Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2320: Throw Away the Scale!

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

The power of the scale. (1:25) Why it’s irrelevant. (6:02) Four reasons why you should THROW AWAY your scale! #1 - It doesn’t measure body composition. (11:49) #2 - It takes our focus off other metrics. (14:31) #3 - It can mess with our heads. (21:46) #4 - Weight can fluctuate from day to day. (26:48) Related Links/Products Mentioned Exclusively for Mind Pump Listeners, NASM is offering their CPT (Certified Personal Trainer) Premium for the Price of Self-Study ($899) usually $1,249. Get All Inclusive for the Price of Premium ($1179) $1899 $151/mo. April Promotion: MAPS Anywhere | MAPS HIIT 50% off! ** Code APRIL50 at checkout ** Why The Scale Is Not Always The Best Way To Measure Progress – Mind Pump Blog Mind Pump #1917: Ten Common Traits Of Fit & Healthy People Mind Pump #2105: How To Become A Muscle Mommy Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health, and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, we talk about why you should not weigh yourself. Most of you, it's probably messing with your results. Now, this episode is brought to you by a sponsor, NASM. They're the world's premier certification for personal trainers. They have been for a very, very

long time and now that we work with them, you go through this link, you'll get yourself a discount on their certification. So go to NASMPT.com. Also, our program sales this month are Maps Anywhere and Maps Hit, both 50% off. If you're interested, go to mapsfitnessproducts.com and then use the code April50 for the discount. All right, here comes the show. Believe it or not, one of the things preventing you from getting to your fitness goals may be the scale. That's right.

What we found as trainers for over two decades, was that often telling our clients to stop weighing themselves got them to move forward in the right direction. And on the contrary, people that weighed themselves often, often didn't get great results. So what we're gonna tell you today in this episode is to throw your scale away. Get rid of it.

So great, we were talking about this episode and doing this and I was like simultaneously going through my DMs and literally just received a DM from somebody who has had finally taken that advice from us and thrown away the scale. Yeah it's great. What did they say? I'll read to you guys it was like that way I don't screw it up. I tend to do when I try and regurgitate what someone says. It says, you gents are so right about the scale. I put it away and after two months I caved. I gained weight, but after a minute of what the fuck,

oh shit, oh hell no, I remember my clothes are better fitting, was able to get into jeans, I was not able to before, plus my waist was hanging over. What? I am stronger. Set up a gym in my garage with squat rack bar trap Etc and get out there when I can I work full-time as a primary caregiver for my mom who suffers from dementia and neuropathy And her legs it is a struggle for time

But I do get in three times a week and have dumbbells at work for those days I cannot work out at home. I have I have 40 more pounds to go and I'm not stressing I'm the oldest in my office, older than the doctors, coworkers, but knowing I am healthier, stronger, more active than all of them combined. Well that makes up for being the elder of the practice. That's awesome. Huge thanks to you guys. Fitting clothes better, stronger, feeling better. Yeah, the scale is, boy, you know, I remember when I figured this out with my clients, I started noticing this trend with clients where they would,

because when you first become a trainer, you're taught to weigh people, test their body fat, do their circumference measurements. It was like a weekly thing that you're supposed to do, right? They check in with you and you do these measurements. And I noticed my clients' moods would shift. Oh my God, yeah. Radically if the scale went in the wrong direction

even though everything else was moving in the right direction. Then it became like this. It just completely crap them out. It not only crap them out but then it would cause them to over correct or do things inappropriately because they were freaking out over the scale. So you know at some point I don't remember how long it took me but I remember telling my clients we're not going to weigh you anymore. In fact the clients that I did track for myself as a trainer, I'd have them stand backwards on the scale and they wouldn't look at the number.

I'd do the same thing. Yeah. You know that this is actually one of those things that is so powerful that, there's like things that we talk about on the podcast that obviously we've learned as coaches and trainers over time. And then there's things that I learned as a coach and I,

and I figured out relatively early with my clients to your point. Like it wasn't that long into training that I realized, Oh wow, like, boy, if I, if I weigh my clients, every time I see them, they just ended up, it's like rarely ever, they not discouraged, right? Like even when they lose weight, it's not enough. Or if it's, if they do lose weight, it's like, or if they don't lose weight, then they're completely discouraged.

