You get up in the morning and step onto the scale. One of three things has happened: you’ve gained weight, you’ve lost weight, or you’ve stayed the same.

If you’ve lost weight, you’re ahead of the game and can afford to cheat a little. If you’ve gained weight, you may feel angry or depressed. If you’ve stayed the same, it looks as if what you’re doing is for nothing. And what’s the likely response to any of those three situations? To eat, of course. The scale can actually prompt you to eat.

The scale can work against you in other ways, too. Using a scale can lead you to the misconception that how you look is determined by what you weigh. That’s not always true.

The scale is one of the most inaccurate ways to measure fat loss that I know of. Your goal is to have your body look exactly the way you want it to, and the scale doesn’t reflect that. If you want to use something to measure your progress, a tape measure is better than a scale. Or use your clothes. Pounds and inches are not the same. The scale may not say that you’re losing weight, but if your clothes are getting looser, you know you’re making progress.

A pound of fat is much larger than a pound of muscle, yet it takes fewer calories to sustain. In other words, the more fat you have in proportion to muscle, the fewer calories you’ll need compared to someone the same weight. And the more muscular you are, the more calories you’ll need. That’s one reason you can watch someone who is thin and beautifully toned sit down and eat a huge meal without gaining weight. You can’t figure out where they’re putting it, but it’s all going into their muscles.

Furthermore, after you get to be twenty-six years old, your body starts playing trick on you. It takes half a pound of muscle each year and turns it into fat, whether you like it or not. It’s called aging. With each year that goes by, another half a pound of what used to be muscle is now fat.

That’s not so bad, you say, half a pound a year. But they add up. By the time you’re thirty-six years old, you have five more pounds of fat on your body than you did when you were twenty-six, even if you weigh the same. The clothes that fit you then won’t fit you now. Five more pound of fat is bigger than the muscles it replaced.

It’s a cruel trick, but our bodies do that to us. And it’s one of the reasons scales aren’t really the best way to measure your progress.

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