Stop Losing Weight - Lose Fat Instead

If you're like most people, when you're trying to lose weight you hover around the scale constantly. Your biggest concern seems to be how much weight have you lost today. What most people don't seem to realize though, is that losing weight can sometimes be a problem. If you're focused on losing weight, you may not realize that you're losing the wrong weight.

The reason many fad weight-loss diets work so well, or seem to, is because they cause you to lose water weight very quickly. The human body tends to hold approximately 10 pounds worth of water weight on average. Depending on your lifestyle, and your health status, you could actually be holding as much as 20 or 30 pounds of water weight. Fad diets are designed to cause your body to lose that water weight quickly. So they seem like they're working, because your scale shows you losing weight.

Other diets might cause your body to lose muscle mass. Muscle weighs more than fat, so if you start losing muscle mass it will look good on the scale. Losing muscle mass is dangerous though, and can make you very ill.

How much weight you lose isn't really important, unless you are actually burning body fat. And the scale won't tell you if you're burning fat. You can tell when you're starting to burn fat though, because your clothes start fitting differently, and you can actually see the difference in the mirror. If you have a lot of body fat on your belly for example, you can look in the mirror and see if that fat is actually starting to go away. You can also take measurements at different spots on your body, and chart the progress of those changes as you go along. If your diet is simply helping you lose water weight, you won't see much difference in the measurements on your body.

Losing weight according to what scale tells you can also be detrimental to your progress. Women for example, will fluctuate in body weight at different times of the month. If you're working out, lifting weights, or doing anything else that may be strengthening and growing your muscles, this can cause the scale to show that you have gained weight because muscle mass weighs more than body fat.

So if you really want your body to be trimmer and slimmer, try to ignore what your scale says. Instead determine your progress and success by how your clothes fit, and how your measurements change. As those improve, you'll know it's much more likely that you're burning the excess body fat and losing weight for real.

2008, Kathy Burns-Millyard. Would you like more weight loss tips and techniques? Visit http://www.ScaleTippers.com now and don't forget to check out our free email tips letter too!