Why Weight Loss Always Fails (But Don't Ditch the Scale Yet) | Ep 215
What if weight loss is NOT the answer? Or even “maintaining” your weight loss?
If you’re tired of obsessing over the number on the scale, you feel stuck in a cycle of yo-yo dieting and frustration, or have ever been told that weight loss is the key to health and happiness…
And yet it’s just not working… this episode is for you.
Philip (@witsandweights) exposes the weight loss myth that has plagued the fitness industry for years. He reveals why focusing on the scale sets you up for failure and how to shift your mindset toward body composition for lasting success. Learn how to use the scale as just one of many tools to track progress, and discover the freedom that comes with focusing on getting stronger, healthier, and more confident—without obsessing over weight.
⏬ Download my free Body Composition Nutrition Guide to help you set up your nutrition for losing fat (not just weight!), building muscle, and looking and feeling your best at: https://www.witsandweights.com/free
Today, you’ll learn all about:
2:14 Why the scale obsession is harmful
4:56 Muscle loss and weight loss drugs
7:53 Using the scale as an objective tool
9:24 Tracking progress with multiple metrics
12:08 The liberating shift to focusing on body composition
14:00 What you should be doing for lasting success
16:20 Client story: Body recomposition without weight loss
20:47 The dangers of focusing solely on weight loss
21:07 Outro
Episode resources:
👊 Shout out to Carl Berryman of the MENtal Muscle-Up Podcast for the question that inspired this episode
Episode summary:
What if the relentless pursuit of a lower number on the scale is actually sabotaging your fitness journey? In this episode of the podcast, we delve into why focusing solely on weight loss can be detrimental to your overall health and wellness. Inspired by Carl Berryman, host of the Mental Muscle Up podcast, we dismantle the myth that weight loss should be the ultimate goal in fitness. Instead, we emphasize the importance of body composition and overall wellness, offering a more sustainable and healthier approach to fitness.
The episode begins by tackling the pervasive myth of weight loss obsession. Many of us have been conditioned to equate success, health, and attractiveness with losing weight. However, this mindset often leads to frustration, yo-yo dieting, and even weight gain. The scale, despite its bad reputation, is not the enemy. It can be a valuable tool if used correctly, focusing on improving how you look, feel, and perform rather than merely losing weight. We explore why weight loss as a goal is not just ineffective but harmful and provide insights into a more holistic and sustainable approach to fitness.
One of the key points discussed is the science behind weight fluctuations. Your weight can swing by several pounds within a single day due to factors like diet, hydration, and hormonal changes. This makes the scale an unreliable indicator of health. Instead of fixating on scale weight, we should prioritize body composition, focusing on the ratio of fat mass to lean mass. This approach provides a more accurate picture of health and helps avoid the pitfalls of an unhealthy obsession with weight, such as yo-yo dieting and improper exercise habits.
Transforming how you view the scale is crucial. Treat it as one data point among many. We advocate for daily weigh-ins to capture trends over time, smoothing out daily fluctuations through an exponential moving average over three weeks. This method, combined with other metrics like progress photos, body circumference measurements, strength gains, and biofeedback, offers a comprehensive picture of progress. Understanding the impact of factors like a new training program on scale weight can help interpret data more accurately.
Shifting the focus from weight loss to body composition involves understanding that gaining weight rapidly is often due to factors like water retention, not fat gain. By treating the scale as just one data point among many, such as waist measurements and strength progress, you avoid letting it dictate your mood or self-worth. Emphasizing resistance training, adequate protein intake, and a nutrient-dense diet supports muscle building and fat loss. This holistic approach requires patience but offers sustainable results.
The episode also discusses the importance of breaking free from the traditional weight loss mentality. Instead of focusing on losing weight, prioritize improving body composition. Download the free Body Composition Nutrition Guide to support you in making meaningful, lasting changes to your fitness journey. Remember, you are much more than a number on a scale. Use wisdom and strength in your fitness journey.
A real-life testimonial from Shawnetta highlights the value of this holistic approach. She shares how focusing on body composition rather than weight loss has been transformative. This mindset shift allows you to build healthier habits and achieve lasting results without the emotional rollercoaster associated with weight fluctuations.
In summary, this episode challenges the weight loss obsession that has plagued the fitness industry for decades. It offers a more effective approach to health and fitness by prioritizing body composition over mere weight loss. By using the scale as a tool for tracking progress rather than an emotional trigger, you can achieve a more sustainable and healthier transformation. This episode provides valuable insights and practical tips for anyone looking to revolutionize their fitness journey.
