Why The Simple Bathroom Scale Doesn’t Tell You Shit About Your Fitness Progress!
I know we’ve all heard the saying, “Throw Out The Scale!” Well, I’m telling you why you should. The simple bathroom scale is a one-dimensional tool that can often be the biggest culprit for our misconceptions about our fitness progress and body image. The number it reads can often be the reason behind a bad day and can often dictate how we feel about ourselves. We are so much more deserving as women and mothers, to look beyond the numbers on the scale when it comes to understanding our fitness progress.
When it comes to our body weight, we need to think beyond the scale and understand what this value truly means. This simple number is actually made up of many components, all of which make up what we call our “body composition”.
Our body composition has four components: fat, water, bone and muscle1. It is used to determine a person’s muscle-to-fat ratio, as this can dictate their fitness, health and overall tone. These four components are what make our body weight something that needs to be understood on a multi-dimensional level versus just a uni-dimensional one like the house scale.
When we think about weight gain or loss in terms of our body composition, we get out of the mindset of tying this phenomenon to just fat gain or loss alone. We begin to understand that there are more components that go into these fluctuations, as there are more things at play, other than just our body fat (including water, muscle and bone).
Considering our bone weight remains somewhat stable over a period of time (this changes as we get older, which is why we need a healthy diet to support our bones as moms), we can appreciate that our muscle weight and water can fluctuate. This is especially true as women, in that hormones can play a critical role in body weight retention or loss. Additionally, when we have a fitness program that includes Resistance training, our muscle weight can also fluctuate as a result of glycogen utilization (as the body uses this molecule to store and produce energy for muscle contractions).
With all of this said, we can appreciate the fact that when we jump on the house scale, this number may begin to tell us nothing.
Did we make fitness progress when our weight went up but we “checked all of the boxes”?
When we go periods of time with no movement on the house scale number, are we truly in a plateau or are there other factors at play?
It’s critical to remember that we are not created, nor do we function, in a vacuum as humans. Our bodies are in a constant state of flux, working hard to create a balance. Anything that disrupts this balance will have a counter-effect, and so the pendulum of our health and fitness continues to swing. We cannot expect exact numbers when it comes to gauging our overall fitness. What we can do however, is take averages over time, from measurements that aren’t strictly uni-dimensional in nature, to help us understand our true progress.
It’s critical to remember that we are not created, nor do we function, in a vacuum as humans.
An example of how our uni-dimensional measurements may fail us, can be seen when comparing two individuals with the same weight but different body compositions (I speak about this in my book, “How to Reset, Reframe and Reshape…a mother’s guide to changing her mindset about fitness and her body”2
I discuss an example using myself at the same weight (140 pounds), but with two completely different body fat percentages (20 percent body fat versus 10). Although my weight was the same, my fitness level was not. I had more muscle and less body fat at 10% body fat, yet weighed the exact same as when my body fat was much higher. Had I jumped on the house scale and predicated my fitness progress on that number alone, I wouldn’t have any insight into my fitness progress that I’d made, being the same weight I was before. You can see how the house scale can tell you little about your current state of fitness or progress that has been made.
Because of it’s shortcomings, and the less we can apply it’s uni-dimensional measurement to dictate our progress as we advance with our fitness, the house scale is deserving of not taking up space on our bathroom floors. We truly need to throw out the scales!
We can replace these archaic tools however, with ones that can give us a better insight into the individual components of our body composition. There are many types on the marketplace, some more accurate and possibly more expensive than others, including a BIA (Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis) scale, DEXA measurements, Hydrostatic weighing, etc. By utilizing these multi-dimensional tools, we can get as close as possible, to understanding our individual progress and fitness outcomes. (I share my experience with Hydrostatic testing on my YouTube Video: https://youtube.com/shorts/KDl04tP4qCY?si=FKhywQS04TyaSvoW)
Additionally, we can use other measurements to provide us data as it relates to our body composition. Tools such as skinfold calipers, and body tape measurements, can be used to help us understand our body fat ratios. Progress pictures, when taken consistently over time, can give us a good idea of how we are making progress from an aesthetic standpoint, when evaluating our body composition. Oftentimes, the way we fit in our clothing can give us the easiest and simplest evaluation on whether or not we’ve made fitness progress.
The important thing to remember, especially as women, is to not allow the number we read on the simple house scale to control how we feel about ourselves. We need to take the emotions out of the number it reads, and remember that it is reflective of so much more than just weight gain in terms of body fat. We also need to practice a little more self love and remember that we are in fact, so much more than just a number!
- Body Composition – Physiopedia; https://www.physio-pedia.com/Body_Composition#:~:text=This%20precedure%20uses%radiological%20or,fat%20ddeposits%2C%20and%20muscle%20mass. ↩︎
- “How to Reset, Reframe and Reshape…a mother’s guide to changing her mindset about fitness and her body”; Cassie Morell; 1st Ed 2024, pgs 58-59. ↩︎
