Why Weight Loss Isn't Always Winning: The 4-Step System to Track Real Progress

The number on the scale might be going down—but what’s actually changing beneath the surface?

In this episode, I’m sharing a pattern I see often in clinic: people fully committed to their routines—getting their steps in, strength training, hitting their protein targets—yet their muscle mass is quietly disappearing while fat slowly increases.

It’s not about doing anything “wrong.” It’s about tracking the right things—so your efforts actually support long-term health, not just short-term weight loss. Join me as I unpack why traditional metrics can be misleading, how well-meaning habits can backfire, and what to focus on instead. 

I’ll also walk you through the simple four-step system I use with patients to track meaningful progress and make informed, sustainable changes (without obsessing over every number). If you’ve been putting in the work but feel unsure about what’s really working, this episode will help you zoom out, reassess, and move forward with clarity.

References

InBody Scale

Ep. 69 - BMI: Proof it Falls Short as a Measure of Health

The Top 5 Mistakes That People Make on a GLP-1

Get Your FREE 3-Day Hunger Hormone Reset Mini Video Series

Audio Stamps

02:30 - Why focusing solely on weight loss numbers can be misleading, plus examples of patients losing muscle while gaining fat.

08:45 - The four-step scientific approach to health: pick a plan, decide what's good enough, track consistently, and adjust based on data.

15:20 - The importance of defining "good enough" and how perfectionism prevents consistent action.

22:10 - Tracking methods, including weekly weight averages and monthly body composition measurements using tools like InBody scales.

28:35

All of the information on this podcast is for general informational purposes only. Please talk to your physician and medical team about what is right for you. No medical advice is being on this podcast.

If you live in Indiana or Illinois and want to work with doctor Matthea Rentea, you can find out more on www.RenteaClinic.com

Premium Season 1 of The Obesity Guide: Behind the Curtain -Dive into real clinical scenarios, from my personal medication journey to tackling weight loss plateaus, understanding insulin resistance, and challenges with GLP-1s. Plus, get a 40+ page guide packed with protein charts, weight loss formulas, and more. 

Pre-register for the Sep 30/30 group.

