Janet Bond Brill - Intermittent Fasting For Dummies

Scientists concur that keeping tabs on your progress by weighing yourself often (and recording the weight) is one of the best tools for helping you achieve your weight-loss goals. In fact, stepping on the scale is the best way to assess whether your intermittent fasting program is working for you. If you don’t see a drop in weight over time, then you need to reassess your program and tweak your plan. If you’re trying to hit a specific number or weight range, weighing yourself is the simplest and most accurate means of determining your starting point and whether you’ve reached your goal.

You may hate the idea of the scale, but frequent self-weighing is not only beneficial for losing weight, but it also helps prevent weight gain associated with aging as well as stopping weight regain after loss. Be brave, step on that scale!

Keep the following pointers in mind as you weigh yourself to ensure your results are as accurate as possible:

Remember not all scales are created equally. Different scales can yield different results at different times of day. Therefore, experts recommend routinely using the same scale to highlight your progress.

Weigh in the morning. If you weigh yourself at night, especially after you’ve eaten, you’re going to weigh more than you truly do. Weigh yourself first thing in the morning, unclothed, and definitely not after an exercise bout.

Wear your birthday suit. Clothes can add up to two pounds on the scale that don’t account for your actual body weight. Weigh yourself unclothed.

Don’t weigh every day. You won’t see major changes from day to day and checking the scale that frequently can do more harm than good by affecting your mood and motivation. Twice a week is ideal.

You don’t take a holistic approach. The number on the scale shouldn’t be the only measure of your success. Just because the numbers on the scale aren’t moving, or aren’t moving fast enough for you, doesn’t mean your body isn’t changing in a positive direction. You can still be losing fat, perhaps gaining a tad of muscle, and looking at your newfound energy boost as positive markers that your healthy lifestyle is working.

When you’re trying to lose weight, you can easily let the number on the scale ruin your day. Don’t overstress it. You may have eaten too much water- retaining sodium, you may be adding muscle, or you may have overeaten. Weight fluctuates naturally, and because weight on a scale isn’t always reflective of other positive changes that are happening in your body, I suggest you use other methods of assessment tools that I outline in the following sections.

Weighing yourself is not mandatory when following an intermittent fasting program. You’re weighing yourself to obtain data, not to judge yourself. However, if the scale isn’t an assessment tool you want to use, then ditch it!

Starting with a rough idea of your healthy weight is better than nothing. Here’s a quick, down and dirty calculation that can give you a fast estimate of whether you’re overweight. Since this calculation was originally created, many nations’ populations have literally expanded and people have gotten heavier. Therefore, keep in mind, that this guesstimate tends to make your ideal weight range much lower compared to the other calculations in this chapter:

For men: Start with 106 pounds for 5 feet in height and then add 6 pounds per inch where you’re taller than 5 feet or subtract 6 pounds per inch if you’re shorter than 5 feet. The healthy weight range would be plus or minus 10 percent.

For women: Start with 100 pounds for 5 feet in height and then add 5 pounds per inch where you’re taller than 5 feet or subtract 5 pounds per inch if you’re shorter than 5 feet. The healthy weight range would be plus or minus 10 percent.

All the calculations and assessments in this chapter are for adults only. Children should be assessed by their pediatrician or a pediatric dietitian.

Here’s an example of this method:

Debbie is a 50-year-old woman. She is 5-5 tall and weighs 160 pounds.

Debbie’s healthy weight range is between 112.5 pounds and 137.5 pounds. Therefore, according to this method (which does tend to underestimate ideal weight range), Debbie needs to lose approximately 20 pounds to reach her healthy weight goal.

You can access one of my favorite websites ( www.calculator.net/ideal-weight-calculator.html ) that uses several popular science-based weight formulas (based on your height, gender, and age) and then displays the results side-by-side to allow you to see your ideal weight at the click of your mouse. Plugging Debbie’s age and height into the calculator gives you a range of ideal body weights from 125 to 132 pounds.

Doctors use a mass screening tool to give them another quick way to instantly see if their patient’s weight puts their patient at risk for health problems. The body mass index (BMI) is a good estimate of body fat, based on height and weight, that applies only to adult men and women.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) defines BMI categories as such:

Healthy weight: 18.5 to 24.9

Overweight: 25 to 29.9

Obese: 30 or greater

You want to aim for a healthy BMI of less than 25 . Figure 2-1 shows a BMI chart where you can look up your BMI.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a great BMI calculator at www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmicalc.htm that does the work for you.

Source: www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmi_tbl.pdf

FIGURE 2-1:Body Mass Index chart.

If you like numbers and want to do the calculations yourself, then use this equation:

Here’s how this equation works:

Use Debbie from the previous section. If you input her height and weight into the online BMI calculator, you come up with a BMI of 26.6, a number greater than 25, so Debbie is overweight. How much weight would Debbie have to lose to get to a BMI of 25? For her height she’d need to weigh a little less than 150 to get to a BMI of 25, so in this case she would set a long-term weight loss goal of 11 pounds. I suggest you use this method for an accurate calculation when you’re setting your initial weight-loss goals.