Your Starting Point
Why your clothes beat your scale, how to take a progress photo you can trust, and the one number to write down before you change anything.
Weigh yourself first thing in the morning, then again before bed, and you will get two different numbers. Your body did not change in those hours. What changed is what you ate and drank, the water you are holding, and whether you have used the restroom yet.
That is why the scale is a poor judge of progress, and why your clothes are a better one. In this article you will learn how to take a starting point you can trust: one outfit, three photos, and one number for how much you burn in a day.
Why the Scale Moves When You Do Not
Your weight is not a fixed number. It moves from one morning to the next even when nothing real has changed. In a classic study that tracked 140 young soldiers, about a third of the day-to-day changes in morning weight were a pound or more. The changes followed what the men ate, how active they were, and how much fluid they took in and passed.
None of that is fat gained or fat lost. It is food, water, and timing. So if you weigh yourself, do it the same way every time: first thing in the morning, after the restroom, before you eat or drink. Consistency is what turns a number into a fair comparison.
Even then, the scale can only tell you how much you weigh. It cannot tell you what that weight is.
What the Scale Cannot Tell You
I sat down with Dr. Katherine Swing, who practices obesity medicine and founded Swing Women's Health and Wellness in Metairie, and asked her how her clinic approaches weight loss. She called BMI a crude measurement of whether you are healthy, because it only looks at your weight compared to your height. It does not tell you whether that weight is fat or lean tissue. So her clinic tests body composition to know where the weight is. The way she put it:
"We focus on body composition, not just BMI."
Dr. Katherine SwingBoard-certified in obstetrics and gynecology. Diplomate, American Board of Obesity Medicine. Founder, Swing Women's Health and Wellness
Dr. Carl "Chip" Lavie, medical director of cardiac rehabilitation and preventive cardiology at the John Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute, gave me an example of how BMI can mislead. A lot of middle linebackers in the NFL would be considered obese by their BMI, yet they are solid muscle. He was careful not to stretch that example. Most adults with a very high BMI, he said, carry a lot of body fat. The recommendation now, he said, is not to rely on BMI alone, and to use other measures of body composition, like waist circumference at least.
Neither of them was talking about jeans. That part is mine. But a pair of pants that fits snug at the waist is a measure you can take at home, in the same way, as often as you want.
Why Your Clothes Can Change Before the Scale Does
Lean tissue is denser than fat. The standard numbers used in body composition testing put fat-free mass (everything in you that is not fat) at about 1.1 grams per milliliter and fat at about 0.9. That means a pound of fat takes up about 22 percent more room than a pound of lean tissue.
Here is what that looks like in real life. If you are strength training while you lose weight, you can be losing fat and holding on to muscle at the same time, and if you are new to training, you may even add some. The scale adds those changes together and may barely move. Your waistband feels something the scale cannot: a pound of fat lost frees up more room than a pound of muscle gained takes. That is why someone doing the work can notice their clothes fitting differently weeks before the scale gives them credit.
Dr. Swing made a related point about patients on GLP-1 medications. They will probably lose weight even without exercise, because they eat so much less. The problem, she told me, is that when they are not eating the right things, they can lose too much muscle, and that slows their metabolic rate down, because muscle is what drives your metabolism. Then they can hit a plateau or start gaining weight. That is why she has those patients do resistance training three times a week and work every major muscle group.
Coach's Note: Consistency is what makes a measurement worth anything. Same time of day, same conditions, same outfit: that is how you get an apples to apples comparison. Your weight changes through the day, and it changes depending on whether you have used the restroom. How you look and feel in your clothes tells you more about your composition, and about whether you have gotten bigger or smaller. Nothing beats putting on the same piece of clothing again and again and feeling the difference. When you do, write it down.
How to Take Your Starting Point
- Pick one outfit. One pair of jeans or pants and one fitted shirt, something that fits a little snug right now. If you have a pair from a few years ago that you no longer fit into, use that instead. It becomes your benchmark. You are not comparing yourself to anyone else. Just to you, in that outfit.
- Take three photos. Front, side, and back. Same outfit, same spot, same light, same time of day. Morning, before you eat, works well. Then put them away and take them again every four weeks. You see yourself in the mirror every day, and that makes slow change hard to notice. Two photos taken the same way, four weeks apart, do not have that problem.
- Write down how it fits. Two lines with today's date: where the outfit is snug, and how it feels when you sit down. Every time you put it on again, add two more lines. Over a few months, that page becomes a record no scale can give you.
- Find your daily burn. That is your resting burn, the energy it takes just to keep you running, plus everything you do on top of it. Use the MaxWell calorie calculator. It is built on the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, one of the most accurate and widely recommended of the common formulas. It is an estimate, not a lab result, but it gives you a real starting point instead of a guess. Write it down with today's date.
Built & Balanced
Strength training is one of the best ways to hold on to muscle while you lose fat. If you want a plan for it, Built & Balanced is my six-week program for busy adults and anyone getting back into training: four workouts a week, about an hour each, in the MaxWell Nutrition app. It comes with MaxWell Nutrition Unlimited.
The photo you do not want to take is the one you will be most glad you have. Nobody else has to see it. Take your starting point today, take it the same way every time, and let your clothes tell you what the scale cannot.
Spencer Maxwell Shilstone
Founder of MaxWell Nutrition and Shilstone Performance Systems. Spencer works with teams and individuals to help them reach their performance goals. He has the honor and privilege of working with and building integrative performance programs for members of U.S. Army Special Operations Command. Optimum Performance is his column at MaxWell Nutrition.