And yet I was still on that same hamster wheel, not realizing like the power of it. Like, so yeah, okay, you see it with your clients every day and you go, oh, I need to change this behavior because they're so attached to this scale that it's dictating how their mood and how they they work out stuff like that so quickly pivoted from that like you if I would I'd have them weigh just so I have the stats I'd turn them around backwards and I would tell them specifically why I don't want them to

weigh themselves I don't want to get in their head I know what I'm doing but yet here I was weighing myself in the morning weighing myself at night every single day yeah still of my life and so And so funny how obvious it was to me as a coach or trainer to see that in my clients and know how powerful it was, yet I still was susceptible to that and fell for that trap of still weighing myself and it driving my behaviors around nutrition and training. And so it took a really long time for that to come full circle for me to realize,

oh shit, even I'm guilty of the power of this thing. Well, I think initially too, I was a bit of a naive trainer in that like, I didn't really know like how often like your body just like fluctuates and then the weight can, depending on what you ate the night before, depending on like your water retention, depending on sleep, stress. I mean, there's just, it's just all over the place in terms of it being like something where it's actually more of a distraction than anything else. And like, like overall, like more macro trends is what you really need to overall like more macro trends is what you really need to kind of peer into occasionally. But I mean, at that point, that point in the beginning of my career, I was like, that's

the focus is trying to get your clients like that immediate result in weight was a big part of that. So we got to lose the weight and we got to show them that you're valuable in what we're doing. Well, it's interesting when you think about it, because still to this day, we get people that say things like, I want to lose 30 pounds. That's still very prevalent in our space. Like, if you were to look and go, what is the most common goal?

It's to lose weight. It's to lose weight. We have episodes titled like that, specifically because of the common goal. Because it's searched so much. So that's crazy when you think about it. When you think about our journey with the scale, so much to the point that I would say it's damn near irrelevant.

It's like that irrelevant. I don't ever weigh myself. Literally weighing myself now is just like, man, it's been forever since I got on this scale. I wonder where I'm at. It's more like that than it is like, oh, did I do this right or isn't that like, so think about that for a second.

Like something that, a tool that we all used a lot early on in our career has now reached a point in our career that I would say it's irrelevant. It is. It's so irrelevant. It's funny. I don't care who you are, where you're at, really. I mean, I guess granted if you're morbidly obese,

hundreds of pounds. I don't use it, I only use it as part of a combination of metrics, never on its own. Yeah, you just reminded me of this bit, this comedian did this bit where he says he weighs himself every morning with his cat, and then he starves his cat. So you can see his scale. I'm moving down.

I've never heard that one. There's one way to do it. You know, you told me, it's interesting you said what you said about yourself, Adam. I was the same way. I would weigh myself and look in the mirror and study my body all the time until I had developed some health issues, which people who listen to the show

regularly know, I've talked about this before, but I had to throw the scale away and I had to stop really studying myself in the mirror in order to improve my health. At the end of a year, when I finally allowed myself to do those things, I realized I had been, I was more fit and I looked better

than I'd ever looked before by stopping my hyper-focus on that metric. You know, weight is, it's a single metric, but, and it just tells you mass. It doesn't tell you what you're weighing. You know, the joke that I would tell people when they would become members of my gym,

when they'd say, I wanna lose weight, I'd say, well, we could cut your leg off. Is that the kind of weight you'd like to lose? And they'd laugh, but it's, look, it's a serious question. Not that you'd wanna cut your leg off, but what kind of weight would you want to lose? And weight looks very different, depending on where it comes from. If you were to look at a six foot man who's 200 pounds at 20% body fat versus a six foot

man who's 200 pounds at 10% body fat, the same body, the weight is exactly the same. They would look radically different. Vastly different because the body fat percentages are different. Same thing with women. You take a woman who's 150 pounds at a high body fat versus 150 pounds at a low body fat, same height, and the leaner person would look radically different, have a much smaller physique, better curves, better shape, yet if they were standing on the scale, it would say the exact same thing.

