What Doesn’t Get Measured, Doesn’t Get Managed!

March 23, 2014

The rule of thumb for staying in shape is not to gain a lot of weight.  But who said weight gain is a bad thing?  Doesn’t more weight just equal more muscle?  Well, when most people are honest, they know they want to and need to weigh less.  We may want to look like the TV personalities we see, and even though we may understand/rationalize that photographs and/or TV cameras may add 10 pounds and maybe we are really not that heavy, we usually know the facts:  that we are  fatter and/or heavier than we really want to be.

So let me ask you a question?  How much do you weigh?  If you had trouble saying the answer out loud, what are you doing to change things?

Well, one simple thing you can do is hit the scale every day.  You may have heard a piece of advice preached by the diet industry…..”Don’t weigh yourself more than once a week.” HOGWASH!  Many diet authorities claim that body weight may fluctuate up and down from day to day (that is true), and so they say that daily weigh-ins are futile.  HOGWASH!

Following a diet only appears to free you from the need to weigh yourself every day.  It is one of the features that the diet industry advertises to attract people to their programs.  Their claim is that if you follow the diet’s rules, you will lose weight without bothering to weigh and measure.  HOGWASH!  See above, ”What doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get managed.”

Diets don’t teach you to properly balance your diet and activity to maintain your weight and keep the weight off when the diet is over.  At F.I.T., we say that to establish the proper balance of lifetime diet and activity habits, monitoring and modifying your calories becomes critical.  However, the public remains in calorie denial because the quick-fix diet industry discourages the very habits that can help us manage our weight, such as weighing ourselves every day.

But what about those day to day fluctuations in the body weight that the diet industry mentions?  They say that those fluctuations skew your weigh-in measurements and the disappointment makes us depressed.  The scales measure weight:  bone, muscle, organs, water, hair – it is a weight.  Daily fluctuations are just that – fluctuations in water retention or gastrointestinal contents (undigested foods) that your body will adapt to with increased exercise and portion control.  Knowledge is power – the power to quickly adapt and change your diet, your exercise program, your portion control.

Remember, it takes only 1 day to gain body fat or lost muscle!  Why wait a whole week to measure it?  Weight management is a day to day process.  The sooner you are able to see your weight going off track, the sooner you can take action!  Remember  WHAT DOESN’T GET MEASURED, DOESN’T GET MANAGED!

After a big weekend, like a big birthday weekend –  a big 50^th birthday weekend, an increase in exercise would be a good answer.  Yup, time to hit the scale and then the gym.

In good health,

Bob

“The Cardiologist Diet … If it tastes good, spit it out.”  – Unknown