From early years we've thought of ourselves in terms of our weight and now as adults many of us are trying to manage our weight or simply lose weight.
Stop! This is a mistake!
Think for a moment about what weight actually is. It’s how much of a dent you make in the carpet. Now if you’re punching holes in the lino with your stilettoes then this might be relevant, but for most of us what we weigh isn't what matters.
What matters to us is how we look, how we feel and how healthy we are – so we need to focus on measuring those.
Standing on the scales is so easy, but just because it’s easy to measure doesn't mean it’s what we should focus on. Running a tape measure around the waist is easy too.
You need to measure what you value because you will value what you measure.
We feel good when our trousers are not so tight and we can use the next hole in our belt. It feels good to walk in to a shop and buy clothes the size you used to get in to.
However, there is a serious side to this. When you’re focused on losing weight you lose focus on how you’re achieving it.
You could lose weight by losing part of your body, but you wouldn't want that – that sounds nasty like losing a limb or an internal organ, but actually aggressive dieting really can mean losing muscle and bone density along with the fat and that is not good.
One alternative is to find out what your body fat percentage is. That’s how much of your weight is actually fat. There are small electronic gadgets that can measure this – some scales for home use or in gyms can measure this too. From this you can make sure you’re not losing too much of you that’s not fat.
It’s also better to focus on the body fat percentage rather than Body Mass Index (BMI) which is rather a blunt instrument on a personal level.
I’ll write more about this again, but for now think about what matters to you and don’t fall for just talking about how much you weigh.