So that's why it's irrelevant is it just tells you mass. And in like a big, it's why it was a bit of an overgeneralization when I said it's, it's completely irrelevant or like it doesn't, your weight doesn't matter at all because of course there's exceptions to the rule. Right. So I'm, I, I am sensationalizing that a bit. Like, like if someone is 150 pounds overweight, like getting that person down 50 pounds plus off the scale

is not gonna be a bad thing. But I tell you what, I would say 80%, maybe more, of my clients who needed to lose 10, 20, 30, even upwards of 40 pounds, they would say, which is I would say most people fit in that category. We technically could have kept the scale exactly the same and just change their body composition and they would be unbelievably happy

with the physique they built. And I think that message can't be said enough because people don't think that way or else they wouldn't say things like, I need to lose 30 pounds. It would be cool to see a movement of like, stay the same weight but lose the body fat. I tried to start that.

So when I first got on Instagram, the few people that probably still listen to this podcast that were following me 10 plus years ago, that was my initial goal. I weighed in, I wanna say at 214 pounds and 20% body fat. So kind of similar to what you were saying. I was 214 though. 214 or 212.

And the goal was, I actually announced this on my Instagram to my, you know, back then 100 followers or whatever it was and said, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to try my best to keep my weight exactly the same, but show you how I can completely change my physique. And at the end of it, I was literally the exact same way. I think you saw me go down to like 212 up to 216. So I had this like four pound, you know, up or down that I stayed, but I stayed right around the same. And it was my, it was my, and that was the goal was to kind of hover around. And honestly, I actually think that's a really good thing for people to try

to, if you have, if you're not currently weight training, you're not currently following a meal plan, then a better goal than losing weight, even if you know, If you're not currently weight training, you're not currently following a meal plan, then a better goal than losing weight, even if you know you need to lose 30 pounds, is actually stay the same weight, but build some muscle and lose body fat simultaneously because that will probably give you a better, because in order to do that, to create more movement, to exercise, also change your eating habits, and not go down on the scale, or not go up means you're probably hitting

right around what the body needs in order to support the movement and exercise you're doing. And if you're stimulating it and you're sending a signal to build muscle, it should adapt and build muscle. And if we do this just right, you should see a nice exchange of building muscle and to losing body fat which should equal out

to about the same on the scale. I used to use this as a sales method in the gyms that I would run. I've told this example many times but I had a female trainer who I would, when I would have a potential member, I would challenge them and I'd say, if you could guess my trainer's weight within 10 pounds,

they'll give you a month free membership. If you can't guess it, then you gotta sign up today. And they'd laugh and we'd say, okay. And I'd call this female trainer in and they would all guess, every person would guess, and I knew it, it was like clockwork, 90 to 100 pounds, she was petite, right? Oh, she weighed 100 pounds, oh, 90 pounds.

I think the heaviest somebody ever guessed was 110. She was 135 pounds, I believe, but very lean. You know, the thing about body composition The heaviest somebody ever guessed was 110. She was 135 pounds I believe, but very lean. The thing about body composition is it's what determines your health and it's also what determines what you look like. It's not total weight. Total weight doesn't tell you much. It's what that is made up of.

When muscle takes up roughly maybe three fourths, maybe a little more, three fourths of the space of body fat. So if everybody lost 15 pounds of fat and gained 15 pounds of muscle, which is a lot, everybody would look smaller. But it's dramatic. Dramatic, you'd be smaller. You'd be almost a fourth smaller,

but you wouldn't just be a fourth smaller everywhere. You'd be more than a fourth smaller in the places it matters, like your waist would probably go down by 50% because you don't have all this muscle around your waist, then your shoulders would come out a little bit, your glutes would come out a little bit. Everything would get more defined.

You would look extremely different. A scale doesn't tell you that at all. In fact, the scale, if you just look at your weight on the scale and it goes down, that could be bad news if you're trying to lose weight and you're losing muscle. Like if you lost 10 pounds of muscle and you got on the scale and you're like, wow, I'm losing 10 pounds and moving in the right direction, you are not moving in the right direction. Your health has got worse.

You look worse when you take your clothes off because now you're flabbier. Your body fat percentage actually went up because now your total body fat is a higher percentage of your body weight because you lost some weight from muscle. You've also slowed down your metabolism, which means now gaining body fat becomes easier. You've lost strength and mobility, and you've lost insulin sensitivity and androgen receptor density for your hormones.

