Tom knew he had to lose weight – it was in his future. He woke up one typical morning. Tom got ready for work following his well-entrenched routine – lay out his clothes, shower, shave, and dress.
This morning, the dressing part of the process didn’t go as planned. When he attempted to button the top button on his dress shirt before tying his tie, he couldn’t get the button in the buttonhole. Had the shirt shrunk at the cleaners? He pulled on each collar in a losing effort to get the button close enough to the buttonhole to make contact. In the mirror, he watched his hands strain to pull the buttonhole side closer to the button. Just… a little… more.
As Tom watched this scene unfold in the mirror before him, he noticed neck fat rolling over the top of his collar. Where did that come from? He realized a few weeks ago that his dress shirts were a bit snugger than he remembered, but not being able to button the top button – that was unexpected. How did this happen? He decided to sport the more casual look of leaving the top button unbuttoned with his tie loosely tied for today. He hoped he didn’t have any formal clients who might frown at the casual look.
Tom knew his pants were tighter, too. He solved that problem by moving his pants waist down a tad, letting the belly fat roll over his waist. But by God, he still wore size 36!
But there was no easy fix for his increased neck circumference. He needed to do something about that. But what? Those gummies promising 40-50 pound weight loss in a couple of weeks hadn’t worked. Gym? A crash diet like the Keto, Whole30, or Master Cleanse diets? What makes sense?
Tom Joined Six Out of Every Ten People
Unfortunately, Tom’s experience and realization that losing weight was much more of a future reality is not unique in the United States and other developed countries. Data from the CDC shows that 42.5% of adults 20 and over have obesity. Another 31.1% are overweight. That means over 70% of American adults, regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity, are overweight or obese.
This means that statistically speaking, seven out of every ten of us have had (or are having) an experience similar to Tom’s. Those seven out of 10 people need to lose weight to achieve what is considered a healthy weight.
The last question Tom asks is, “What makes sense?”
Too many people get scammed by the numerous misleading marketing programs that promise you will quickly lose an unrealistic amount of weight. You may have seen the gummy ad describing losing 30 or 50 pounds in a week or two that didn’t do anything for Tom. Many other ads offer the same unrealistic weight loss promise. Without hacking off a body part, losing weight that quickly is not possible. People go on hunger strikes and don’t lose weight that fast.
And all those who join a gym to lose weight as part of their New Year’s resolution are almost certain to fail. Data shows that 80% will not make it to February before giving up.
Lose Weight Series
This article is the first in a 10-part series of articles that guide you through an evidence-based losing weight process. The best part? I’m providing this as a public service to anyone willing to listen. It won’t cost you a dime and I won’t try to sell you something or put key information behind a paywall.
If you’re tired of struggling with losing weight and have questions about achieving your desired body composition, you’ve come to the right place. This ten-part series is your guide to losing weight and achieving the body composition you’re after.
I’ll show you how to create achievable goals for body weight and composition. And then I’ll explain how you create YOUR plan to reach and maintain that body weight and composition for the rest of your life.
The 10-Part Series to Lose Weight
This series is divided into three sections:
- Some preliminary information to help understand weight loss;
- The specific steps you need to take to shed those unwanted pounds; and
- An overview of the technology that can assist you in your journey, such as Fitbit watches and other similar devices.
Preliminaries to Lose Weight
Part 1: You Know You Need to Lose Weight. But… (this article)
This article explains the difference between losing weight (what we typically set out to do) and making desirable changes to our body composition (what most of us need and want to do). I guide you through setting your goal weight in a way that is achievable for you.
Part 2: Set a SMART goal to make desirable changes to your body composition (reduce fat, maintain or add muscle mass).
Don’t skip this step. If you do, you lower your odds of success. Developing a specific, meaningful, achievable goal is the first step in making any change – and that’s exactly what you are doing – changing your body composition by losing fat and preserving or gaining muscle.
Part 3: Weight Loss Science – Not as Complicated as We Are Led to Believe
I explain the science and biology behind successfully losing weight by changing your body composition (losing fat and preserving or gaining muscle). There aren’t any gimmicks, calorie counting, weight loss supplements, or special diets and meal plans. Once we filter out all the noise that attempts to derail us (marketing campaigns), you will see that it is not that complicated. And there aren’t any paywalls.
Part 4: Gym, Kitchen, or Both?
The last preliminary topic addresses whether one should focus on exercising, improving their diet, or both. This is a question that has been asked by many. For overall general health, the ideal answer is both. But if your focus is losing weight and achieving your desirable body composition (fat versus muscle), you must prioritize your kitchen, i.e., what you eat. While exercise is important for many reasons, when it comes to losing fat, it is secondary to maintaining a proper healthy diet.
