Regardless of your goals with tracking your macros, the scale is only one of the MANY data points used to track and measure success. Our diet culture has been plagued with the idea that the number on the scale is the most important indicator of success. It will make or break the kind of day you’re going to have. If it is moving in the right direction, good day! Wrong direction? Bad day.
Did you know that your weight can fluctuate anywhere from 1-10 pounds over the course of ONE DAY? Your weight depends on how much you’re eating and drinking, your hormones, stress level, the types of foods you’re eating, etc. Unless you have a brain of steel, most of us cannot take the significant emotional ups and downs that come from weighing ourselves every day. So, DON’T. These fluctuations can happen over the course of a day, overnight, and may take hours or days to change back. So, let’s stop looking at the scale. Yes, let’s stop.
Other ways to track your weight success:
How your clothes fit.
Depending upon your goals, your clothes may be getting loser or tighter.
Are your pants fitting more comfortably around your waist? What about the collar of your button down shirt? It’s a well known fact that muscle weighs more than fat. So, as you continue to experience body composition changes, you may not see much fluctuation on the scale. But when fat turns to lean muscle, your body mass will change. This means the way your clothes fit and look will, too!
How you are performing inside and outside of the gym.
Performance goals motivate so many of us to clean up our eating act, whether you want to finally dead lift 300 pounds, run your first half marathon, or carry your kids around the park. Reaching both short term and long term performance and personal goals are amazing ways to track success.
Energy and how you are sleeping.
When you start to fuel yourself the right way, it is AMAZING how other pieces of your life begin to fall into place. Energy and your quality of sleep are two of those pieces that directly correlate with you weight. Tied directly to your performance inside and outside of the gym, energy level can be a great indicator of if you are eating enough and the right amounts of each macro nutrient.