Do you feel like you are enslaved to your scale? Are you obsessed with your daily appointments with those “weight digits”? Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s time you break up with your scale, and instead begin focusing on your lean body mass and fat percentage for a strong body.

As a physical fitness trainer who focuses on body transformations, one thing I emphasize on when I take on new clients, is the idea of fat loss as opposed to weight loss. What is the difference you may ask? Well, simply put, muscles always weigh more than fat, and that’s why you might find two people with the same height and weight looking completely different from one another. The person with higher muscle mass will look leaner, thinner and stronger, while the other person who weighs exactly the same, or in some cases more but has a higher fat percentage, will look heavier and less defined. So basically, the less fat you have, the leaner you will look.

Often times people lose weight, but they don’t realize that bad nutrition, and improper training (or none whatsoever) lead to low fitness levels, poor performance, health deficiencies, low immunity, ageing and various other physical problems. On the other hand, when you focus on fat loss, accompanied by proper nutrition, and regular exercise, you become stronger, improve your fitness levels, reduce your risk of developing diseases, sleep better, and look like a million bucks.

As you embark on your transformation journey, you have to break that connection you have with your scale, because most of the time, it’s not telling you the truth. And just like any habit, you have to psyche yourself up in order to break it. So, to change the “to look good, I have to weigh less” mindset you have to focus on the following:

-Remember that muscles weigh more than fat, yet they look a million times better than flab.
-Avoid starving yourself, muscles need fuel to grow. And by fuel, I mean healthy nutritious meals.
-Forget about the scale and focus on your body composition. Invest in a “at home body composition” scale as you track your transformation every six weeks, and not daily, as you would do with a normal weight scale. Trust me, you will thank me later! 
-Take before photos and track yourself every month with new ones. Seeing the changes will encourage you to keep going. 
-Always remember that this is not a phase, this is a lifestyle, and like everything else in life, you have to work hard to see results.

Ohan Shidanian for Transform-U