Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 79: Interpreting the scales properly
Transcript
- Cameron: Welcome to the Cameron's Conversations podcast. So in today's episode, I want to talk about interpreting your weight. So scale weight is a tricky one to navigate for most people because they don't navigate it in a structured fashion. So I'm gonna do a quick fire episode on some of the things that I would change about the way you're currently weighing yourself towards being much, much more deliberate, more accurate, and having a more of a systematic approach. So first point I would look at. Really, really simple, weigh yourself daily, not weekly. If you weigh yourself weekly, then you are only getting a tiny, tiny amount of the sort of potential picture you can get from it. You can see trends, can see, do I tend to spike up at certain point in the week? Are there certain things that I have salty food? And all these things you can pick up on. So that's the first thing, is weigh yourself daily. Second thing, use the daily weigh-ins to create a weekly average. So, your week one of weight loss, you do weekdays, know, weigh yourself daily, and then you've got your week one. So you've got days, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, combine that weight, divide by seven, that's your average weight. So let's say that's 76 kilos. Then you have week two, and then you combine your weight all through that week, and you can see that you're now 75.3. So you can then see, my average weight has dropped by 0.7 kilos. That is your miles per hour. That is the speed of your weight loss. That is the number I want you to focus on. the most, that is the absolute key, the sort of north star of your weight loss, right? Because if you are focused on, ⁓ but on Friday I had a big spike up, cool, what was your average weight? But on Monday I had a, cool, but what was your, it's really useful to notice why those spikes might be happening, ⁓ I did go over my calories then, that's probably why that went, ⁓ actually, didn't go over my calories, just a ⁓ saltier meal, okay, that's nothing to worry about. That's useful, that absolutely is useful for developing your understanding of the scales, which is part of the reason that I'm such a big advocate of what we're talking about here, yourself daily. But it is not the be all and end all, and that average weight is far more important. So we look at that, that's the starting point. The next thing that we can look for is have you seen a new low that week? That can also be a bit encouraging, where you might see average weight go down, and you also see, actually, particularly on Thursday, for whatever reason, my weight really dropped down, the farthest it's dropped. That should be a source of encouragement, because once you see it once, it's very likely in the next week that you're likely to get closish to that again, or at least in the following week after, you'll probably no doubt hit it. So having that mentality of like, cool, I hit a little new low, that can be a tick. Has my average weight gone down? That's a big one, right? That's the first big tick. Everything else is secondary to that, but you have this little extra tick because you're like, well, I hit a new low weight, that's cool. These are really big wins. that allows you to see your overall trajectory. Then what you can do over the course of a longer period of time is you can take an even bigger step back out and you can say, well, if I look at this last month, this is my average rate of progress because I lost 0.7 kilos, 0.6 kilos, 0.5 and then 0.7 again. So let's say whatever that works out as, it's 0.6, 7 kilos average weight loss. You now know, at least currently where you are, your current trajectory of weight loss. Now, people often think that weight loss is likely to slow down massively. Now sometimes after the first initial few weeks it can because you, in weeks one and two you can see drops from drop in bloating, from having less food in your digestive tract, all these reasons, sure, that absolutely can happen and will happen. But after you get into month two and month three, most of what you're seeing is just normal fat loss. There's none of the extra bits and bobs that come from the start of starting, you know, like someone comes on, from a holiday and then they start a weight loss phase, well yeah, you're probably gonna see some big drops initially. Not all of it's gonna be fat mass, some of it's actually gonna be food in your digestive tract and so on and so forth. That's fine. So we know that that's there, we know that that exists, cool. That's absolutely fine. But after that, you've now got something where you can kind of look up, this is what my average weight is, and you can start mapping out a reasonable trajectory. Okay, I've dropped to .67 a week, so even if I take that to .6, where would I be in 10 weeks time? Am I happy with that? Well, if I'm 74 kilos at this point now, coming down from 76 or whatever it is, and I'm 73, 72, then another six kilos off, my goodness, I'd be in great shape then, cool, I'm happy with that, let's stay there. Or you think, actually, yeah, I'd like to kick on a bit faster, cool, we can do that, that you can start to do a bit of mass behind that and say, well, I'm at 0.6 right now, I'd like to move it to 0.8. Because you're not, if you sit there and think, I'm gonna double it, good luck. The deficit you're gonna be in is huge and it's not gonna be a good idea. You're gonna find that very difficult. Do you wanna maybe add 0.2 kilos to that? Okay, cool. Well, I know that there's 7,700 calories in a kilogram of fat, so I take 0.2 times that. What do I get? Okay, well roughly 1,500 calories. Cool, so I know that I now need to pull another 200 calories a day off my daily calories to hit that target. Is that doable? Maybe not, actually. I'm gonna stick with where I'm at. Actually, yeah, that seems manageable. The diet's not too hard. You have choice, right? you can start to decide the rate of weight loss you go at to an extent. Now, sometimes for whatever reason, weight will slow down a little bit, usually because your calorie tracking accuracy has slipped. If that hasn't slipped, it might just be a natural lull. In the same way that, I can think of one of my clients who was having a natural speed up the last few weeks, she's out of nowhere, she seems to have shot down even farther. It's just one of these things, her steps are pretty similar as normal, but she's a wee bit more active than that, maybe why? So what's really interesting is you do go through these little logs, but it can give you a pretty clear picture overall of what we might expect. Now, in real life, there are some variations and things, but actually that's a pretty good guide as a starting point as well. So that can be a nice way of starting when it comes to interpreting weight, and hopefully that helps, because if you are someone who's kind of just done weekly weigh-ins before, or monthly weigh-ins, God forbid, this is a bit of a mindset shift, because I think monthly weigh-ins are pants, and I think weekly weigh-ins are pants as well. And I'm not gonna... hold back on that, I think it's not the best way of doing it at all. So if that was helpful and you are needing a bit of a hand with your weight loss journey, then that is what one-to-one coaching is all about. Getting the weight loss piece done and dusted, getting it done in a good amount of time, cracking on with it and then moving to maintenance so you finally learn how to not just lose weight and then regain it, but in fact lose weight and keep it off and keep it off for good. So if you are needing a bit of support and you're interested in coaching, then the link to one-to-one coaching is in the show notes and you will see my WhatsApp there. You can pop me a message about coaching and we'll have a little bit of a chat about how it might suit you, what we can do, what you can expect, and we'll take it from there. Otherwise, have a great week and speak soon.