It's January. The start of 2016. Resolution season. For some of you, your resolution or goal for the year is to drop some pounds, but in the interest of your health, I'm proposing that weight is merely a number and doesn't tell the whole story.

 

Weight is the number we get when we add how much fat mass we have to how much fat-free mass we have. Fat mass is exactly what it sounds like - taking into account how much fat you have. Fat-free mass on the other hand includes everything that isn't fat - bone, muscle, water, etc. We can look at these as percentages of your overall body weight. An example of this is if I weighed 180 pounds and had 10% body fat, then I would have 18 pounds of fat and 162 pounds of fat-free mass split between muscle, bone, water, and so on. With this example we see that just looking at "weight" doesn't give me the whole story.

 

Fat on the body is good and actually necessary as long as it is kept within the appropriate range for your age group. Fat insulates the body to keep you warm, cushions your organs, helps with nerve transmission, and is necessary for the absorption of certain vitamins. Excess fat on the other hand has a negative impact on the body, raising the risk for developing certain diseases such as type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, and others. Too much fat also adds to your weight but doesn't assist with movement function like more muscle would even though increasing muscle mass means your weight will increase. What this means is extra load for your joints, which could lead to joint pain, and compensatory muscle patterns that could lead to further chronic pain.

 

When the goal is specifically weight loss, some pretty drastic actions are typically put into practice - cutting out carbohydrates, jumping from one fad diet to the next, drastically reducing calories, even going to the extreme with exercise. You may lose weight in the short term, but at the cost of tearing your body down.

 

Cutting carbohydrates out of the diet makes you lose weight because you're losing water weight. The more carbs you eat, the more water you store, and when you cut them out, there's no more need to store that water. Realize this is water, a component of our fat-free mass, not fat. So we've done nothing to improve our health, and as soon as we eat carbohydrates again, the water comes back along with the weight.

 

"Diets" are an interesting beast because if one worked for everybody and was sustainable for a lifetime then we would all be following it and it would be easy. The problem with "diets" is that if you can't see yourself doing the same thing 10 years later then there's no point. Doing something for a month doesn't mean much if you're planning on going back to what you were doing before when you're done. Everything that changed will just revert right back to where it started. I use quotations on "diet" because a diet is actually just what you eat. So rather than jumping from "diet" to "diet," make sure your personal diet is balanced and filled with fruits, veggies, whole grains (all three of which are carbohydrates), and protein. Pair this with a balanced exercise regimen of resistance training, cardio and rest and you will set yourself up for success.

 

One thing to watch out for that will sabotage your fat loss plan is cutting calories too fast. Calories are energy. Fat can be thought of as stored energy. So if you deprive yourself of energy, your body will start to store more calories as fat. Say you're used to consuming 3000 calories per day, but you cut your calories to 1500 per day because that's what you read in a book was appropriate for your activity level. Well that's a huge jump and you're likely to feel tired and so hungry that over time your body will go into starvation mode and store more of the food you eat as fat because it thinks food is scarce. Start small, make sure you can maintain whatever change you make. Eating enough is necessary to help repair the body from difficult workouts.

 

This resolution season, seek not to lose weight, which could mean a loss of muscle, water, even bone, and have a negative impact on your health, but rather to lose fat, lowering it back down to a healthy level. Fat is necessary, but too much stored on the body can lead to negative complications.

 

Remember, just as fat packs on slowly, fat will leave slowly. Stick with it, making small, meaningful, consistent changes.