Transcript

0:29

Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. You guys know that the things that I normally talk about on the podcast are the things that I see my patients as well as clients in my programs, the things that are really going on.'cause there's always a thread, just suddenly I see the same thing again and again for a week, and I'm like, oh, that's the theme for the week. I talk about this a lot on the podcast, but. A lot of people are really obsessed with just net what their number is doing with weight loss. The net number, what their weight is. And you know, for me, I am much more interested in what your body composition is doing. How is your fat mass changing? How is your skeletal muscle changing? And I wanna give a really big example that occurred here in the not too distant past. Actually, there were several examples of this, and it's people that are, they are killing it. Okay? They are. Exercising over an hour a day. So let me tell you what this practically means. These are people that they might be walking 30, 40 minutes in the morning, maybe 30 minutes at night. They might also be doing multiple times a week, strength training. So they're really doing a lot. They are locked in with their protein intake, all the things, but then certain things fall off. So for example, they get into diet culture where they think that keto is the answer that I gotta be lower carb, that's the way I'm gonna lose the next few pounds. And so they start to. Intensify things that they're not even aware that they're doing. And then the next thing you know, we look at their trends over time and muscles going down, fats going up. Although weight overall is going down, it's not the way in which we want it to happen. And. People don't believe this, that aren't tracking body composition. I'm just gonna throw it out there. You don't believe that this can happen, but I see it all the time. So this is why sometimes based on people's genetics, I'll say, look, you actually. Need to up the carbs or you need to stop doing so much strength training per week because you think it's such a hero move, but look at these results, it's actually backfiring on you. All these things that you're doing. Knowing how to track things over time. It might. Seriously be the difference between you long-term having great health versus just a vanity metric of a lower number on the scale. But in the long run, you actually end up doing worse than someone that might have 20 extra pounds on them. That's why this looking at someone or looking at numbers in the wild, a net weight without anything else is so unhelpful. I'll never forget, and we had this episode over a year ago where I talked about. Why BMI doesn't matter. And I talked about how this doctor had told the person, oh, you need to lose another 20 pounds. And they had essentially no body fat. They had the most muscle in the world. It was literally to the point where I said, if you lose any, first of all, if you lose any more body fat, you're gonna lose your periods. Bad things are gonna start happening, it's no longer about health. This is no, and this person was not disordered eating or anything. They were just really in a great regimen and their body was really responding to everything. But the fact that that doctor was just so stuck in the look at the BMI and don't look at anything else, it was really detrimental. Had that person listen to that. Because this physician was not, I'll never forget too, this physician said, oh, I don't trust the body composition scales. Like the InBody and I was sitting there thinking, well, let's get trust in something because what you're doing is staring people off a cliff. So what is it? Do we need to get a professional model for you? What do we need to do to make you a believer? But what you're doing is not helping this person at all. Because if they had followed what that doctor said, they would sacrifice about 20 pounds of extra muscle and no one wants to do that. So anyway, back to the plot. I want you to think about your journey being very scientific. So here are my main things. You're gonna pick a plan, you're gonna decide what's good enough. That's step one. Pick your plan, decide what's good enough. Alright? So whether that be, are you going to, get a hundred grams of protein per day fiber with every meal, walk at least 30 minutes a day? Whatever it is, you're gonna do that. All right, you're gonna do it. Consistently, whatever, consistently enough for you is, remember, consistency is not a seven outta seven days in the week. Consistency could be, I exercise four or five days the other few days. I might do a leisurely walk on those days. The pace might be different on different days, but your consistent with how you're implementing it. The reason that this step is really important is because you cannot tweak things that are not done consistently. It's random, it's shotgun at that point. So literally makes absolutely no sense. So you're gonna do these things, whatever your version of consistent is. I think that a mild version of habit tracking in the beginning is helpful. I'm not trying to make this 75 hard for you, but if we, our brains are really bad at retaining things, and so we think when we look back retrospectively that we have a good perspective, we do not. We we're, we're making stuff up right and left. When you look at, uh, let's say an exercise log, right? You're like, okay. Four days a week, I'm doing stuff. So this fallacy of I'm never working out, not true, this fallacy of I'm working out all the time. Also not true, right? But based on that, you can make tweaks. I can't offer recommendations to people that have no concept of what's happening. I just can't do it. And it's not a bad thing. But the first thing I'm always gonna have that person go do is do a log for two weeks and come back and talk to me. Okay, so that's, you're gonna do this thing consistently, then you're gonna track your data. Is it once a week that you do? I would say net weight you can do once a week. So if you're weighing yourself every single day, you're gonna take all those days, divide by seven, that's your weight for the week. If you're doing body composition, it's gonna be once a month. Now I do have my people