Why Losing Weight is Not Important

Many people concentrate on trying to lose weight every day. What they don't realize is that they could be making a very big mistake. When someone tries to start losing weight, they concentrate on what their scale tells them. In fact, what the scale says seems to be the most important part of their weight-loss process. If that's what you're focusing on though, you need to understand that you are probably not losing the right weight.

Losing weight for the sake of reducing what the scale tells you will not help very much at all. What the scale says does make most weight-loss diets look good, and even fad diets seem to work very well based on that too. Why is that? Simply put: water weight.

When you start concentrating on trying to lose weight, regardless of how you do it, the first thing your body normally tends to do is start dropping water weight. This is usually caused because you are changing the way you eat. So the first week or two, the scale may tell you you are doing really great with your weight loss. It doesn't last though, because it isn't real.

It's natural for the human body to hold weight in the form of water. In fact an average healthy adult usually carries about 10 pounds of water weight, but some people can carry as much as 30 pounds just in water weight alone. Many of the fast weight loss, and fad diet plans available on the market today are specifically designed to help you lose that water weight quickly so that it looks like you're getting what you pay for. Unfortunately, some of them are quite dangerous to because they cause you to start losing muscle mass to make it appear as if you're losing weight too.

Losing water weight is not real weight loss, and losing muscle mass is not only unreal but dangerous. The real thing you should be concentrating on, is losing fat from your body. Your weight scale is not going to tell you if you're burning fat ether, generally that can be determined by how your clothes fit and how your body looks.

If you start a weight loss or fitness program which is designed to burn body fat, you will start seeing obvious results when it is actually working. If you carry most of your body fat in the belly for example, you can keep track of your progress by simply measuring the size of your belly. You can do the same thing by using a pair of pants to determine how smugly or loosely they fit on you.

For example, if you start a weight loss program which involves burning extra fat from your belly, you will notice progress because you will literally lose inches in the measurement of your belly as you progress successfully. If you're using a pair of pants to gauge your progress, they may start out quite tight. In fact, you might choose a pair of which you cannot even button in the beginning. As you start burning real fat from your body however, you will notice those pants become easier to put on, and button. Over time, they may even start becoming loose around your stomach area because you're losing so much fat.

So when you decide it's time to start losing weight, try not to pay so much attention to what the scale tells you. Instead, concentrate on burning the excess fat from your body and you will be much happier.

©Kathy Burns-Millyard