And it's hard to sustain, so it's more likely to yo-yo back. You're more likely to become sick. So the scale doesn't tell you that. All the scale says is weight, but it's body composition that matters. And it's funny because you'll say this to people, and here's why we say throw the scale away,

because people are like, well fine, I'll get a body fat test too, or whatever. Which is cool, body fat test plus scale, then you figure out what's going on. I don't care, I used to do both with clients, and even if the scale didn't move but they got leaner, and I'd be like, look, you gained four pounds of muscle, you lost four pounds of body fat,

it would still mess with their heads. Yeah, but I have this weight that I have in mind. I still want the scale to go down. Body composition is what matters. The second part or reason why you should throw your scale away is that it takes your focus off of other metrics. I remember clearly examples of when I would have a client who I'd be training, and this was later on when I'd say, okay, we'll weigh you less frequently or whatever,

and they'd be getting stronger, they're looking different, they're making comments like, oh my God, my clothes feel different. Well, it's like the DM I just read. Yeah. That person was literally saying, I listened to you guys, I threw the scale away, I didn't look at it for two months,

all the things, waist is tighter, stronger in the gym, feeling better, stomach comes in, all these things, that. But then saw the scale, they gained weight. And then it's like, it's so funny how that can like, totally, all of a sudden, now you just said all that positive shit about yourself, and then you could all of a sudden see the scale and think you're failing. Yeah, a lot of times they're stronger.

A lot of times they relieve a lot of chronic pain and so they're waking up with no pain, you know, in better mood. There's just so many other things involved to focus on that are positively happening, but if you're just stuck on this number on the scale, man, does that just take you away. I remember one woman in particular,

I convinced her because we had trained for a little while and the scale was really messing with her. I said, okay, throw your scale away, don't weigh yourself anymore. In fact, I had her bring it into my studio and I kept it. I said, I'll weigh you in 60 days. In 60 days we'll see where you're at, but for now I want you to trust me. We're going to pay attention to all these other things. So over the six day period, she got stronger, she had more energy, she felt better, she could move better.

She's like, oh my God, my coworkers are commenting that I keep losing weight, my husband says I look so much leaner. And the mistake I made was is I asked her to guess, well based off of everything you're hearing, how you feel, how much weight do you think she lost? She's like, oh I feel like I lost at least 12 pounds. We stepped on the scale, three pounds.

It went down three pounds. Now she was distraught. Like crushed. Oh my God, I feel like I lost at least 12 pounds. We stepped on the scale, three pounds. It went down three pounds. Now she was distraught. Like crushed. Oh my God, I only lost three pounds. I'm like, all the other stuff you felt, everything, all the comments, everything that people noticed, the fact that you thought you lost,

that's all still true. But the fact that it only went down three pounds now is making you feel, and it was this really tough position for her to be in a really tough mental battle that she had to deal with. Now what had happened was she had gained muscle and lost body fat and she had lost a little bit more body fat than the muscles she gained. She'd lost a lot of size, she felt better, metabolism was faster but because the scaling only went down three pounds and

she expected a 12-pound weight loss, she was disappointed, upset, and angry, and was questioning the whole thing. Well, and a lot of times in that situation, because you're talking about she's added muscle, so that she probably did lose 12 pounds or more of fat, but she added six pounds or more of muscle, and so on the scale it's only showing a difference. I don't remember what the number was,

but it was significant. Right, I'm sure she did, if she lost. I remember specifically because she had really good muscle building genetics. We didn't know this she'd never been an athlete before but she really developed good metabolism, good shape, good structure and over a 60-day period her strength went through the roof, metabolism was was humming but I remember how distraught she was because the scale only showed three pounds of a loss and she was like oh my god are we doing the right thing maybe I'm eating too much or whatever

and I'm like oh my, we should have never. Just dissension immediately. Yes, now here's the interesting thing. When you, and this is it, because weight is what's talked about all the time, we place that as the top of the metrics. It's actually not nearly, it's not even close to the top of the metrics.

