By Monique Bartlett
October 9th, 2013 Edition
The thing about losing weight is that it’s really not about your weight at all. If you weighed an extra ten or fifteen pounds but that weight came from lean muscle your body would be tighter, and leaner all over and wearing smaller dress sizes.
Muscle is denser than fat, so it takes up less space, but weighs more. Put a pound of muscle, and a pound of fat side-by-side, you will see that the fat takes up more space than the muscle. So if you are gaining muscle, you may actually go up in pounds, but your dress sizes will shrink. Most people seem to be so concerned about what the scale says, but in reality, they don’t understand the properties of lean muscle vs. fat.
The size of your clothes is going to be one of your best tools to measure how much you are losing, and how much your fat cells are shrinking. Your pants will get looser around your belly, hips, thighs, and butt. That’s much more accurate than measuring your weight on the scale.
The beauty of it is, as you are building muscle, you are speeding up your metabolism, and
that is going to stop your body from storing fat. Your fat cells will shrink as your body becomes more toned. Fat cells will take up less space, and your body will get tighter and smaller.
Think about this. When you go on a starvation diet, or a food deprived cleanse, you are telling your body that food is in shortage. Muscle cells require a lot of your body’s energy to keep them alive, and because your body recognizes there is now a food shortage, it’s going to get rid of these energy cells as fast as possible. This will cause you to lose muscle mass. You will watch the numbers on the scale go down, but it is getting rid of the lean muscle instead of fat.
Don’t let past failures discourage you. Once you figure out how to beat the scale, you’ll succeed in your weight loss journey. Let a tape measure be your friend, and get rid of the scale.
