People are more concerned than ever about their health and fitness, and when asked about their goals, weight loss is often at or near the top of the list. With so many people concerned about their health and actively trying to lose weight, you’d think the percentage of people who are overweight would be declining, but the obesity rate remains as high as ever. There are many reasons for this, but one problem is that people often focus on losing weight, when they should be focusing on losing fat.
You may be thinking that losing weight and losing fat are essentially the same thing, but while they are similar, they are definitely not the same. As you probably realize, losing fat means decreasing the amount of fat stored in your body, while losing weight means decreasing the amount of any number of substances in your body (fat, muscle, bone, water, etc.), many of which you don’t want to lose. Although people mostly use the phrase “lose weight,” they are almost always referring to losing fat.
It makes sense to think in terms of losing weight rather than losing fat, because it’s easy to track weight loss using just a scale, which most people already own. Monitoring your body fat is significantly more difficult and requires additional equipment and tests. Also, some body fat tests are not very accurate and the ones that are reliable can be expensive, time consuming and/or require a trained person to administer.
Another reason why people think mainly about losing weight is because the concept of losing weight is simpler than the concept of losing fat. Weight loss involves an increase or decrease of a single number (weight), while fat loss is typically measured in terms of a percentage (body fat), which is not numerically significant for most people. Of course, society also plays an important role, with almost all the media mentioning the term weight loss more often than fat loss.
Using the term weight loss instead of fat loss may sound like a small difference in vocabulary, but this seemingly small variation can have a big impact on your ability to lose fat. The main problem is that people understand that losing weight is different from losing fat, but they still assume that when they lose weight, all or at least most of the weight lost comes from fat. As a result, it creates the mindset that weight loss equals fat loss.
This mindset is highly problematic, because it leads to weight loss being used as a direct measure of fat loss. Since the scale is used to measure weight loss, people take decreases on the scale to mean decreases in fat loss, although they are often far from the same thing. By having this mindset, true fat loss becomes less and less important and the real goal is to try to lose weight, only to read lower on the scale.
As long as your main goal is just to get one number lower on the scale, it usually leads you to make decisions that ultimately hurt your fat loss. There are many ways to lose weight, and many of them result in healthier weight loss (muscle, bone mass, etc.) than actual weight loss, but the scale can’t tell the difference between them. Also, approaches designed to maximize weight loss alone, especially quick weight loss, generally result in the highest amounts of the healthy types of weight being lost and the lowest percentages of long-term fat loss.
By only worrying about losing weight, people don’t have to worry about having a full health and fitness program, causing them to focus too much on doing everything they can to lose weight. This approach has caused many people to follow poorly designed weight loss programs that only result in short-term weight loss or yo-yo dieting, often leading to increases in body fat percentage over time.
Probably the most common example of this problem is when people eat fewer and fewer calories as a way to encourage weight loss. Everyone knows that you have to eat fewer calories than you burn if you want to lose weight, so they assume that the fewer calories they eat, the more weight and fat they will lose. If you don’t already know, the above assumption is completely wrong.
Excessively cutting calories and making other drastic changes to increase weight loss can lead to significant weight loss at first, but much of this weight loss is due to water and will return as soon as you start eating more calories. In addition, this type of weight loss causes a decrease in muscle mass, especially if you do not exercise, which will decrease your metabolism and make your body burn fewer calories every day. This will also make it more difficult to lose fat in the future.
If you want to maximize fat loss, your main goal can’t just be to lose weight. You need to find a balance between cutting calories and maintaining a well-balanced nutritional program that includes adequate amounts of protein, healthy fats, high-quality carbohydrates, water, and other nutrients. Then you still need to exercise, get enough rest/sleep, and minimize your stress level. All of these things are important to keep your body working properly and help you maintain overall good health.
Taking this well-balanced approach may not result in as great a weight loss as a program designed just to make you lose weight, but this slower approach will cause you to lose a greater percentage and probably even a greater amount of total body fat. Plus, since this approach helps you maintain more of your good weight (muscle, etc.), you’ll be able to maintain your fat loss and continue to lose even more fat in the future.
On the other hand, programs that only focus on losing weight usually end up sacrificing elements that are essential for long-term success and overall health. Many weight loss programs do not provide enough calories or nutrients to maintain your metabolic rate, daily recovery capacity, and immune system function. Eventually, your progress will stall and your body will essentially shut down until you switch to healthier eating and exercise habits.
However, once you stop the weight loss program, you will probably regain most or all of the weight, even if you start eating right and exercising. This is because the previous weight loss was not quality fat loss and this type of weight loss cannot be sustained under normal circumstances. At the end of the day, the only weight loss that really matters is fat loss, and the problem with simply trying to lose weight is that it often results in losing the wrong kind of weight, which actually hurts your ability to achieve long-term fat loss.
