Fat Loss Expectations and Progress Monitoring
As far as fat loss expectations go, generally people can lose anywhere between 0.5 - 3.5 lbs per week depending on your energy expenditure. Your starting body fat % will also affect how fast AND how much you will lose. The rate and the amount of fat loss will be greater in people who have higher body fat percentage than in leaner individuals.
Talking about progress monitoring...Let’s face it, if you’re not assessing, you’re only guessing! We can go crazy basing our progress (or more often lack thereof) on how we FEEL about our looks that day. Feelings are extremely subjective, the way we see ourselves in the mirror is often inaccurate, scale weight might not reflect true fat loss. Then how do we go about tracking our progress? Here are 5 ways how to do it without losing your mind, constantly second-guessing yourself, losing motivation and possibly giving up on the whole thing.
1) SCALE
Scale is the most common way. Even though at times it may NOT reflect your fat loss, we know that the scale weight has to eventually go down if we’re losing body weight. If we ONLY pay attention to the number on the scale, we can get very discouraged when the scale weight doesn’t go down while fat loss could be still happening. Especially for those new to lifting. They will be adding muscle mass while simultaneously burning fat. If you are one of those lucky ones - enjoy it while it lasts:) Sorry to get on my lifting sisters, but, ladies, if you woke up 3 pounds heavier it doesn’t mean you gained fat. Maybe you trained intensely the night before, or you had more carbs than usual, or you didn’t get enough sleep. Where you are in your cycle could have affected the weight gain. What you are seeing is simply water. Please don't go by scale weight only.
2) MEASUREMENTS
In particular the waist measurement is a great way to tell if you are having success. And here’s why. This is the area of the body where most people carry a good chunk of body fat. When you exercise or resistance train, the muscles in your legs and arms might grow, and while you’re losing fat those measurements may stay the same. But your waist line muscles do not hypertrophy all that much. Unless of course you’re doing tons and tons of ab specific training and eating for gaining muscle. So when you lose body fat the circumference in that area will definitely go down. Exceptions are the times when you’re bloated, have inflamation, had a lot of food volume or when women are having that time of the month. But generally speaking, if you’re losing inches off your waist line, and the scale is not moving in the right direction, we know that we’re losing body fat.
3) PHOTOS
I am not talking about your selfies taken from the high angle in poor lighting at the gym’s bathroom. You want your pictures to be taken in the same light, preferably at the same time of the day (let’s say in the morning after you wake up), in the same type of clothing every week. Front, back and side. A good way to do it is to place your phone on the bathroom sink midline to your body, start video recording and do your front, back and side poses. Later during playback pause that video and take screenshots. Voila! Put the photos in your progress folder for later comparison. We see ourselves every day and it is hard to notice subtle changes. But those subtle changes will become obvious if you compare your photos from week, to week, too week.
4) COMMENTS
Friends, family and co-workers comments is yet another way. If you are walking by somebody that you know well and they say: ”Hey. You look different. You look great! Let me in on the secret.” Then you know something’s happening.
5) CLOTHES FIT
How your clothes fit is an easy way to gauge progress. When the clothes that you’ve worn for sometime start fitting looser it’s a good indication of successful fat loss. And by the way, fat loss happens all over your body in unpredictable manner. Even though some people swear they tightened their stomach by doing tons of crunches, your genes determine where you are going to lose fat and in what order. We all have that one area that we want fat to go away. We focus on that. We look at it in the mirror every day. We pinch it. And we're so hyper focused on that one area that we’re totally miss the fact that we’re losing body fat in other less noticeable areas. People are different, but for the most part women will first lose their upper body fat. But glutes, hips and legs fat will be the last to go. For men... it’s usually the other way around. Their legs will lean out first, but midsection and love handles may linger. So give it time. You didn’t accumulate fat in a month, it is only reasonable to expect that it won’t go away in a month.
Now a few words about BIA or bioelectrical Impedance Analysis. You've seen those scales where you get on it barefoot or hold sensors in your hands. Consumer grade scales like that are very inaccurate. The decent ones will cost you an arm and a leg, but even those scales can give you inaccurate reading if your water balance is off. When you get on that scale it sends an electric signal through your body determining your body fat in relation to you lean body mass. Lean body mass (LBM) in your body is everything except fat mass. Water is part of your lean body mass. Depending on your level of hydration the results can differ significantly. Any measurement tool whether it’s BodPod, calipers, or hand-held BIA devices has a degree of error. Even the gold standard - DEXA scan can have pretty high variability. It doesn’t mean they are worthless. At home I have a Whithings BIA scale by Nokia. It measures body weight accurately, but lies to me about my body fat. According to it I am 14% while I know I am 3-5 percent higher. There’s a workaround though. If I were to diet down, all I would need to do is watch the downward trend and not isolated measurements. So if you have a similar scale you need to focus on taking daily consistent measurements and comparing them over time. What matters is the overall trend.
In summary, if you only use one tool, the scale, to track progress, you are not seeing the whole picture. In fact, you might be getting the wrong picture. You want more accuracy in assessing your fat loss? Use multiple consistent measurements and compare them over time. You then will be able to see the overall trend. Yes, it requires patience. But I am sure you'll be able to produce it if you know WHY you are going on a fat loss journey and it is important to you. Find your WHY and remind yourself of it daily.