do the net weight at least once a week, and then body composition at least once a month if they have the home scale. If they don't have the home scale minimum every three months, I want you to re-get that done. Because we're looking at trends over time. We're wanting to pivot with things. And then here's step four is gonna be, then we're gonna adjust. We're gonna pivot. Friendly reminder here, there's no other area of your life where you're not checking in, where you're not changing things. Let's take, I'm just gonna give you an example, kids' school,'cause it's fresh on my mind. Our kids actually went back to school beginning of August. So if some of you're like, we haven't even started back. No. Here in Indiana, at least where I live, they're right back to school. Especially with my kid. They get to school in the beginning. They check in, does your kid need anything? Right? They're looking at do they need an IEP? These are like, if they need any kind of, if they have any type of special things going on. Are there any sort of things we need to implement in the school? You don't just make an IEP and never again check in. It's quarterly. Every three months you're sitting down with the whole team, Hey, how's it going? How's this happening for you? What are you thinking in this class? What are you thinking in this specialty? Everybody's checking in. You're meeting again in the middle of the year, you're meeting a minimum of three to four times, right? This is not, we set it and forget it. If it's not being measured, we can't change anything. If we're not monitoring, we can't do anything about it. So just to kind of review these steps, you're gonna pick a plan, you're gonna decide what's good enough. You need to decide what's good enough. You're not allowed to say, I've always been about perfection and this is hard for me. You have to enough, like you have to decide at this point, what's enough for you, because we have to get out of this fake land where when you say nothing's ever good enough. It, you can't live your life this way anymore. We have so much going on. There is so much happening all day long. You have to decide what is gonna be enough or at the end of the day, you say, gold star, you did it. And it has to be reasonable. You have to be able to do it consistently. If you're not doing it consistently, the system is too hard. The goal's too high. Something's happening. We need to change it. So people always say, what you want me to do? Five minutes of strength training two times a week? I say, yeah, come to me next month and prove to me that you did it eight times.'cause with my patients, I meet every four weeks. I say, prove to me that you did it twice a week for the four weeks until we meet again, and then we'll up it 80% of the time. I wanna say it, it's not happening a hundred percent of the time. So there's no need to increase the goal. We can't even do that right? Then we see, okay. Would it be more helpful to do more at one time? Could we pair it differently? So for example, one thing a patient of mine had to decide is they are exhausted by the end of the day when they get home from work. I mean, put your hand up if that's you.'cause I, with me, at the end of the day is not the time I'm gonna try to lift weights or go to the gym. I always have to laugh when every so often the Instagram algorithm gets it wrong and. Pops me a video of someone, Ooh, this is so fun to be at the gym at 11:00 PM at night. I'm like, okay. The end, I go to bed at nine o'clock. I would be jacked up as can be if I went to the gym at night. This doesn't work if you have kids and they're in bed. You can't just like Trae outta the house to go to the gym. Just altered reality. So the point is we have to see what's realistic in your life, what you can stick to consistently, and then we have to track it. Is it working or not? This is not about shame or any of it. It's just like the end is nothing changing in six months. Do you want something to change, then we'll do something different. But if we don't have the data, if we don't have the consistency, if we haven't decided what's good enough, you can't get anywhere in any of this. And then you have to adjust and pivot. And it's really interesting people that get to the point where this is just scientific and we are like, okay, we're gonna. Add 30 more grams of carb. Right. And I'm not, by the way, I actually, if you're new to this podcast,'cause I love this, we've been getting a lot of new listeners recently, I'm not having people, do calorie counting and everything all day long. I am a fan of usually about one macro counting. So for example, like, uh, tracking your protein intake until you're really like solid on yes, I'm getting the amount that supports me. And then I'm a fan of, you get fiber at every meal no matter what. If constipation's a problem, then we start to dig into, okay. If you're a woman, are you getting 25 grams of protein per day? If you're a man, is it 38 grams or more? Then we really start to go more crazy, right? There's the easy peasy version, and then there's the, we keep digging down into more and more details based on if things are working or not. That's why if you ever listen to season one of Behind the Curtain, that's the premium season one of this podcast. I went into more detail on things because typically on this podcast, it's just too much if I went all the way into every single thing. Most people don't need all the way down in the details. Most people need the general. Informational stuff and, but some people, it won't work for them, the things that they're doing, and then they feel hopeless and lost. Know that There's always more that we can do when, whenever patients have this thought, oh, I'm gonna be maxed out on this, one GLP one, and then I'm thinking, are you kidding me? There's so many other things we can add. There's so many things, supplements that we can add. There are so many exercise things we can adjust. There are so many. Lifestyle things, nutritional things like it's never ending as far as what we could do and everybody's code is gonna be different. There are general principles and then your unique code. Some of the things I do. Are super weird if any of you would do it, but, but it's a Matea thing that works. So keep this in mind. If you are tracking things, I would really encourage you to use a body composition scale. I personally, with patients, use InBody. I am not affiliated with them. The other thing I wanna say on Amazon, a few times a year, they will have a sale like Prime Day, black Friday. These are times when instead of the scale being about.