No, a lot of this is, I feel like on our shoulders, really as trainers in the space because. Well, our industry promotes it. We have to learn to, you know, and I wasn't there yet in my career. Like, I think it was definitely after Justin had already left me by that time before I started to communicate this to my trainers where towards

the end of my career, coaching trainers, did I start to teach them this? Like when you see, we used to have this list of stuff like skin, hair, nails, energy, libido, mood, you know, all the strength. Dysentery probably. Right. Sleep.

Yeah, this big old list. And I would teach my trainers that every time your client comes to visit you, ask these questions. Ask them, how's your sleep been doing? Oh, how's your libido? And you have to retrain them. even though I know they hired you, you know, to help me lose 40 pounds, you got to retrain them to be paying attention. Otherwise, if as coaches and trainers, if we're not doing that, and we're not educating them around the value of all these things, we're really doing them a disservice, even if you get them to lose a 40 pounds. Even if you get them to the goal that they've hired you to go do and you neglect to attach all these other incredible values of why they're exercising, you really are doing them a disservice

and you're really failing them. You're temporarily giving them this arbitrary number. They'll never build a long-term relationship. Yeah, they won't. It's sure that you, okay, so what? A client who has good discipline hired you. Great job. And you can tell them what to do you

You told them two plus two is four and they agreed and they followed through on it But it doesn't mean that you significantly change this person's life yet until you can teach them to have a better relationship With exercise and nutrition and all these other things that are so important. They're never going to move past the scale thing Here's why i've used this example before, but I saw it, but I'll use it again. There's this wonderful, this is a wonderful analogy because, uh, I think it exemplifies what we're talking about, but there's this, this psychology experiment, it's a very popular one. You've probably seen it before where there's a bunch of people passing

a basketball back and forth. There's things like 10 people and you have to count how many times they pass the basketball. So the guy in the beginning of the video says, okay, count how many times people pass the basketball. Let's see if you get it right. And then you're watching and you're counting, counting, counting. And at the end he says, did you see the gorilla walk through the crowd? And you're like, what? Then they rewind the video and literally a man in a

gorilla suit walks through the crowd, but you don't perceive him because you're focused simply on counting the times the basketball is being passed. So when your focus is on the scale, you end up ignoring or not perceiving all these other potential benefits or detriments. You could be losing weight on the scale and you're happy, but you could be feeling terrible, energy's going down, not realizing you're doing it the wrong way, hair's falling out, have clients like this,

I'm losing weight, and your hair's falling out, your nails are brittle, you don't feel good, this is not moving in the right direction. So it takes your focus off other metrics which I'll say this, here's the interesting thing, take weight off the plate for a second. If we focus on other metrics, strength, energy, sleep, libido, mobility, and we move those all forward, the scale doesn't matter anymore. You are moving in the right direction and you are getting leaner and you're going to look better.

And if your goal is to lose a lot of weight, 50 pounds let's say, the scale will move down. That scale will move in the right direction when all the other metrics move in the right direction. This scale by itself doesn't guarantee the other metrics move in the right direction. You can go up or down on the scale and you could be getting a worse health, regardless of what your

goal is. You could be trying to build muscle or gain weight, move it up, become worse with your health. Or try to lose weight, go down on the scale, health becomes worse. And it's really hard to be hitting all those other markers and not be significantly improving your health. That's right.

If all those other markers are improving, even incrementally, are improving, you are getting healthier. You are getting fitter, regardless of what the scale has to say. Right, and the third part about this is it messes with your head. Okay, here's how you know that you're somebody who should throw the scale away. If your weight on the scale will then dictate how you feel for the rest of the day,

time to throw the scale away. What did the scale just tell you? It told you nothing about you as a person. It told you nothing about how healthy you are. It told you nothing about muscle building and performance or anything like that. If you weigh yourself day to day and the scale goes up a couple pounds and you feel, oh man, I'm gonna get my fat clothes out, I'm not gonna go to the dinner anymore,

I don't like the way I look, I feel terrible, I'm self-conscious or whatever, then you need to take that scale and throw it away. That is a dysfunctional relationship. This is or whatever, then you need to take that scale and throw it away. That is a dysfunctional relationship. This is an abusive boyfriend that you need to get rid of because that should not dictate how you feel on a day-to-day basis. And that's how it messes with your head.

