Jean-Claude Vacassin, our new fitness blogger and founder of boutique London health club W10 Performance, questions if weight really matters
The scales don't lie. Neither does your BMI score - assuming that you got you height and weight correct. So scrap the phrase 'the scales don't tell you the truth, they lie' and ask yourself instead, how relevant are either of those numbers?
If you ask me, I'd say not a whole lot. We all have a weight that we recognize to be our fighting weight, a time when we looked good and felt at our best, but the numbers on the scales aren't necessarily what we're chasing.
The problem with weight, and BMI, is that they don't tell you the whole story. As guidelines for health both of these numbers are flawed classification systems. Take a cross section of people all weighing 80 kilos for example. Chances are they'd all look pretty different. Why? Because the scales only paint part of the picture. Here's why:
1. The scales don't know the difference between tissues. It's body composition, what our weight is actually made up of, that is important, not weight per se.
Muscle is denser than fat (it doesn't weigh more, a pound is a pound) so someone who is lean and muscular will look very different from someone at the same weight with less muscle and more fat. The same goes for bones - do sturdier bones make us fatter? No.
2. The scales don't count your carb intake: The amount of carbohydrates you eat can dramatically affect your weight. Carbs don't make you fat but they are how your body stores fuel in the muscles. The short story is that carbs enter the blood stream (as glucose), which is turn is taken up and stored in the muscles to be used as fuel (glycogen).
This muscle glycogen then requires water for it to be used, which makes us store water, which makes us heavier. Not fatter - just heavier. The more muscle mass you have, the bigger this fluctuation will be. Note: this is why ultra low carb diets do wonders for weight loss. Weight loss, not fat loss.
3. The scales don't account for water fluctuations; It's obvious that when we're holding more water we weigh more. Water is not fat though. Lots of things will affect how much water we hold on to - from how much we drink, foods we eat (see point 2), how heavily and regularly we sweat to our mineral balance - and thus how much we weigh.
This is the short quick-read version, because there are other factors at play here that will affect weight, the digestive tract being a big one. But if you take away just two things, remember that losing weight (manipulating fluids) is easy but is not necessarily a true representation of fat lost and that it's body composition that's important, not weight.