They can be our best friend or our worse enemy.
You’ve been strictly following your training plan and eating better than ever, then you step on the scales and things aren’t going at the rate you want them too. So what should you do?
99 percent of people give up and feel disheartened due to erratic numbers on the scales, which of course is not good.
Patience and mindset can often be the key to seeing those numbers go down, but sometimes there’s more to it.
If you’re always asking yourself the same question – “will I ever shift this weight”, or feeling depressed because you are not a patient person, perhaps you need to ditch the scales for a month.
Here are 5 reasons why:
- Time
It can often take weeks or even a month until all that training and healthy eating shows on the scales.
This really depends on your hormones, health, sleep, stress, mindset and consistency.
Plus even if you have been working out and seeing results, but then your weight sticks. Patience and a new plan of attack is needed.
A new progressive stimulus is often needed with your training and nutrition. So many peoples body and minds are bored and stuck which leads to a stubborn plateau.
Humans get comfortable very quickly and its your job to give your bodying mind and boost to push to that next level.
- Muscle
If you’ve recently started working out, you might not notice much on the scales, but a lot is happening within your body and Metabolism.
By engaging your body in regular exercise you are building muscle and burning fat.
This increase in muscle won’t mean you’ll be looking like a body builder, but it will mean that you need to ignore whatever the scales are telling you in the meantime.
Muscle weighs more than fat and as your body is building muscle your stored fat dropping. Remember, each time you hit the gym you are investing time into lasting results your body will reap into the future. You are building the foundations.
Before you know it, the stubborn fat will fly off and so will that number on the scales.
- Water retention
The human body is approximately two thirds water, but hydration and water retention fluctuate. So chasing those numbers on the scales is in no way a clear indicator of losing any real weight.
You could just be carrying a little more or less water during each weigh in. So if the number moves around don’t panic. Stay calm and stay on track. Keep Stress low as possible and make sure you sleep well.
- Salt (Sodium)
A single teaspoon of salt contains around 2,300 mg of sodium. Too much sodium in your system causes your body to retain water.
Generally, we should consume between 1,000 and 3,000 mg of sodium daily, however many people exceed this upper limit resulting in higher water retention. So take a look at your diet, read some food labels and see where you could cut down your sodium intake.
- It’s just a number
The sooner you forget about numbers and focus your mind on training and a good diet plan, the bigger picture of simply improving your health will become your priority and results will eventually show for themselves.
And remember, as mentioned above stress can play a big role in weight gain, so if you’re stressing about the numbers on your scale, you’re less likely to ever see them go down –
So be patient, relax, and it will happen. Just stay positive and keep to your program.
To ensure all our clients get great results we do a number of things that work. We don’t guess or hope for the best.
We track, measure and monitor and of course follow a proven system that is guaranteed to work.
So your Planning, accountability and support are always the most vital part of a weight loss and transformation program.
At LEVEL UP ELITE, we tailor a plan completely to your individual needs and we track your progress each week to ensure your are constantly progressing.
To be 100% clear. We focus more on body composition. Not just scale weight. The scale weight is a way of us seeing a trend.
But we prefer photos and measurements, plus progress in your energy and dress sizes for example. There are many more ways to test and monitor progress. Scales is not always the best.
If you want to drop 3-4 clothes sizes in just 12 weeks on our program. This is how!
