Psychology of the Scale and Weight

Well, man, there's so much stuff that's going on. So understanding that the body is going to adapt in whatever way you push it. So if I give the body less food, then the body is naturally going to try to accommodate less food by moving to that level. So when somebody has been chronically dying for a long time, they could be eating eleven hundred calories and not losing weight. Um, now there's obviously some people who just straight up lie or they under report or they don't know how to track and report food properly, or they overestimate their output. There's stuff like that. But, you know, training a lot of coaches, I've come to understand that there's these long-term issues where somebody has been chronically dieting to try to look like a trainer or contest prep or whatever photo shoots. they get to a point where 1100 calories might actually be their maintenance and they have a choice they're either going to eat less which we don't recommend or they increase their food up to whatever we calculate their maintenance to be and they just understand that they're going to gain a little bit of weight initially but that's going to be important if you want to get your hormones back your period back if you don't want your hair to fall out anymore if you don't want to be freezing cold all the time and if you want your strength to go up you're going to have to gain a little bit of weight. Um, now the interesting thing is if you do it right and you stay within the mathematics of, of what we do and energy availability, we don't really see a lot of people get fat. What we do see is an increase of fat free mass. But again, a lot of women are focused on the scale. So if they see the scale go up, um, six pounds, they're going to freak out even though they look better. And even though their clothes are fitting better. Um, so it takes a long time to basically get them out of that brainwashed state that they identify with what the number on the scale. And like, you know, you remember one of the strategies I did for you, because you wouldn't get on the scale, you'd have to get on it backwards. And Charlie would have to send us your weight. And then occasionally, you'd look at it and freak out. So I had you change your scale to kilos, because Americans don't understand the metric system. So if you gain three kilos of weight, that's not as scary to you as gaining 6.6 pounds because a pound is a very scary concept for a lot of people, especially women. So, you know, if you're 60 kilos versus 132 pounds, that 60 kilos looks a lot more desirable to you. The only time that that's not the case is your weights when you lift. It's a lot better to say, you know, I bench press 440 pounds than to say, oh, I bench 200 kilos. So it sounds a lot more impressive. But, you know, a lot of it is not, I don't want to say manipulating or tricking people, which is exactly what I did to you and exactly what Shane does to you. But sometimes you have to do that. Um, if it's going to push the client to start learning concepts and looking at things in a different way and taking away the stigma of the scale, because every women are indoctrined into this stuff. I mean, you look at commercialism, they tell you you're not pretty enough. You're not small enough. You're not skinny enough. Your dress size is too large. You know, muscles are bad. Fat is bad. They tell you all this stuff and you hear this your entire life. So it programs you to be absolutely scared of the earth's gravitational pull on your mass. And it's, it is ridiculous, but it's the way the system's been designed for a long time to sell you more bullshit. Yeah, I actually weighed, I weighed less coming to you, even though it was still higher than I wanted. But now that my body composition is different, then I tell people all the time, I've been within four pounds of the same weight for two years, including three wedding preps, I guess, quote wedding preps. And it's been a different look around that weight, which to me, you know, my biggest fear was always blowing up because that's what I had been used to. And, you know, you have a coach who understands your lean body mass like you guys, where you were like, you know what, you don't need to weigh yourself anymore because it would get to the point where I'm like, all right, I know if I eat late and I'm thinking I need to weigh a certain amount by a certain time, the next morning I'm going to weigh a little bit more. That's been so liberating now the past few weeks, not even getting on the scale because I know I look better and your relationship with that and the stress that it causes is like, it's amazing. So getting people to understand like lean body mass also weighs something It not just fat So if the scale goes up it not just body fat Right And that's the thing, right? When you look at those first two to three kilos that women will gain when they start eating closer to maintenance, you have to understand that some of that's fecal matter because you've got an increased amount of food. Some of that's going to be more water retention because you're now eating more carbohydrates. So they need to understand that's actually fat free mass. That is not fat. If you look at body fat percentage, a lot of people, even trainers don't understand what that number means. It is a ratio between what's fat on your body and what's not. And people can have a higher body fat percentage and not be fat if they're under muscle. Right. So like my wife, anybody who's met my wife, she's they'll say, man, she's she's, you know, very lean. Right. she's actually not if you look at body fat percentage she's around 25 to 27 percent but she's only like 54 55 kilos her she's her ratio is off just because she hasn't spent enough time training with weights consistently enough to put on appreciable amount amount of muscle so we've got to stop telling people that you know if you're a certain body fat percentage you're fat because that's not the case um you know obviously if you're 50 body fat yeah you you know, sorry, you've got a lot of stored energy on your body. We need to take care of that. But, you know, for some of these women who might have a higher body fat percentage, but don't weigh a lot, they need to understand that, you know, lifting weights and eating to fuel that weight lifting is going to make you look better, even if your body fat percentage doesn't change much, because you're going to have a better ratio of fat free mass to fat mass. And that's, that's going to make a big difference. And over time, if you just focus on building more muscle and getting more conditioned, it's almost effortless to get the body fat off when you're ready to say, get from 25 to 20% body fat. But a lot of girls have a, uh, a weird, um, a weird viewpoint of what their body looks like. Most men, it doesn't matter how fat a guy is. He's going to look in the mirror and he thinks he looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know, yes. Yes. Every guy. And he's going to say, I'm 12% body fat. And you look at him, you go, look, honey, you're about 24, dude. Like that's not 12%. Yeah. 12% is a lot leaner than you think it is. And in girls are the opposite. It doesn't matter how good they look. They always think that they're fat and they look like shit and all that. So, you know, it takes a long time to break people out of that mentality. It does. It's, it's interesting when, you know, a lot of my clients will comment when I increase their food and the scale goes up and it's like, I feel bad for how I have said things like this to you and Shane, but then it also helps to talk them off the ledge in that sense because it's like all right listen there's like a billion reasons why the scale can change but you know this is what we have to do now because you know people will pick like some arbitrary number that they were in college and they're like i want to get down to like 119 all right when's the last time you were 119 i was 17 years old like okay and say they were an athlete and then they lifted a little bit sporadically like all right you're probably not going to be 119 if you were 140 and you had a 14 pack are you going to be upset you know positioning it that way and it's crazy because i can say that to people and like we could all say that to others but when it comes to ourselves it can still play with our minds and it's one of the harder things and i know you guys deal a lot too with like stuff that happens in people's lives in childhood and the trauma and that also contributes to their disordered eating or relationship with food and the scale and that. So that's another thing that you have to take into account when training people online is that their past, it'll also be very highly psychological too. Yeah.