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Transcript
Philip Pape: 0:01
If you've been trying to lose weight for what feels like forever, constantly jumping from one diet to the next, and you find yourself obsessing over the number on the scale, feeling elated when it drops and devastated when it doesn't, this episode is for you. Today, I'm going to expose why weight loss as a goal is setting you up for failure and why the scale, despite its bad rap, isn't the real enemy. We'll explore why focusing solely on weight loss leads to frustration, yo-yo dieting and often ending up heavier than when you started, and you'll learn how to use the scale effectively as just one tool in your arsenal and what you should really be focusing on for a lasting body transformation. Welcome to Wits and Weights, the show that blends evidence and engineering to help you build smart, efficient systems to achieve your dream physique. I'm your host, Philip Pape, and today we are tearing down one of the most pervasive and damaging myths in the fitness industry, and that is the obsession with weight loss. Now, this episode was inspired by a question from my friend and brother, Carl Berryman, host of the Mental Muscle Up podcast, and Carl asked, quote why do fitness professionals insist on talking about losing weight and weight loss when, according to the evidence, this approach has been proven to fail over and over again for the vast majority of people and, Carl, as always, you've gone straight for the jugular. I couldn't agree more. I wanted to address this topic today, and we are going to expose why focusing on weight loss is not just ineffective, it's worse than that it is harmful. And what you should be doing instead. Now, before we dive in, I do have something special for you. I've created a free guide. It's called the Body Composition Nutrition Guide and it's going to help you set up your nutrition for what we talk about in this episode Losing fat, building muscle, looking and feeling great, not focusing or obsessing over scale weight and if you want your free copy, just click the link in the show notes or go to witsandweightscom slash free. This guide will give you the exact blueprint you need to start focusing on. What really matters which will be clear from this episode is not losing weight, but improving how you look, feel and perform. So again, go to witsandweightscom slash free, or click the link in my show notes.
Philip Pape: 2:14
All right, let's get into it and talk about this weight loss obsession that has plagued the fitness industry for probably decades at this point, and it still does. You've seen it everywhere Promises of rapid fat loss, the miracle diets, the detoxes, the quick fix programs, even the bigger programs, the Weight Watchers and Optiveas of the world, are still in that realm of you know, you need to lose weight fast and we're going to help you get there. And there's this constant push to make the number on the scale go down. That's what it's all about. The reality is that this obsession isn't helping anyone. It probably hasn't helped you. It's not just ineffective, that's the thing. It's actually harmful. It's harmful. And the core issue is that we've been conditioned. We've been conditioned through society, through our upbringing, through just everything in our environment, the Western world in particular, to equate weight loss with success, with health, with attractiveness right, we even know that being too heavy on the scale does correlate with negative health outcomes. So then, that would lead you to believe okay, all I need to do is lose weight. But the equation is fundamentally flawed. Like many things, it misses context and nuance, it misses the whole picture and it's going to make it hard on yourself if you stop there, Because your weight, yes, it's just a number, All right.
Philip Pape: 3:33
It's a number that fluctuates wildly, All right, and it's based on factors that have nothing to do, oftentimes, with your actual health or fitness level and it doesn't necessarily speak to all the factors that affect your health or fitness. Just think about this right, Very simple example. Everyone will understand your weight can swing by several pounds in a single day. A single day. If you got up in the morning and you stepped on the scale, and then an hour later, four hours later, at night, you know, take six scale measurements during the day, day, and you will see how much your weight swings in one day. Now, it's based on what you've eaten, it's based on what's in your gut, it's based on your hormonal cycle, it's based on your training so many things.
Philip Pape: 4:15
And just the logic of that, the fact that your weight can be six different numbers in a single day, should kind of tell you that it's not super helpful in many respects, and yet we still put so much stock in it. So I mean it's bad enough when we go from day to day and we're way ourself, or week to week, and then we freak out over you know it going up two pounds, and I could say, hey, it's just due to water weight or this or that. But when you look at it in a single day and notice that that's happening. That should kind of give you a wake-up call that, hmm, there's something more to this, right, there's something about our body mass that gets measured on the scale. That in and of itself isn't really that helpful, but it does go deeper than that.
Philip Pape: 4:54
I think it really does, because even if you then, let's say, you focus on the scale weight, you manage to lose weight, that doesn't mean you're fitter, it doesn't mean you're healthier. You could and most likely are losing muscle mass, and that is the opposite of what you want for long-term health and an improved physique. And we see this in very short order for those taking the new class of weight loss drugs and I'm not judging the drugs here at all. What I'm mentioning is that those who are on it, we see a rapid loss of muscle, and it's not that they cause you to lose more muscle than weight loss alone. It's just that they're causing you to lose weight very fast, which then leads to more muscle loss, which is just scaling up the negative outcome that happens with most of us when we diet or crash diet and we're not doing the right things. You know we're not strength training and all the other things that we do to hold onto that muscle. So I'm going off on little tangents.