And when it messes with your head like that, what ends up happening is you're over-correct. Over-correct. You're over-correct. And this has happened multiple times with clients clients that like you don't get an unfavorable result and Even though they have like upward trend in terms of their progress and a lot of these other metrics are starting to really move In a positive direction just completely will abandon the game plan It just no I guess what the recipe is I have to like start myself start myself And then I have to like sweat everything off

and I have to go in that direction. And this is the frustrating part and really something you have to outline and forecast for clients so they know like this is a longer process than the immediate. And also the scale is not gonna be beneficial for me to use. This part of the conversation is so important and so difficult.

It really was highlighted for me in during my journey of competing. Because never in my life have I been so detailed about the calories I'm consuming, the water I'm in taking, the amount of time I'm working, the steps I'm, I mean, I was just, every metric was accounted for. And of course the scale too.

And you can have, you can have all the knowledge in the world around nutrition, physiology, and that understanding of what you need to do in order to change this body composition like I did. And still that, if you allow that scale to be the driver of your decisions, it'll still fuck with you even at that level. I mean, that was one of the most difficult things was, I'm like checking my boxes. OK, had this much water.

OK, ate this macros. OK, got my workouts in. OK, like hitting, hitting, hitting, hitting everything. And then something happens where my scale stayed the same, or went up, or went to a couple pounds too quick. And the feeling that I would get of like, oh, what am I doing wrong? So I think I told you this not that long ago, why this is where this was the birth of this rule for me, where I would start things like, okay, one, I'm going to only let the body

fat percentage. And even then the body fat percentage, I would need to have two bad tests before I would have chest because how much these variables, these things, these ways that we measure what we think is what's telling us if we're doing good or not. Like I needed to have like multiple bad. Trends. Trends in order to correct.

Because if I went by every time I got on the scale, it moved in a direction I didn't want it to move. Oh my God. And imagine. So when what that highlighted for me is all the years experience I have, how dialed I am and then I know this about the scale and yet it's still messing with my head. All I went was like, Oh my God, how many people are wrestling with this at home? It's so powerful. Yeah, I'll tell you what, I, training clients, I could easily screw somebody up

by having them weigh themselves regularly, and often they would do much better when I had them not weigh themselves at all. Now we would look at other metrics, and I would make sure that they focused on other aspects, like, again, like their strength was one of my favorite ones, like are you getting stronger? How do you feel?

How do your clothes fit? How's your energy? Let's pay attention to all these things and let's take the scale away. Whenever I did that, people would always trend in the right direction. In my early days when I would have clients weigh regularly, which is what I do, oh make sure you weigh yourself, let me know, whatever, it almost always moved people in the wrong direction because they would over correct. Uh oh, the scale went up a couple pounds,

tomorrow I'm gonna starve myself. Oh no, I'm starving, I'm gonna binge. Oh, I need to over run, I gotta go run. I know Sal said don't train today, but I'm gonna go push myself even harder because the scale's not moving in the right direction. And it was almost like kryptonite. The scale was almost like kryptonite.

Almost always would screw people up because of how it tends to screw with our heads. And body weight in general, and this is especially true for women. Like they say, never ask a woman how much she weighs, right? It's like this number that people are afraid of or what does it mean? This is why strength training for women, thankfully these days strength training is gaining popularity among women. But for a long time, women didn't like it because what if the scale goes, even if I'm leaner, what if the scale goes up?

It's like, well, who cares if you're leaner? That doesn't mean anything. You know, it's pretty crazy. By the way, here's the last part. Your weight can fluctuate on a day-to-day basis pretty dramatically, and it doesn't mean anything. You know how much water you can gain or lose in a day, depending on?

Nine pounds. Was that you? Nine pounds. So I did this intentionally to prove this point that you're bringing up right now. I did it during when I was posting on Instagram and growing the following and stuff like that and I was tracking my journey. One of the most craziest things that especially when I started to ramp the water up obviously that's you keep an account right so people that are going

no way yes I documented it I shared it I showed it. Yeah you're a big dude a lot of my six foot three got a lot of muscle. I'm a big dude I was drinking I got it to almost three gallons of water at one point when I was pushing the water really hard So there's a lot and then you you guys already know my peeing situation in the night three times and stuff like that So, of course this there's gonna be this massive But I mean I would have never guessed it to be that that potential but think about that for a second again I'm an extreme example, but how much you can fluctuate and how much, by the way, to visually that looks different. So the way my body would look, completely carved up,

water retaining, everything high, to the morning time of nine pounds of water weight coming off of me. If you ever see nine pounds of water weight come off you, you look like you lost 10, 15 pounds of body fat. So I, and that was the point of the pictures I show people. I would show these two pictures of myself, of 24 hours apart from each other.

