Why the Scale
Lies
By Renee Cloe, ACE Certified Personal
Trainer
We’ve been told over an over again that
daily weighing is unnecessary, yet many of us can’t
resist peeking at that number every morning. If you
just can’t bring yourself to toss the scale in the trash,
you should definitely familiarize yourself with the
factors that influence it’s readings.
From water retention to glycogen storage
and changes in lean body mass, daily weight fluctuations
are normal. They are not indicators of your success
or failure. Once you understand how these mechanisms
work, you can free yourself from the daily battle with
the bathroom scale.
Water makes up about 60% of total body
mass. Normal fluctuations in the body’s water content
can send scale-watchers into a tailspin if they don’t
understand what’s happening. Two factors influencing
water retention are water consumption and salt intake.
Strange as it sounds, the less water you drink, the
more of it your body retains. If you are even slightly
dehydrated your body will hang onto it’s water supplies
with a vengeance, possibly causing the number on the
scale to inch upward. The solution is to drink plenty
of water.
Excess salt (sodium) can also play a big
role in water retention. A single teaspoon of salt contains
over 2,000 mg of sodium. Generally, we should only eat
between 1,000 and 3,000 mg of sodium a day, so it’s
easy to go overboard. Sodium is a sneaky substance.
You would expect it to be most highly concentrated in
salty chips, nuts, and crackers. However, a food doesn’t
have to taste salty to be loaded with sodium. A half
cup of instant pudding actually contains nearly four
times as much sodium as an ounce of salted nuts, 460
mg in the pudding versus 123 mg in the nuts. The more
highly processed a food is, the more likely it is to
have a high sodium content. That’s why, when it comes
to eating, it’s wise to stick mainly to the basics:
fruits, vegetables, lean meat, beans, and whole grains.
Be sure to read the labels on canned foods, boxed mixes,
and frozen dinners.
Women may also retain several pounds
of water prior to menstruation. This is very common
and the weight will likely disappear as quickly as it
arrives. Pre-menstrual water-weight gain can be minimized
by drinking plenty of water, maintaining an exercise
program, and keeping high-sodium processed foods to
a minimum.
Another factor that can influence the
scale is glycogen. Think of glycogen as a fuel tank
full of stored carbohydrate. Some glycogen is stored
in the liver and some is stored the muscles themselves.
This energy reserve weighs more than a pound and it’s
packaged with 3-4 pounds of water when it’s stored.
Your glycogen supply will shrink during the day if you
fail to take in enough carbohydrates. As the glycogen
supply shrinks you will experience a small imperceptible
increase in appetite and your body will restore this
fuel reserve along with it’s associated water. It’s
normal to experience glycogen and water weight shifts
of up to 2 pounds per day even with no changes in your
calorie intake or activity level. These fluctuations
have nothing to do with fat loss, although they can
make for some unnecessarily dramatic weigh-ins if you’re
prone to obsessing over the number on the scale.
Otherwise rational people also tend to
forget about the actual weight of the food they eat.
For this reason, it’s wise to weigh yourself first thing
in the morning before you’ve had anything to eat or
drink. Swallowing a bunch of food before you step on
the scale is no different than putting a bunch of rocks
in your pocket. The 5 pounds that you gain right after
a huge dinner is not fat. It’s the actual weight of
everything you’ve had to eat and drink. The added weight
of the meal will be gone several hours later when you’ve
finished digesting it. Exercise physiologists tell us
that in order to store one pound of fat, you need to
eat 3,500 calories more than your body is able to burn.
In other words, to actually store the above dinner as
5 pounds of fat, it would have to contain a whopping
17,500 calories. This is not likely, in fact it’s not
humanly possible. So when the scale goes up 3 or 4 pounds
overnight, rest easy, it’s likely to be water, glycogen,
and the weight of your dinner. Keep in mind that the
3,500 calorie rule works in reverse also. In order to
lose one pound of fat you need to burn 3,500 calories
more than you take in. Generally, it’s only possible
to lose 1-2 pounds of fat per week. When you follow
a very low calorie diet that causes your weight to drop
10 pounds in 7 days, it’s physically impossible for
all of that to be fat. What you’re really losing is
water, glycogen, and muscle.
This brings us to the scale’s sneakiest
attribute. It doesn’t just weigh fat. It weighs muscle,
bone, water, internal organs and all. When you lose
"weight," that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve
lost fat. In fact, the scale has no way of telling you
what you’ve lost (or gained). Losing muscle is nothing
to celebrate. Muscle is a metabolically active tissue.
The more muscle you have the more calories your body
burns, even when you’re just sitting around. That’s
one reason why a fit, active person is able to eat considerably
more food than the dieter who is unwittingly destroying
muscle tissue. Robin Landis, author of "Body Fueling,"
compares fat and muscles to feathers and gold. One pound
of fat is like a big fluffy, lumpy bunch of feathers,
and one pound of muscle is small and valuable like a
piece of gold. Obviously, you want to lose the dumpy,
bulky feathers and keep the sleek beautiful gold. The
problem with the scale is that it doesn’t differentiate
between the two. It can’t tell you how much of your
total body weight is lean tissue and how much is fat.
There are several other measuring techniques that can
accomplish this, although they vary in convenience,
accuracy, and cost. Skin-fold calipers pinch and measure
fat folds at various locations on the body, hydrostatic
(or underwater) weighing involves exhaling all of the
air from your lungs before being lowered into a tank
of water, and bioelectrical impedance measures the degree
to which your body fat impedes a mild electrical current.
If the thought of being pinched, dunked,
or gently zapped just doesn’t appeal to you, don’t worry.
The best measurement tool of all turns out to be your
very own eyes. How do you look? How do you feel? How
do your clothes fit? Are your rings looser? Do your
muscles feel firmer? These are the true measurements
of success. If you are exercising and eating right,
don’t be discouraged by a small gain on the scale. Fluctuations
are perfectly normal. Expect them to happen and take
them in stride. It’s a matter of mind over scale.
Originally published on The Fitness Jumpsite™.
|
Pure
Delite Chocolate