Philip Pape: 5:48
But back to the weight loss fixation. It leads to just all negative issues. It leads to an unhealthy relationship not only with the skill itself, but also with food, with exercise, because you're starting to create a connection that is not a real connection. It's not a healthy connection, but you think it is, and therefore it promotes you to do things that are not sustainable or can harm you. Crash diets, doing way too much cardio than you really need, maybe not lifting weights, I mean Optivia, I think, encourages people not to exercise, which is insane, and it sets you up for the cycle that many of us have experienced through our lives is yo-yo dieting, whatever you want to call it going on a diet, coming off a diet, regaining the weight.
Philip Pape: 6:30
Going on a diet, coming off a diet, regaining the weight and feeling like it's getting harder and harder the older we get. So what's the alternative then? The alternative is changing how we think about fitness and body transformation and then reverse, engineering that back to the things that we really want to track and measure and seeing where scale weight maybe fits into that context in a more objective way. So, instead of obsessing over weight loss, which is a term I almost always try to avoid, unless I'm specifically talking about literal, just losing scale weight as part of the overall picture of fat loss. Instead of obsessing over it, we want to focus on body composition. Right, that is, the ratio of fat mass to lean mass in your body, which is? It sounds like a subtle difference, but it's a massive difference because weight is one variable, body mass requires multiple variables, and then that gives you the true picture of what's going on and it changes everything. It changes everything because when you prioritize body composition, you're not a slave to the scale and you can start appreciating the complexity of your body, the beauty of your body, instead of reducing it to a single number, and you can start learning about it and changing your behavior with real data that tells you what's going on in a healthy way, in a positive way of improvement and self-growth.
Philip Pape: 7:53
Now I'm not telling you to ditch the scale. That is another kind of overreaction in the industry. The ditch the scale movement right, I see it all the time in podcast episodes. Ditch the scale. I might've even had it in one or two of my episodes with guests. And when you think about it.
Philip Pape: 8:09
The scale weight itself is just a tool, right, Like a scale is just a tool that gives you a number of how much gravity is pulling you down to the earth. That's it right. There should be nothing emotional about that and in fact, I prefer daily weigh-ins. I prefer daily weigh-ins for myself and my clients and anybody listening as a useful tool when used correctly and when you interpret it and use that data the right way.
Philip Pape: 8:33
So instead of reacting to each individual weigh-in especially when you're not weighing yourself frequently and it's just random we look at the trend over time, and that's where having the daily weigh-ins can be helpful. In my coaching program, we use an exponential moving average over about three weeks okay, and that comes straight from what other experts and apps use to calculate trend weight over time. The app Macrofactor uses it that way as well, and by using a moving average over three weeks, it smooths out the daily fluctuations that are inevitable and it gives us a clear picture of the overall direction that our body mass is moving, which is a better indicator of change in body mass and then, hopefully, change in fat mass. But again, it's not the only thing that tells us to change in fat mass. It is one piece. Right, it is just one piece. So once you've resolved the okay I hear what you're saying, Philip weigh myself daily and don't care about the daily number, just care about the trend over time. And by weighing yourself daily you have enough resolution, enough, you know detail to get that smoothed out number. Then we add that in to other metrics like progress photos, like body circumference measurements, like your strength gains in the gym, like your biofeedback, energy levels, recovery, mood, sex drive, all of it, how your clothes fit right. It's this combination of data points that's going to give us a true picture of progress. And when you have that approach, it just liberates you. It frees you from the emotional rollercoaster of weighing yourself, even if you are doing it daily, and in fact when you're doing it daily, it almost becomes a non-issue. Okay, I weigh myself every day. I see the number. Not only that, here's the cool thing. The scale itself is just a data point and can now become a useful data point in certain ways, Because I was just talking to a client on our group coaching calls the other day and she was struggling with this a little bit.
Philip Pape: 10:29
She said okay, I understand all the reasons that scale weight changes. I'm taking my weight daily and yet still I sometimes have a little bit of a reaction when the scale pops in a given day and I said, well, you just switched to a new training program three weeks ago, right? I said yeah, I went from a three-day full body to a four-day split. I said can we look at the pattern with those bumps in your scale weight? Is that happening the day after your heavy leg training day? Because using large muscle groups in your training tears more of the muscle. It causes more recovery and inflammation and that actually causes more fluid retention overnight. That causes the scale weight potentially to go up or not go down as much. If you're in a fat loss phase. Ah, that's pretty cool. Now you can take that data point and use it as an indicator of what you're doing right and you can correlate it with reality rather than assume that it's because you're just getting a bunch of fat.
