go down so they feel good and feel like they’re succeeding. This isn’t healthy.

You have to stop letting the scale control you in this way. It’s controlling your mood, your emotions, your behaviors with food, how you treat your family, how you take care of yourself. You’re letting the scale run the show instead of you being in control.

If losing fat is your goal, are you confident in your actions? That is the number one shift you must make here. Are you in a calorie deficit 80% of the time? Over the last 30 days, 20 days or more are you hitting your calorie deficit target? Over the last 30 days, how many days did you track your food? Over the last 30 days, how many days did you track using a food scale? Over the last 30 days, how many days did you hit your protein goal? Or fiber goal? Over the last 30 days, how many days did you hit your step goal and exercise goal?

I have seen many clients in the last 11 years who will share their frustration with me over not losing fat and then I’ll say okay, that’s valid. I hear you. Let’s look at the data and when we look at the data they have 6 days where they hit their calorie deficit out of 30 days. That’s good news. Now we know why fat loss isn’t happening because 6 days out of 30 is great, but we need to work on getting that to 20 days out of the month to lose fat because 6 days isn’t going to generate fat loss.

You see a lot of women aren’t analyzing their data like this and taking an honest audit of what they’re doing across the entirety of their life. If you’re not doing this, you’re missing the solutions to why you’re not losing fat and then you’re getting mad at the scale and spiraling and giving up.

Like in the example I just shared. It’s good news that we know 6 days you were in a calorie deficit out of the last 30. It’s not enough to see weight loss, but now we can ask. What helped you achieve that on those 6 days and how can we do that more often? What can we do to be more aware of this and track this over the course of weeks and month? Once I point this out to clients, they’re like oh I didn’t realize this. I never even thought about that.

The scale is just one piece of data. Getting mad at it or frustrated is valid, but you want to be auditing yourself in this journey and looking at all the data points. Not just the scale. How are you feeling? Do you have a better routine? Are you sleeping better? Do you have more stable energy? Are you feeling more confident with food? Audit your tracking, how many days you hit your calorie deficit target, how many days you went to the gym and got steps, take measurements and weekly scale averages.

The way all of this gets easier is to take a hard look at your action steps. That is the blueprint of how you’re doing, is your action steps. Everything else with the scale and your clothes will catch up. It may take a few months, but you know what? If the scale isn’t moving that much, audit your actions to see where the opportunities may be, but make sure you are giving yourself enough time.

Many women are not giving themselves enough time. Learn how to do fat loss correctly. Learn how to collect and analyze all the data correctly. Stop trying to do the same tricks you’ve been taught from fad diets.

Sometimes I think it’s as simple as reminding yourself, you are a grown woman getting flustered about a number on a box on the floor. Like, are you really going to let that derail your day? And put you in a bad mood for the next three days because it didn’t say what you wanted it to say and it’s going make you lash out at your family because you’re upset about a box on the floor?

Sometimes clients will say to me “well, I expected it to be different.” It’s like, well, let’s zoom out and audit what’s been happening, get all the data because the scale is just one data point and let’s also look at the emotional attachment you have to this box on the floor. It’s another example of things we as women ruminate on. What am I like this? Why do I feel this way?

It’s like well it’s your mess of a history with your diet, your family, maybe your mom was always dieting and all these different societal things we as women have been told. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter where it comes from.

Like my father always made comments about my weight. Now as an adult, I realize he was fat shaming me. But it doesn’t matter. What does that have to do with me now in this moment? Same for you. It doesn’t matter.

You have allowed the scale to be in charge of you. How many diets have you done based on the number on the scale telling you what you need to do with food and exercise? And 99% of the time, it’s unsustainable methods for the sake of the number. When you’ve been on this hamster wheel and now, you’re trying to get off the hamster wheel, you must recognize it’s not about the number anymore. It’s one piece of data and that number does not get to decide what you do next.

The number doesn’t get to decide your doubt in yourself. That’s not even logical that a box on the floor gets to define your success. What have you been doing for the last 30, 60, 90 days? Can you say with confidence that you’ve been putting in the boring basics and have data to back that up? Again, the scale is a piece of data but it’s not in charge of what you do next.

 Your goal is to become neutral to the scale. The scale is a tool, not a weapon you use to make yourself feel bad or use to stop taking care of yourself. The number should inform, not emotionally control you. The healthiest relationship with the scale is neutrality, but fat loss requires you to emotionally regulate yourself and become more focused on your actions then whatever is happening on the scale.

As I’ve shared many times on this body, body composition is the most important indicator of health. You can be leaner and be skinny fat. If you’re in the less than 20 pounds to lose category, it is likely you need body recompositing more than scale loss. A lot of women struggle to accept this. Again, because we as women have been so conditioned to think that a number on the scale is what will give us the body of our dreams. It does not.

I’ve shared many videos on social media of my own 80-pound weight loss journey and how I lost all this weight but still looked fat. That was because I have no muscle, so I had no shape or tone to my body. Once I began lifting weights and building muscle, I put on ten pounds of muscle. I went from 130 where I looked still overweight to 140 but I look a lot leaner even though my scale weigh is higher. I will link that video in the caption if you want to check that out.

My body performs better all the way around too. I’m also able to maintain my weight much easier because with more muscle, I’m burning more calories at rest. This is why a lot of women struggle to maintain fat loss because they’re burning so few calories at rest and to maintain their results, they would have to eat very little.

Hopefully, you’re seeing that all this is not as straight forward as looking at the scale once a week or even daily. There’s a lot more context and nuance with fat loss and weight maintenance that so many women don’t realize because all they’ve ever know are the methods they’ve taken with different fad diets.

I find even with clients who start working with me who are tracking calories, don’t understand a lot of things correctly. Sometimes they don’t want to accept where they are either.

I think that is hard about a weight loss journey is accepting that you have years of yo-yo dieting, years of a toxic relationship with the scale, a bad relationship with food, years of not exercising, years of being sedentary and then wanting to fix all of that in 6 or 8 months. That’s the hardest part of this journey and I know exactly how is feels. But it’s something you must accept if you want off the hamster wheel. There’s no bypassing any of this.

Even if you go on a GLP-1, you still have to do the boring basics. You still need to get steps, exercise, eat enough protein and fiber and track calories. It may help you do those things more consistently, but you still need to do the boring basics to be healthy. There’s no bypassing this.

Successful women who lose weight and keep their results, focus on their actions, not scale fluctuations, and they stop chasing the scale for validation. They focus on their consistency with their actions. They understand fat loss is slow and that body composition matters more than a scale number.

They don’t quit when they think nothing’s working. They audit their actions, make adjustments based on ALL the data and they keep going. Most importantly, they don’t let a box on the floor dictate their actions or how they feel. Grown women don’t do that.