People often use body weight as a measure of fitness progress but the truth is scales can mislead you. It’s common for people attempting to make a healthy change to feel discouraged when they don’t see kilos dropping off the scale every week, despite seeing and feeling progress during workouts or in the mirror. If you’re thinking about losing weight, chances are you actually want to lose “fat”. So, what’s the difference between weight-loss-vs-fat-loss?
Weight loss
…is a reduction in your body weight, which includes the weight of your bones, muscles, organs, water, and fat. Weight loss as a result of dieting generally bears no effect on body composition. When you lose weight through crash dieting and improper training, you are generally losing significantly more muscle mass than fat. Muscle loss will slow down your metabolism. If you have slow metabolism, it promotes fat gain. This makes it very difficult to lose fat.
Water Weight
As your body is made up of approximately 50-65% water, it can account for a large portion of your weight. One of the fastest ways to lose weight is to reduce carbohydrate intake because carbohydrates retain about three times as much water as any other type of macronutrient. So when you reduce carbs, your body doesn’t retain as much water. However, any type of significant dehydration is unhealthy and won’t last long.
Fat Loss
…is a reduction in total body fat and is generally achieved by eating healthily and appropriately portioned meals and increasing the amount of cardio and strength training each week. When you begin strength training, you strengthen / gain muscle while losing kilos of fat. This is where you want to be. Fat loss will result in a healthier version of you! Strength training also prevents muscle breakdown – which is really important for a long term sustainable, healthy lifestyle.
The more strength training you incorporate into your exercise regime the more fat you’ll burn. It’s important to condition your body for strength training and exercise regularly so that your body will have a higher resting metabolism and burn fat passively.
Let our Doctors track your progress
- Check in with the Doctor’s Kitchen Australia so that our Doctors can measure your body composition and body fat every 2 weeks. They’ll check your body composition, total body fat percentage and BMI to ensure that you remain on track.
- Take full body photos from ankle to neck from the front, side, and back every 2 weeks for comparison with previous photos and importantly wearing the same clothes.
- Keep a training log to track your strength. If it increases, then so does your muscle gain.
- Join our 5 Day Weight Loss Program or Bulk Up Program to get started today!
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