Shonnetta: 11:23
Hi, my name is Shawnetta and I want to give a big shout out to Philip of Wits and Weights. I discovered his podcast just a few short months ago, but I quickly realized how valuable his content is. With all the many fitness and nutrition influencers out in the world today, I often suffer from information overload, but Philip poses careful questions to his guests that get to the meat of the subject matter, while most everyone offers free guides to this, and that what I found most unique about Philip is his live training and weekly Q&A sessions. If I can't make it live, I can always catch the replay. I am very grateful to find someone I feel is so passionate and genuine to his purpose, while also being hands-on within the Wits and Weights online community. He is truly only a click away, thanks.
Philip Pape: 12:08
Philip, for all you do. Another way to think of it is this way you would have to over-consume by 3,500 calories in a day, over-consume beyond your maintenance calories, to gain a pound of fat. So if you go from one day to the next and you gain three pounds on the scale and you ate pretty much the same you normally do, well, then it's not fat. It's a very liberating thing when you realize that. And so then the scale becomes one data point in a sea of data points, no more important than your squat PR, your waist measurements. You're not letting a number dictate your mood anymore, dictate your self-worth, dictate your actions for the day. It's just hey, cool, look, that happened. Let me understand why. Great, move on, because I'm doing all the other things that I know are going to, in the long term, produce the thing I'm going for, which is improved body composition, and that allows you to focus, then, on building those healthy, sustainable habits that improve that right Becoming stronger, becoming healthier, becoming more confident, not just lighter on the scale. And, of course, there's always a time and place especially if you're carrying excess weight from a metabolic health perspective where it's a negative thing to be heavier on the scale and you want to drop some of that, great, it's fine, but do it again in the context of improving your body composition. No one says you just have to drop a bunch of weight to get healthy and don't focus on body composition. No, no, you can do both at the same time and in fact, when you focus on body composition, it's even easier to drop that weight because you're building muscle along the way and you're becoming fitter, becoming more athletic. It's fantastic, it's an amazing place to be. And then when you shift your focus, you find that you know, losing fat and then reaching your ideal weight just happens right. It happens like as a side effect of a more holistic, sustainable approach. And again, I'm not saying that weight loss is the goal, but the weight on the scale will come as a lagging indicator of all the other things you're doing. We are not going after weight loss. So what do you actually do? This is not going to be a how-to episode. I've got plenty of other episodes. Maybe I can drop a few in the show notes with.
Philip Pape: 14:07
Like you know, here's how we set all this up, but it's very simple. Number one straight train. You've always got to be training to build and maintain muscle mass. If you're listening to this show, or if you just came across this show and you're not lifting weights and you're like, no, I just care about weight loss, or I just care about weight loss, or I just care about fat loss, or I just care about nutrition. Sorry, that's not going to cut it. You have to be resistance training for it all to work.
Philip Pape: 14:29
That's how body composition gets improved is by building and maintaining muscle mass. Period. It is the most important thing, right? Yes, nutrition is the lever to modify your fat loss, but training has to be there for the muscle side of the equation. And then to support that, you have to eat enough protein and enough nutrient-dense whole foods as part of your diet, a flexible diet, to get there to support your training. Then, if and when you need to lose fat in a meaningful sense and, yes, part of that is dropping scale weight well then you're going to go into that calorie deficit while you're training and getting the protein.
Philip Pape: 15:03
And then, along the way, you're going to track and measure a bunch of things. You're going to track scale weight, but also all the other things we talked about progress photos, body metrics and so on, and then you're, of course, going to be patient, because none of this is quick. Real change takes time, but it will actually, in an ironic twist, happen faster than if you just forced it because of scale weight. It'll actually happen faster and in the right way. You're going to feel and look better, even if the scale weight isn't dropping as fast, and ultimately, isn't that what we're going for? Like, you're happy with your physique and how you feel, how you perform, how you function. So the bottom line is weight loss as a primary goal is a dead end and it is outdated, it is ineffective, it doesn't work. We instead shift our focus to body composition, we use the objective tool of the scale in a smarter way and then we achieve the lasting, meaningful changes that we're looking for in our bodies, in our lives. Right, and it's not just about looking better. Okay, I know that's a nice side effect we're all going for. It's building a healthier relationship with your body, with your food, with your movement, your training, so that you can do this the rest of your life. You can become the strongest, most capable version of yourself, and that is just who you are. And it doesn't feel like you're always dieting for weight loss.