And I looked like completely different. I mean, nine pounds, nine pounds of all inflated up and then all of a sudden deflated afterwards. And I'd show people like, this is no pump, no nothing. This is just literally me, 24 hours of letting all the water sudden deflated afterwards. And I'd show people like, this is no pump, no nothing. This is just literally me 24 hours of letting all the water come out of it. I could very quickly gain or lose five pounds within a couple days by simply manipulating water,

water retention, either through carbohydrates, sodium, sweating, water intake, that's it. But a lot of people don't realize that that happens naturally throughout the day. Like maybe you drank less, maybe you ate out more, so you had more sodium, maybe you lost sleep. Losing sleep tends to cause water retention. More inflamed.

So does stress. So do hormone fluctuations can change things. Like if a man's testosterone goes up, so does his water retention. Of course women have their monthly cycle, so they understand at least that aspect of it. But if you weigh yourself every... My point with this is if you weigh yourself every single day and you're seeing these fluctuations, it's messing with your head every single day.

And what you're trying to do with these water fluctuations is correct with diet and activity. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. So again, towards the end of my career, I would weigh clients once a month and I wouldn't even let them look at the scale. And this was in combination with body fat percentage tests and circumference measurements and all the other metrics we mentioned earlier. Only then did it really make sense because then I could see it's body fat, it's muscle, oh, and you feel good or you feel bad or energy is going up, oh, you're stronger or you're not stronger. That's when it made sense. Well, towards the back

half of my career the way I used it was more so just to make sure that I wasn't swinging any direction too much. I didn't want to see us go up too much, I didn't want to see us go down too much and so because another mistake that a lot of people make especially when your goal is weight loss is they love to see that first nine pounds come off the scale. And like for me as a coach and a trainer, that would be like, oh wow, I cut way too much. What am I doing? Like that was versus celebrating that with, I think, I think the young trainer did, right? I have a client hires me when you lose 50 pounds. I show him nine pounds off the first week because half of that's water and just carbohydrates.

Most of it. Right. And so you're like, yeah, we're doing the right thing. I would be like, oh, whoa, I need to feed you more. So I use the scale to really, OK, if I'm feeding this person appropriately, I'm training them appropriately, then I should have a nice exchange of building muscle and burning body fat.

I kind of want to keep their weight the same. And I would allow that to dictate increasing calories or not, which is so difficult to explain to somebody who is hiring you to lose weight that you're like, Hey, I'm, I'm weighing us to make sure we don't lose anything right now. Like that's really hard to be able to get that across to the, the value of that when you're,

when you're first getting started with a client of like, man, we are far better off keeping our weight the same building your metabolism up so that the weight loss part of this becomes a lot easier than we are racing to. How low can we get that scale as fast as we can? That's a losing battle. There's a losing battle. It reminds me of these commercials and ads.

I had a client that used to get these Hydro-Colonics, and she would show me these ads, and they would say things like, lose six pounds in a session. She's like, oh, it's crazy. I lost like six pounds. Is that the enemas? Yes! Yeah, yeah, they were funny. I'm like, that's not's crazy. I lost like six pounds. Is that the animos? Yes.

I'm like, that's not body fat. They just flushed a bunch of water and stuff back. Anyway, it's crazy stuff. Look, if you want to learn about peptides, peptides are new here in medicine. In fact, you've probably heard of GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide, Wigovia, Ozempic. But there's other peptides, ones that raise growth hormone,

ones that help with recovery. if you want to learn about them We have a free peptide guide cost nothing and it teaches you about all the most popular peptides You can find it at mind pump free calm you can also find us all on Instagram Justin is that my pump Justin I'm at mind pump media and Adam is that mind pump Adam Thank you for listening to mind pump if your goal is to build and shape your body dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Super Bundle

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