One thing that pregnant celebrities – Kourtney Kardashian, Heidi Klum, etc. – and the general public have in common this time of year is weight loss. But, will chasing a number on the scale necessarily mean that you will get back to your old body?
“Weight loss and fat-loss are not the same thing,” says Josef Brandenburg, author of The Body You Want from A to Z and owner of TheBodyYouWant.com. “It is entirely possible for a woman to drop a dress size or more with almost no change on the scale.”
Brandenburg says that most people define their goals in terms that are not very useful – pounds on the scale. He says that most people – especially women – would be better served by setting goals based on clothing size. What people really want is to look better naked, and that is a function of body composition – what your body is composed of, rather than how much or little you weigh. In body composition gaining a pound of muscle counts the same as losing a pound of fat – they both serve to improve your body composition.
“It’s the difference between a beach ball and a baseball,” says Brandenburg, “the beach ball weighs less, but is big and soft; whereas the softball is heavier, but it’s small and firm.”
Brandenburg says that on a traditional weight loss program of low-fat food and aerobic exercise somewhere between 25 and 50% of what people lose on the scale is actually lean body mass, not fat. So, if you drop 20 pounds, as much as 10 of those pounds could be absolutely meaningless.
If you use Brandenburg’