Prescription to Lose Weight by Changing Your Body Composition
These are the essential five steps to losing weight, developing your ideal vision of your body composition, and then maintaining it for the rest of your life. You’ll find that these steps are not complicated and can easily fit into just about any lifestyle.
Part 5: Create a Weight Loss/Maintenance Kitchen Pantry
Losing weight starts in the kitchen. When we became empty nesters, we cleaned out our pantry of overly processed foods, added sugar items, etc. If it was in the house, we’d eat it. We didn’t want any more of these scenarios – “I’m hungry,” followed by “Wow, that package of Oreos was tasty!” and finally “I can’t believe I just ate that entire package!!”
Part 6: Modify Your Diet (but not drastically)
This is change, and change can be hard. Making small adjustments helps us transition to a healthier diet. If you start by severely restricting your diet and the things you love, you won’t stick with it.
Part 7: The Weight Loss Plateau
You’re losing weight, and then after a few weeks, you can’t. Everyone hits that point. Learn why and how to overcome it.
Part 8: Making Diet and Physical Activity Adjustments
The best plan includes diet adjustments and physical activity adjustments. Here’s how you implement those adjustments.
Part 9: Long-Term Body Weight Maintenance
Encouragement and tips to make these adjustments permanent. You’re after a lifestyle change, and once you figure it out, you don’t want to fall back on old bad habits. But our brain is wired to conserve energy, which means taking the easy path. And the easy path is always the right path. Here’s how I manage that issue.
Technology – Fitbit, Smart Watches, and Numbers on a Treadmill
Part 10: Does Technology Help with Weight Loss?
The final article covers technology like Fitbit watches, calorie trackers on fitness equipment, and calorie counting software (which I contend you won’t and don’t need). I describe what works, what doesn’t, and how to use these items. Further, I explain how I used some of them before discarding them, and how I continue to use some of them today.
Let’s get started!
Why Is Losing Weight Important to You?
This is somewhat of a loaded question because the CDC publishes data that shows 73.6% of adults 20 years old or older are overweight or obese. That’s a big number. Even more than 20% of kids older than 6 are considered obese. Unfortunately, those percentages have continued to rise over the last three decades for almost every gender and demographic. It doesn’t matter if you are poor, rich, male, or female. And it doesn’t depend on your skin color or ethnicity, either. So, our obsession with weight loss diets, pills, exercises, and specialized meal plans is justified. But… even with all those “tools,” we are still becoming more obese as a society instead of reaching a healthy weight. Why?
Ask 10 people the question “Are you trying to lose weight?” You’ll find that most answer yes. Then ask them “Why are you trying to lose weight?” After stammering around, they may say it is to improve their health, or they want to fit into the clothes they used to wear, or they want to look “better,” whatever that means. But of all the people I’ve asked, very few have a definitive answer they are committed to or have a measurable goal outside of a number on the scale.
Without a reasonable and achievable goal, most of us lose interest after a brief period of trying. And then we start over again at some point. Before we go any further, let’s answer the question: What do we mean when we say we want to lose weight?
Lose Weight – Code for Change Your Body Composition
Losing weight to most of us is code for changing our body composition. Our body composition represents the muscle and fat mass we carry around. Sometimes we have to gain weight to achieve a desirable body composition.
Losing weight is just that – doing something that lowers body weight. I can decrease my body weight in several ways, some of which aren’t desirable (or healthy). Here’s a sampling:
- Lower the amount of fat I carry around (the reason most of us go on a weight loss program of some kind);
- Lower the amount of muscle mass. This is not desirable, especially as we age. But a restrictive diet will do just that. I prefer to maintain or increase the muscle mass I have while losing the extra fat;
- Dehydrating myself. When you engage in a sweat-inducing activity, you lose water. A pint of water weighs about 2 pounds. So did you lose those 2 pounds? Not really – it’s just water, and you’ll regain it after you satisfy your thirst.
- You may find this a bit disgusting. But here it is: having a good bowel movement. Depending on the size of your stool, it, too, could represent a loss of a couple of pounds.
In all these cases the bathroom scale will show that you lost weight. But in the case of dehydration and a bowel movement, it’s not the weight you probably intended to lose. And the second one, muscle loss, should scare you. If you severely restrict the amount of food you eat or eliminate certain food groups from your diet, you risk losing muscle mass. And most of us don’t have muscle mass to spare, especially as we age.
So, how do we lose fat and not muscle mass?
Changing Your Body Composition
Again, making desirable body composition changes (reducing fat while maintaining or increasing muscle mass) is what we typically mean when we say “losing weight” is in our future. We want to do one or more of the following:
- Eliminate belly fat;
- Eliminate fat on our hips;
- Decrease fat from just about anywhere on our bodies;
- Have solid-looking (washboard?) abs;
- Sculpt our arms, shoulders, and back to look like they are strong;
- Have muscular and shapely glutes (butt) muscles; and
- Have shapely and muscular calves and thighs.
