Newsletter Monday
Hello Reader,
I was reading a new research paper this weekend and, to be honest, it wasn’t especially surprising.
It echoed what we’ve seen many times before.
Losing excess weight is generally associated with improvements in health. But as always, there are caveats. Lose too much muscle along the way and some of those benefits begin to disappear. Exercise is one of the best ways of protecting against that.
Good.
Useful.
Expected.
It got me thinking.
It’s incredibly easy to become so focused on losing weight that we forget why we wanted to lose it in the first place.
The goal is never really to see a smaller number on the scales.
The goal is to become healthier, and to feel better.
Those aren’t always the same thing.
People who are unwell, having treatment, riddled with stress and anxiety can lose weight quite quickly, they often aren’t healthier for it.
Many people can clean up their diet, start training and get dramatically stronger, fitter, healthier, more mobile and more confident, but the scales don’t show much.
The person whose blood pressure improved, blood sugar improved, who can now get off the floor more easily and stop dreading the stairs is likely in a better position than the person who has dropped a stone but hasn’t eaten more than tea and biscuits in a month.
If you only looked at the scales, you’d miss the bigger picture.
It reminded me of a podcast I’ve been listening to by Michael Easter.
His guest (a professor from the University of Utah whose name hasn’t stuck) was talking about what happens when tracking data becomes more important than the reason you started.
He gave the example from his own life, of tracking his diet when he wanted to lose weight.
He soon felt better when he was eating proper food.
His weight came down a bit, then stalled.
Now anyone who has tracked their food and cooked from scratch will know the faff.
You have to enter every ingredient then try and work out your portion size.
So over time, he ended up buying pre-packaged meals because they came with all the nutrition information neatly calculated.
He hadn’t set out to eat more processed food.
He’d simply become so good at tracking the metric that he’d drifted away from the original goal.
I see versions of this all the time.
People become obsessed with…
- hitting exactly 10,000 steps
- checking their sleep score every morning
- worrying that their HRV has dropped by three points
- buying another supplement because someone on Instagram promised it would optimise something
- squeezing another gram of protein into a day that was already perfectly adequate
None of those things are inherently bad.
Tracking can be useful.
Data can be useful.
Technology can be useful.
But every now and then it’s worth asking yourself one simple question.
“What problem am I actually trying to solve?”
If the answer is…
“I want to become healthier.” Or “I want to feel better”
…then don’t let the data become more important than the reason you started.
Don’t let food tracking stop you enjoying home-cooked meals.
Don’t let a fitness watch convince you that a lovely walk “doesn’t count” because you forgot to charge it.
Don’t let the scales persuade you that nothing is improving when your clothes fit better, you’re lifting heavier weights, your blood pressure has fallen and you’re slinging that bag of compost into the car boot like a pro.
The metric isn’t the mission.
Health is.
Sometimes the scales move.
Sometimes they don’t.
But if you’re getting stronger, moving more, eating mostly real food, sleeping as well as life allows and gradually building a body that’s capable of doing more than it could six months ago…
…you’re probably making more progress than the scales would have you believe.
