Do you have a love/hate relationship with your bathroom scale?

You get out of the shower and gingerly step on 
the bathroom scale hoping to see a number you'll like.  

After all, you've stuck to your new diet ---you've felt completely miserable for a month and you expect so see some change. Score!  Down 14 pounds.  Time to celebrate, right?

No so fast. You may not have lost the "right kind" of weight to warrant a celebration.  Wait. What?

That's true. When you suddenly reduce your caloric intake or eliminate a nutrient source (carbohydrates/fat) when you on a diet, you can expect a couple of things to happen.  First all you will lose is water weight.

According to the Mayo Clinic,  during the first few weeks of losing weight on a typical diet,  the body gets needed energy by releasing its stores of glycogen, a type of carbohydrate found in the muscles and liver. Glycogen holds on to water, so when glycogen is burned for energy, it also releases water, resulting in substantial weight loss that's mostly water.

Did you notice that you just read glycogen is stored in muscle and it is burned?
 
That is not good.  So really all that you've lost so far is water and muscle
--and very little, if any, F-A-T.

Muscle takes up less room that fat in the body and it also determines how quickly you metabolize calories.  The more muscle you have, the faster you burn calories.
That is good.

So just imagine if you are on a diet and you lose, say, 30 pounds. (Yeah!)
But you realize up to 15 of those pounds could have been muscle. (Boo!)
Then you go off your diet and you gain your weight back plus a little more (Ugh!)
--which is what traditionally happens, right? (Sigh)

So sure, those numbers on that scale will go down...but are they the right kind of numbers?  Well, most likely they are not!

(Click the link to learn more.)

Next, losing weight at a very rapid rate (more than three pounds a week after the first couple of weeks) can create serious health problems. It may also increase your risk for developing gallstones. Your hormones will become unbalanced.
And low calorie diets, which provide less than 800 calories per day could also result in heart rhythm abnormalities, which can be fatal as well as symptoms of malnutrition such as weak nails, thinning hair, fatigue and frequent colds.
Does this sound like a healthy way to lose weight? Or a sustainable one? Nope.

So please choose a healthy plan and do not starve your body!
And after after all, the whole point of losing weight is: 

1. To Feel Healthy
2. To Look Great  
   and 
3. To Keep It Off! 

I'd also like you to consider changing your thought process about dieting in general. Dieting will ALWAYS bring that weight back (and sometimes more of it). What you need to find is a Lifestyle Program designed to help you learn now to eat properly so you lose the right kind of weight-- keeping all your muscle and losing only fat.  So please don't be a slave to your scale. 

Instead, to track your progress simply keep an eye on how your clothes fit.

Your Healthy Thought for the Day

Stop dieting and, instead, choose make healthier food choices everyday.

Go ahead and take measurements all over your body and not just the obvious places, like your waste, hips and thighs.  Include your arms, wrists, neck and ankles.

Noticing you've lost multiple inches all over your body is way more exciting than any number on a bathroom scale anyway.  

Trust me!  :-)