Some of these may represent unrealistic views of what we want to look like. Let’s say you want to accomplish all the items on the list. That’s a huge time commitment that you may not have time for because of family and career responsibilities. Are you prepared to eat the proper foods all the time and train your body 2-3 hours a day? For most of us, the training time is the deal killer. But adjusting our diet is well within our capability because it’s not much of a time commitment.
While I’m not a huge advocate of tracking weight, I strongly advocate achieving your desirable body composition. For example, if you adjust your diet and add weight training, then it’s very possible to gain weight by adding muscle mass while lowering fat mass. Muscle is much more dense than fat, so a little muscle can outweigh a lot of fat.
Real-Life Example: How Weight Loss Differs from Changing Body Composition
In early 2016, my vision was to compete in the 2017 USA Taekwondo national championships. For most of 2016, I trained hard and developed excellent cardiovascular and muscular endurance and strength.
Then in late 2016, I was diagnosed with stage 4 non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer. That ended the Taekwondo training and I started an aggressive regimen of chemo treatment. At the time, I weighed about 185 pounds, and, because of the Taekwondo training, had a lot of muscle mass and not much fat.
Over the next 6 months, I was beaten down by the treatments, which were ultimately successful. My physical activity was reduced to the point I couldn’t even manage a flight of stairs. However my appetite was still okay by chemo standards, and my life partner and the exemplary nursing staff on the Rush University oncology floor ensured I ate sufficiently to maintain my immune system.
Even with a decent appetite, my weight dropped 10 pounds over those 6 months. Interestingly, my pants were tighter around the waist even though I had lost weight. How could that be?
The figure provides a visual comparison of fat and muscle tissue. Each represents 1 pound of tissue (muscle or fat), but the 1 pound of fat takes up 15% more space than the 1 pound of muscle. I lost weight by unintentionally changing my body composition in an undesirable way.
I lost a lot of muscle tissue while adding fat to my waistline (and elsewhere). And, as Cleveland Clinic points out, the fat I gained took up more space in my body than the muscle I lost, as shown in the figure. The result: a larger waistline.
Achieving Desirable Body Composition Changes
After chemo finished, I restarted lifting weights (I couldn’t do much cardio work yet because my hemoglobin counts hadn’t recovered – they take a few months). I also focused on returning to an appropriate diet with lean proteins, fruits and vegetables, fiber and whole grains, and healthy fat. The muscle tissue came back while the fat slowly shrank away to pre-chemo levels, and I gained weight. And even though I gained weight, my waistline returned to the pre-chemo level.
The takeaway from this story is this: the chemo fat I gained around my midsection suggested I needed to lose weight. Earlier in my life when my pants became too tight, I did need to lose weight. But that wasn’t the case this time. I needed to build muscle and lose fat, meaning I needed to gain weight. I created my proper body composition by rebuilding muscle tissue and burning off the fat I had gained.
Just remember: Losing weight isn’t always the goal. Sometimes we need to gain weight even though we think we need to lose weight. That’s why I don’t suggest that people weigh themselves frequently. Other, more meaningful metrics I describe below accomplish what most of us want to accomplish.
Reasons to Focus on Body Composition v. Lose Weight
Most decide losing weight will help us look good, fit well in our clothes, and improve our health by lowering our risk for chronic diseases. As I explained above, simply looking at the scale may not meet these goals.
Body composition measurements, almost all of which can be done with a simple tape measure, can be related to what we think of as weight loss and health. The CDC, NIH, and WHO publish research results that directly relate waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio (waist circumference divided by hip circumference), and Body Mass Index (BMI) to health risks.
The health risks are serious diseases. Carrying too much fat around can lead to:
- Cardiovascular disease (heart attacks and strokes)
- High blood pressure, which leads to other health issues
- Increased cholesterol levels that, again, lead to cardiovascular disease
- Insulin resistance, which is code for Type 2 diabetes
- Fatty liver disease
- Sleep apnea
- Gallbladder disease
- Joint problems (knees and hips)
- Mobility limitations which lead to losing your ability to live independently
- Increased risk of depression
- Overall higher mortality risk (risk of dying)
As I said, these are not for the faint of heart. They are serious diseases that will affect your quality of life and healthspan. Extra fat, especially around our midsections, limits our lifestyle and affects our health. How many times have you heard the phrase “That guy looks like a heart attack waiting to happen” directed to an overweight person? It’s not a happy thought, but data shows that it’s accurate.
What measurements should our goals address?
Body Composition Goals
Several body composition measurements can easily be turned into goals. Some, like BMI, waist circumference, and waist-to-hip ratio are health-indicating body composition metrics that, if outside a certain range, strongly correlate to increased risk for cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and the others listed in the previous section.
