Paula -- sometimes it is hard to stick to our plans when we hear "oh, I lost seven pounds this week!" or whatever from our friends or colleagues on this or that diet, especially when we ourselves may not have seen the scale move at all.
I think that there are two important things to remember about fat loss:
1. it is not a race
2 .the number of pounds lost is meaningless
First, to “win” at fat loss is to lose body fat while preserving muscle and to keep it off forever, right? So it is completely irrelevant how long it takes you to get there, so long as you get there and STAY there. I did it fairly fast because my body responded so well to exercise and eating clean (and I never cheated). But does anyone care now how long it took me to lose it? Nope. What’s important now is that I am keeping it off.
Second, the number of pounds lost is meaningless. On some diet plans, especially super low-carb, what is being lost is water and muscle along with fat. Sure the scale goes down dramatically, but at what price? The last thing we want to do is to lose muscle. The scale can’t give you an accurate picture of fat loss — only body fat measurements can. So the number of pounds that someone loses doesn’t tell you much about the amount of fat that they have lost.
And, as I can tell you from personal experience, once you quit a diet like that, the weight piles back on as FAT. You lose muscle pounds and they come back on as fat pounds. The net result is muscle loss and that is precisely how I yo-yo’ed my way up to 57% body fat (which is a truly horrendous number).
In actuality, I lost 132 pounds of fat while gaining 10 pounds of muscle, for a “scale” loss of 122 pounds. But the loss of 132 pounds of fat is far more significant to my health (and my pants size) than the scale loss.
So put your ear plugs in and your blinders on and keep on doing what you are doing now. You are doing great!
Remember, “the only way that you will fail to reach your goal is to stop before you get there.”
Meg
Luckily, that's all it was.
