Death to Your God: Stop Letting The Scale Control Your Life

Let’s get one thing clear here. 99.99% of you hold the weight scale as an indicator of progress/failure around your fitness routine. 99.99% of you are bonafide morons. Yes, we’re going tough love on the blog. It’s the only thing that’ll work at this point.

Fun fact: The human body is composed of bones, fat tissues, muscles, organs, liquids, probably some poop, more liquids and a few other ingredients thrown in for good measure.

Want to know what the only thing the scale shows you? All of it. A combined number of all of that. Want to know what the only thing you’re seeing when you look at the scale? Fat.

The human brain is ridiculous like that, it sees what it wants to see, and for some reason we’ve become hard wired to read those numbers as connoting only to fat. Our brain conveniently forgets we’re made of muscles and bone and only sees the number as indication of fat content. And my God we’re fat. So fat. I better put in three more hours on the treadmill yo! That shit won’t burn itself!

Yes, there are scales that can measure your body mass by content, it can tell you how much fat % you’ve got in relation to your muscle %, but you won’t find those in your average gyms and certainly not in your bathrooms so for the purpose of this article, those scales don’t exist.

And neither should yours.

Your perception of fitness progress/failure should not center around those three or two digits on the scale simply because it does not account for actual progress unless you’re an obese 140-kilogram man who’s got more fat in him than a slap stick of butter; in which case those numbers decreasing is good news for your heart and bad news for your heart doctor.

Your progress indicators should pertain to things you feel and see. Like what, you ask? Well, for starters…

• How long you can go on the treadmill before panting out of breath and succumbing to the sweet sweaty embrace of death
• How much heavier you can lift and how much you’ve progressed in that department since you started working out
• How your clothes feel looser and that your belt needs more tightening
• How your friends are family are commenting on how different you look
• How you see yourself in the mirror

The scale and its fancy digitized numbers can’t tell you any of that. All they can tell you is that you weight XX and you’re shit out of luck if you’d know how much % of that is fat or muscle.

This is a personal plea to stop letting gym and bathroom scales run your life and lead your progress. Did you step on the scale today and it said you’re one kilogram heavier even though you trained your balls off yesterday and were eating like an Olympian athlete? Have you considered the fact that you drink water which actually weighs something? Ever heard of water retention? Did you know your poop can weigh a substantial amount? Hell, your farts can actually weigh enough to tip off the scale by 300 grams sometimes!

Another negative aspect of focusing on the weight scale is in relation to those who take up weight lifting concurrently as part of a program to get fit (which includes fat loss) relates to muscle gain. Your weight scale - unless specialized - cannot tell you if those increasing numbers on the scale are muscle or fat, only you can tell that by seeing the difference on your physique.

My point is, you are more than a few digits on a screen. Your progress is not and cannot be limited by what you see on that contraption. Your progress is defined by you and no one else. You can run faster now, you’re stronger now, you need to buy smaller clothes, you look better, you feel better and you’re healthier; and your scale can’t tell you about any of it.