$300, it'll be maybe two 40, so if that's something that's really important to you. The other thing you can buy on eBay, you can buy used versions. I would discourage against the used ones. Because every so often this, machine is going to not work properly. Things like that. If you've bought it new, you can contact the company. They're gonna help you troubleshoot through it. If you get a used one, you don't have that chain anymore, right? You're not within the warranty period. You. It's not as likely that they're gonna send you a new one if it doesn't work. And by the way, there's 900 things you can do to make sure that it works before they're gonna tell you that it's a problem. There's literally an entire manual that comes with it. Some people are not cleaning the probe parts correctly, like they're not literally wiping them off every so often. So they have a dry foot that they've. Never, cleaned off or put moisturizer or done anything to the machine is dirty itself. They're not positioning themselves correctly. There's a lot that goes into it, but if you're doing this properly and it's not working, they're a really great company to help you through it. Or rarely. And again, this doesn't happen often, but rarely, they really are a respectable company and we'll replace it for you if it's truly not working, but anyway, so that. That is what I typically use with people in my mini course, the the top five mistakes people make on a GLP one. I actually have a whole bonus video where I go through how I go through the interpretation of these. What is it that I'm actually looking for health? It's not just what the normal ranges are. That are happening on this. I actually like the ratio of your body fat to be underneath, to be less than the pounds of fat that you have. And then there's certain ratios that I want the skeletal muscle to be compared to total body weight. And so some of these things and all those formulas are in that mini course as well. If that's something that, that you're looking for, also we have in that course, it's a six month access that you get when you sign up. Someone wrote me a nasty gram the other day. They didn't realize that it was six months. By the way, if you ever have confusion about things, just go ahead and email me. Because we're a small business, I will always answer you and clarify things and make things right for you. But there's no reason to start out with a really nasty email when, I'm constantly connecting with the community and I really care about. Everyone that's in there, we're not this like massive program where I have no idea what's happening. Everything comes to me. But anyway, the point is we have six month access and monthly we do live q and a calls. And they are always so phenomenal because we get such a range of questions. Recently here we've had everything from, Hey, I've been doing all this calorie counting the whole time. Now I wanna go more to not doing that. But I feel like I just. Lose control all the time then. So there's strategies for that, there are other people they don't know when this or that's appropriate or what can be done for inflammation or all these different types of things. So those monthly calls, we have all those calls in the Q Bank, so you can go back years at this point and listen to them. And they're all really varied what we're going through. But if you had a question, you can submit that monthly. Or underneath each video you can say, Hey, I was wondering about da da da da, and I'll write back to that. Hopefully within a day or two I can write back between calls as well. So you actually really get a lot in that mini course if that's something that you're interested in. Alright, so I'm gonna leave it here if you have questions. We have the fan mail option under this reminder. It's anonymous means when I get it, I just get the message. I don't have any way to contact you back if you don't leave an email. Other reminder, this is not how you get on my email list. This happens quite often. People submit just their email and I'm thinking, I think they're getting on the email list. The thing with email list is that you have to consent into them. There's like laws around this stuff, right? So you can't just give me an email. Sometimes I will have my assistant email you back and say, Hey, we assume that we think you're trying to get on the email list. If you wanna do that, here's the link. But the best place to always do that is to go to EA clinic, R-E-N-T-E-A, ea clinic.com. And you can get absolutely anything on there. Like we have a free metabolic health guide on there. We have a free, the regulating your Hunger hormones. That's right on the homepage, right when you get there. We've read on the whole website, if you get that offer, it's a three part video series that will get you on our email list.'cause it'll be a, Hey, do you consent to be on this? And I would click yes. Otherwise you're not ever gonna hear from us again. If you want that's fine. But typically we don't email you often. It's on Monday mornings to tell you when. This regular podcast comes out. We do not email about the Friday, your Friday five. We don't even have that one on the website. That's just a little additional extra. It frankly, was too high with production for me to also involve a whole nother post and stuff on that. But let me know if you're like, yeah, I would love. For that to go on the show notes on the website as well in the blog. We could definitely start doing that if that's something where there's a lot of interest for it. Alright, so there was a lot of information here at the end. Again, fan mail down below if you have questions that you want, answered in the future. Let me know if you have any other questions. Otherwise, I hope that you have an amazing rest of the week and I'll catch you at Friday, at your Friday. Five. Have a great rest of the week.