Philip Pape: 16:20
And I want to end here with a quick story that I think will drive the point home from one of my clients I'm going to call her Lauren I like to protect my client's privacy unless they've given me permission to share their name or their info. And she came to me frustrated, like so many do, because she had been trying to lose weight for years without success. And now she's a little bit older, as the kid, the stressful job, perimenopause in her late 40s and she was always on and off diets usually a low carb diet or intermittent fasting was pretty common. She had done both and I can feel you there Very common People try these. She was doing hours of cardio and boot camps, spin classes. She was weighing herself obsessively, I'll call it. In other words, she was weighing herself for the sole purpose of getting that dopamine hit, to see if it went down. But then she'd get frustrated because she would use that as her only measure of progress.
Philip Pape: 17:12
And so when we started working together, we shifted her focus. We had her still weigh daily, and this is where a lot of people get shocked. They're like wait a minute, if you have an unhealthy relationship with a scale, do you want to keep weighing yourself? And the answer is. Yes, it's almost like I don't want to like the face, your fears, mentality, where, now that you're working with someone who gives you a different perspective on it, the thing no longer carries power over you and therefore you can use it for you instead of it using you. Ooh, that's, that's not bad, is it? So we still had our way every day, but I helped her put that data in the context right, focusing not on the daily fluctuations but the trend. And then that was one single objective data point. And then, more importantly, I put her on a structured strength training program where she would progressively overload and actually get stronger and build muscle. And then, of course, we optimized her nutrition and lifestyle to support that for muscle growth and then, eventually, fat loss.
Philip Pape: 18:05
And after two months, that's usually about when it starts to make some significant, meaningful progress she was having. She was making progress, but not necessarily happy with everything happening, because she was looking at the scale and the scale hadn't changed very much. So some of that lingering emotion with the scale was there. And then I, we sat down, we did a check-in. I showed her okay, let's look at your measurements. Your waist came down right, your progress photos, more muscle definition how much fricking stronger she had gotten. Like you know, some of her lifts doubling in just a few months, and that's not uncommon when you're doing it the right way.
Philip Pape: 18:39
And so the difference was stark. She had lost significant fat around her midsection. She had gained visible muscle mass in her arms, in her legs, she had dropped about 3% body fat, which you know again, that's the way I calculate it with measurements. You're in the ballpark of measuring that accurately. And yet the scale had hardly even budged, and we weren't trying to make it budge. And that's part of the issue is that she was, you know, kind of stuck in the mindset of of am I actually making progress? Because the scale's not moving. And once we put into the context, well, actually you're energy for her training and recovery, not to mention her hormones, not to mention better sleep. Her body weight stayed almost exactly the same, but her body composition had improved dramatically and she looked and felt stronger and sexier. Right, and that's what a lot of us are going for Now.
Philip Pape: 19:40
If Lauren had been focused solely on weight loss, she might've given up, she might have missed out on the incredible transformation that she was experiencing in just those first two months and, yes, it's sometimes hard to notice this without a second pair of eyes, like a coach, helping you examine the evidence about your own physique changes Very hard sometimes. And that is the power of focusing on body composition instead of skill, and that is the power of focusing on body composition instead of scale. So, as we wrap up, I want to leave you with this your worth, your health, your progress are not defined by that number on the scale. They're defined by how you feel, how you perform, the habits you build day in and day out, the systems that you build, if you will. So I'm going to challenge you on this Don't ditch the scale, but put it in its place right, use it as the objective tool.
Philip Pape: 20:27
It is just like macro tracking, just like measurements, just like your lifting progress. Why not weigh yourself consistently rather than haphazardly, but focus on the long-term trend and not the daily fluctuations, and then view that as one of many indicators of progress and then track with all the other things we talked about, because the goal here is not to be lighter. As Carl mentioned, weight loss is an insidious goal to go after. It does not help, it is ineffective and it is dangerous. The goal is to be healthier, stronger, more confident right, and that comes from improving your body composition, not losing weight, and then, when you have the whole context, you'll have a much clearer picture of your true progress.
Philip Pape: 21:08
So I hope that helped everyone today. I hope that you are ready to break free from the weight loss mentality and start focusing on what matters. And if you want to do that, don't forget to grab your free body composition nutrition guide, which is linked in the show notes. Or go to witsandweightscom slash free, and that'll give you the blueprint you need to start focusing on what really matters here, which is your body composition. All right, until next time, keep using your wits lifting some weights, and remember you are so much more than a number on a scale. I'll talk to you next time here on the Wits and Weights podcast.
