A while back, I posted on the 4 things essential to successful dieting. I thought I’d expand a little on goal setting.
Last time, I said that you shouldn’t be using scale weight as your goal. It’s a fickle number and it’s a poor indicator of progress. Your body is made of up of, well, lots of stuff, but broadly it’s made of muscle, organs & bone, fat and water. Organ weight is something you can’t really manipulate. You can change the amounts of the other three; but here’s the kicker, though: muscle, which you want to maximize, weighs more than fat. This means that someone at 10% body fat at 200lbs is going to look better than someone at the same weight with 20% body fat. Suppose the guy at 20% bodyfat lost 20 pounds but stayed at 20%, so that he lost about the same amount of muscle as fat: Would he look better and hence feel better?
The final factor is water. Water weight is ephemeral but it’s very real if you happen to have a lot of it at weigh-in time. Say your goal for the week was 1.5 pound loss. But you ate just the right (or wrong) mix of carbs and fat that causes water retention so you actually post a gain for the week! It can be incredibly deflating when you worked so hard all week just to post a gain because of a poorly timed meal.
There’s got to be something better to measure.
We just had a burst of abnormally warm (for the time of year) weather in Ottawa, that required whipping out the summer clothing. I’ve been losing weight since October, so I haven’t worn my summer shorts or shirts since at least then, maybe even earlier. Nothing fit! It was all too big. Some of it just hangs there precariously on my hips waiting for a jaunty trip down the stairs to fall off and trip me up. Others require just a small tug downwards to do the same. My shirts, likewise don’t show off my gut anymore, cause I have a much smaller gut 🙂
What an unexpected motivation!
One of the toughest things about physique transformation is you can’t get away from yourself. Because you’re always around yourself, you don’t really get to see the changes. So putting on a piece of clothing that you haven’t worn in a while can give you a real boost.
We were in Costco two weekends ago, probably buying big hunks of meat, when I came across a mountain of shorts at $16.99. Since none of my shorts fit quite right, I thought why not get a pair of shorts at a smaller size? If I didn’t fit into them right away, I’d work on getting into them. They’d be my goal shorts. So I bought them (the fiancee bought a pair of goal capri pants – which doesn’t have quite the same ring to it), took them home and tried them on.
They fit! Well, kinda: they fit at the waist a little snugly, so my muffin top got bigger, but I could sit in them comfortably. I try them on again this weekend. I shan’t disclose actual sizes for my fiancee, but she did better than I
Getting into some skinny pants or goal shorts is a great goal. It’s specific, measurable, and it’s clear if you succeeded.
Other good ways of measuring progress that don’t involve the scale are pictures and tape measurements. You may not see it in the mirror, or see it on the scale, but you will see it in the tape. Pictures are good to compare from time to time, especially in places that you don’t look at in the mirror, like in the neck and face. Make sure you take pictures with same clothes in the same spot in the same poses every time to compare properly.
If you are going to use scale weight as your main goal, I strongly suggest you use the other methods mentioned above in tandem. Here are some tips on making sure you’re using the scale effectively:
- weigh yourself officially once a week; I say officially because I can’t help but weigh myself at other times, but I don’t change what I’m doing based on those unofficial measurements.
- weigh yourself at the same time under the same circumstances. The time and circumstances I hear about the most, and the one I use is: in the morning, after peeing, totally naked.
- Keep in mind what you did that week if the number isn’t what you were expecting. Last week I had a little too many carbs, which caused me to gain water weight. This masked any progress I made at the time that I weighed in. But the progress was there, so I didn’t fret or do anything drastic this week (just watched my carb intake a little better). I should post a good number this week.
Edit: The picture below isn’t me. It’s just an example of a good use of before/during photos. If you’re going to use photos as a measure of progress, take one of your front, side and back. Don’t flex, don’t suck in, don’t pose. The photo below is from the Physique Clinic at T-Nation. This guy lost 60 lbs in less than six months, most or all of it was fat, not muscle. You should check it out; it’s pretty inspiring.