Five Ways to Tell You’re Fitter without Weighing Yourself
You might be one of the hordes of people who look to the scale to see how your health and fitness are doing. You hop on the infernal thing hoping it’ll give you a number you like. You’re often disappointed and frustrated. Why won’t that number go down? While it’s true that bodyweight is a useful way to see how you’re progressing, it isn’t the only way. Here are a few other, equally valid ways to tell that you’re still making progress, even though the scale hasn’t moved.
1. Your clothes are looser/fit better. Your weight hasn’t changed in weeks. You’re beginning to think that all is lost. Then, you try on those pants that you stopped wearing because they felt like an anaconda wrapped around your waist. Now they’re…sagging off of you. Congratulations, this is one of the surest signs you’ve lost fat. But if you’ve lost fat, why hasn’t your weight gone down? Because you’ve been exercising, you’ve also been putting on muscle. If you drop ten pounds of fat and put on ten pounds of muscle, your weight will stay the same. But why are the pants looser? Muscle is more dense than fat. A pound of muscle takes up 85% as much space as a pound of fat. Even though your weight stayed the same, the amount of space that weight takes up is smaller, kind of like a pound of feathers taking up more space than a pound of iron. The result is you fitting in the pants again without losing a pound.
2. People are commenting that you look like you’ve lost weight. This one is more long-term and somewhat more nebulous. Even though you’re steadily hitting the gym and eating better, you might not notice the changes happening because you see yourself every day. It simply doesn’t register because daily changes are so small. It’s like if you had a pile of rice and took away one grain at a time. This is why you think nothing’s happened. But then you’ll meet up with that friend you haven’t seen for a couple of months and they’ll remark how you look like you’ve lost weight. The scale might not say it, but if your goal is to “look trimmer” and somebody says you look trimmer, then that sounds like a win to me.
3. You’re still getting stronger. You might not be losing any weight, but your lifts are all going up. This means you’re getting stronger and building muscle. Though it doesn’t result in immediate fat loss, every pound of muscle you put on is going to help you lose the fat later on. The more muscle you’ve got, the more calories you burn even when you’re just sitting on your butt doing nothing. This is why a lot of athletes can eat pouches of cookies and not gain an ounce. They’ve got enough muscle and they’re active enough to burn through the Taco Bell.
4. You don’t get as tired when you’re active. Remember how when you first started exercising you’d get winded jogging on the treadmill? Now you’re running and you can keep up the pace without wheezing. You got fit. Just because the scale says the same thing a before, it doesn’t mean you haven’t improved. Being able to keep up the pace means your heart and other muscle have better endurance and are stronger than they used to be. This is great. In all likelihood, you’ve put on a bit of muscle and your body has dumped some of the fat.
5. You can move better. Before you had a hard time reaching your toes or getting your hand to reach your back. Now you can get closer to the ground or can almost get that unreachable spot that for some reason is the only one that ever itches. There’s a good chance you’ve lost fat. As useful for storing energy as fat is, it tends to make moving harder by being in the way. Being able to get into ranges of motion that you previously couldn’t is usually a sign that you’ve gotten rid of some of that tissue that was blocking your path. Also, if your joints hurt less than they used to, that’s another sign you’ve probably ditched some fat. When it comes to being active or moving around, fat is dead weight. It’s like that guy in the office who doesn’t do anything and just stops by to tell you stories of his high school or college glory days. Also, if you’ve got too much extra fat, it puts a burden on your joints and adds to wear and tear. If your joints have quieted down, it probably means there’s probably less of a load on them than before.
Any of the above are useful for telling if you’re getting in better shape. Yes, scale weight is a useful indicator, but it isn’t the thing to live and die by. Over the years, I’ve noticed that people who focus on performance goals tend to lose more weight than people who focus on aesthetics (physique competitors aside.) Why? They’re usually more focused on the process and the weight loss tends to take care of itself. When you put all that work into doing what it takes to get your first pull-up, you one day look in the mirror and wonder when you got so lean. Scale weight is nice and quantifiable. But remember that if the goal is to look better and you look in the mirror and think you look better, it’s pretty safe to say you succeeded.
