How Important Is The Scale?

While being overweight obviously can have a negative impact on one’s health, how important is it to monitor your weight?

If using the scale is the main measure of your health, then you may not have the best idea about your health.  There are several reasons that using weight alone to determine health or the success of a diet or exercise routine can be misleading.

Most importantly a scale doesn’t tell you where the weight is coming from.  How much weight is from fat, muscle, water, etc.?  Yes, there are scales that are supposed to analyze your percentage body fat but most measure impedance through your body and can be affected greatly by many factors such as how hydrated you are.  A scale with that feature may give you some more information, but it should not be relied on heavily for its accuracy.

Many diets do not help you to lose fat.  Actually many of the very restrictive diets that don’t include an exercise program often end up in the yo-yo effect of going on and then off and on again and cause loss of muscle and lean tissue as well as some fat.  In fact, this type of dieting leads to more fat in the long run because when you go off the diet the body thinks it was starving and will store more fat when you are eating more.  Also when you go off the diet, without exercise the body will not build the muscle and lean tissue that was lost.  If weight is the main goal of a diet and exercise plan, you may be greatly disappointed when the scale doesn’t change because muscle weighs more than fat.  So with proper eating and exercise you may be losing fat and building muscle at the same time.  This would most likely result very little weight loss, which according to the scale would be “bad,” but building muscle and losing fat  is healthy and should be encouraged.

There are many ways to lose weight, but they all are not healthy.  In some sports with weight classes such as wrestling, athletes will do many things to ‘make weight.’  Often it involves trying to lose large amounts of water, by sweating or spitting it out.  Does it decrease weight according to the scale? Yes.  Is it healthy? Not really and does not lead to long term weight changes.  Why is this important?  Because how much water you have can have a big effect on weight and it can change rather rapidly.  So if you lose two pounds one day and then gain three the next it probably has more to do with hydration status than losing and gaining fat.

So is the scale bad?  No, not at all but the information that it gives has to be interpreted correctly in relation to health.  And if health is what you are most concerned about, eating a balanced, nutritious diet and getting regular exercise will go much further than trying to reach a specific number.  In fact for those that are obese losing as little as five to ten pounds with proper eating and exercise can have great health benefits even if it is not an “ideal weight.”