So we’ve already talked at least a few times about the diet industries biggest secret which is that the success rates for most commercial diets is absolutely aweful!  Less than 5 percent for most of them!  This basically means that after the first few years less than 5 percent of the dieters were able to maintain theier weight loss and in many cases – you dieters out there know this for a fact don’t you – the dieter gains back all of the weight lost plus a little bit extra!  You can review our Weight Management 101 video on our home page or services page if you’d like a quick refresher!

The dirty little secret we’re going to talk about today is almost as bad and in some ways worse because it explains one of the main reasons why people struggle so much to maintain their weight loss once they try to transition back to more normal eating!

To be fair, it’s not just the diet industries fault.  They are merely suppliers for consumers who continue to demand easier and faster ways to lose the weight that they most likely spent quite some time putting on!  For a lifetime of healthy weight management there are no pills, injections, or magic workouts.  Hard to believe based on the number of infomercials you see on a daily basis that promise exactly that but if you actually do a little research for yourself you will see that this is true!

Okay, back to our big secret.  Drumroll please……..

The secret is…. that if you go on a diet that causes rapid weight loss – more than a pound or two per week – you are most likely losing a ton of water weight along with some muscle weight, but very little actual fat in comparison to these other two.  Some of the more popular diets over the past several years have demonized just about all carbs – bread is evil right!  So just what happens when you first go on an Atkins or Dukan diet?  Well surprise, surprise you drop a lot of weight.  Yeah, but what kind of weight?  You guessed it; it’s almost all water weight, not fat!  There is certainly a lot to learn about healthy carbs versus the processed junk that many people eat too much of but the amount of carbs that these kinds of diets have you cut out fall far outside the healthy mainstream recommendations that are supported by not just hundreds but thousands of studies from legitimate scientific and medical journals.

So what  do we do about this little bit of trickery?  First off we don’t ever recommend going on a radical diet.  You can become more fit from sensible exercise and appropriate supplementation  - lower blood pressure, better blood sugar control, lower cholesterol – while you are learning to lose weight in a way that you can maintain for a lifetime.  We use proven tools like our Daily Journals and On-Line Meal Planner along with teaching you healthy ways to modify your lifestyle and behavior that will last.

Secondly, we help you understand that the weight scale can only offer a partial and sometimes deceiving amount of information.  Can a weight scale tell you if you’ve lost a pound of fat and gained a pound of muscle?  The answer is NO!  Is this important?  The answer is YES!

This is where Body Composition comes into play.  Body composition is essentially a form of measurement that determines how much of your weight is made up of muscle, fat and water.  If you want to know an easy way to evaluate a legitimate diet and exercise program, just see if they emphasize measure body composition as opposed to your weight!  Body compostion testing will tell you exactly what kind of weight you are gaining and losing so that there is no deception possible.

Can you measure your body composition by yourself.  Well, yes and no.  You can buy a relatively inexpensive body fat scale even at Walmart and Target these days but the accuracy of these scales is pretty bad.  On the other hand, they will at least do a decent job of showing you changes in your body composition as you either gain or lose weight.  To really get an accurate idea of body composition – and this doesn’t include going to a university and getting dunked under water or going to a hospital and having a scan done ( both of which are very accurate but not very convenient ) – you can go to a fitness expert who has both higher end testing equipment as well as experience in administering these tests.  Ideally you should have a skinfold test done – where a special device is used to measure the thickness of skinfolds on specific areas of your body – along with bioelectrical impedance – which when done with the right type of device can be very accurate – and finally a series of girth measurements – taken with a tape measure on specific areas of the body.

All of our clients at XCELFIT go through these measurements as an essential tool for measuring progress and we’d love to offer you a free body composition test at your convenience.  Fill in the contact form below and we’ll set it up!