Weight loss has always been one of the most “buzzed about” health and fitness topics. Ask people around you if they want to lose weight and more than 80% people are likely to say yes. People are so obsessed with the idea of losing weight that they don’t hesitate to try all the crazy diets and treatments that claim to speed up the process.
For most people, though, the ultimate goal of losing weight is seeing the scale flashing 10 pounds less than last month. Unfortunately, most people trying to lose weight demand this new number, regardless of the method they use to get there and how that method affects their bodies.
Ask a healthcare professional or fitness expert and they will tell you how wrong this approach is. Adopting the right method is as important for our overall health as it is to maintain healthy weight. As opposed to losing weight, by any means, we should technically aim to lose those layers of fat that have accumulated on different parts of the body over the years.
Weight Loss vs. Fat Loss
Losing weight doesn’t have to be a challenge. The most popular method that a large number of people use to lose weight is starving themselves. While this actually works – people do lose weight when they stop eating – it badly affects their health in numerous ways. The starvation method not only loses fat but also the muscle, whereas the real goal of weight loss journey should be to lose fat only and to preserve, or maybe even gain, muscles. Losing muscle can actually make it even harder to lose weight.
To put it simply:
- Weight loss is the decrease in overall body weight i.e. the total weight of your organs, muscles, bones, and fat.
- Fat loss is burning and decreasing only the amount of fat present in the body.
Ditch the Scale – It Can Mislead You
Most people are obsessed with their weight – they mold their routines and eating patterns according to how much they weigh on the scale, which for many is the completely wrong approach.
Over and over again, people give up on their journey towards a healthy and successful lifestyle, thinking it’s not working just because they don’t see any change in the number on the scale. Although not always, but sometimes the scale can be deceiving – it cannot tell you if any change has taken place in the fat percentage of your body, you have lost muscles, water weight, or if your clothes now fit better.
If two people weigh the same on the scale, this does not mean their health condition is the same as well. One of them may be healthy whereas the other may be suffering from health issues. This could happen due to different body fat percentages. A scale cannot tell if you have 40% body fat or 10%.
This is why healthcare and fitness experts call this scale tunnel vision. The key to staying fit and healthy is to focus on losing fat rather than losing overall weight. There are many fat loss supplements available that assist you in losing fat and improving your overall health.