Other measurements track progress toward our chosen goal. If you want stronger-looking arms, you need to measure something to assess progress towards that goal. Otherwise, you may not know if you have developed stronger arms.
Sticking with the stronger-looking arms goal, suppose you have an upper arm circumference of 10 inches. You set a goal to increase that circumference to 13 inches by building muscle. You start an exercise plan and, after four weeks, find that the circumference hasn’t budged. That means your plan, or your execution of your plan, isn’t giving you the desired results. So you need to adjust something (diet to get more protein, exercise consistency and time, the actual exercises). If you hadn’t measured your upper arm, you wouldn’t know if you were progressing toward your goal. You’d continue an ineffective process.
Make a Desirable Change to Your Body Composition
Once you develop a body composition SMART goal explained in Part 2, you’ll have a roadmap to reach that goal. You’ll have a diet and possibly an exercise plan. Here’s the process you need to go through to make that body composition change:
- Measure at the beginning
- Set a goal of what you want that measurement to be four weeks from now (you need to give your body at least four weeks to change, and even after four weeks, it likely won’t be a large change)
- Consistently execute your activity (diet change, exercise, something else)
- Re-measure and assess if you are making progress
- If you are making progress, keep at it!
- If you aren’t making progress, evaluate your plan and execution of your plan – maybe you’re not being consistent, or you’re doing the wrong thing. You might consider visiting with a certified personal trainer or a registered dietician for help.
- Repeat this cycle.
Body Composition Measurements
You can apply the above process to anything, and most certainly your body composition (remember, this is your effort to “lose weight”). You can measure these using a tape measure to record the circumferences of these body parts.
Health Indicators
- Waist – Health-related measurement. Over 40 inches for men and 35 inches for non-pregnant women signals an increased health risk of the type listed above (cardiovascular, diabetes, etc). Measure just above your belly button after exhaling.
- Hips – Health-related measurement. Dividing your waist circumference by your hip circumference is your waist-to-hip ratio. It should be less than 0.8 for women and less than 0.95 for men. Anything greater signals an increased health risk. Measure around the largest part of your hips and butt.
- Body Mass Index (BMI) – A screening measurement that can indicate if a person has too much fat. It’s your weight (in kg) divided by your height (in meters) squared. The CDC offers a calculator to make it easy. Anything over 30 indicates possible obesity and anything 26 and above suggests you might be overweight.
Excess Fat Indicators
- Body fat percentage – the percentage of your total weight that is body fat. This takes skill, a second person, and special tools, so it’s not commonly used as a “weight loss” metric.
- Neck – indicates body fat in most of us
Muscle (or Fat) Indicators
- Chest – Men, measure around the nipples. Women, measure right below your breasts. If your chest is smaller than your waistline, then you likely carry too much fat around and/or have very little muscle mass in your chest muscles (pectorals)
- Upper arm – Indicates the muscle mass of biceps and triceps. It’s also a fat storage spot for women. Many people I talk to want larger, stronger arms. With your arm hanging down, measure halfway between the top of your shoulder and your elbow.
- Thighs – Muscle mass indicator. Measure halfway between your groin and your knee.
- Calves – Muscle mass indicator. Measure halfway between your knee and ankle
What I Do and Next Steps to Losse Weight
Most envision desirable changes to all our body parts when we decide to “lose weight.” Once a quarter, I take 10 minutes and measure all the above body composition metrics. I track my BMI even though I know it’s not perfect. My goal is to keep my body fat percentage below 12% but not lower than 9%.
Circumference measurements indicate my fat and muscle mass. As I age, I want to maintain the muscle I have and not add extra fat to my frame. If one or more measurements unexpectedly changes, I assess what I did the last couple of months and adjust either my diet or my training regimen. For example, if my waist increases, I might review my serving sizes and reduce a couple. I may add a little more cardio to my training regimen.
Lean protein, fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and other healthy carbs dominate my diet to maintain my desired body composition. Our grocery store trips are limited to high-nutrition, minimally processed whole foods.
None of these are drastic changes – they are adjustments. Instead of two pieces of toasted whole grain bread with my bowl of homemade bean and turkey soup for lunch, I’ll have one piece. Or instead of running 20 miles a week, I may increase the volume to 22 miles.
Let me emphasize these are adjustments. And I rarely adjust anything more than 8-10%. If I did, then my body might react in an unintended way. If I cut too many calories, my body might think I’m starving and decrease my metabolism. Or if I decided to run 30 miles a week instead of 20, I might injure myself because my body wasn’t prepared for that significant change.
The next step is to create a meaningful weight loss/body composition SMART goal.
Hi, I’m Kirby Chapman, the creator behind The Healthy League. You can read about