62: Weight Loss vs. Fat Loss - Are You Stalled or Progressing Quietly?

Ever step on the scale after a dialed-in week and wonder why the number won’t budge? We unpack the difference between losing weight and actually losing fat, and show how water, glycogen, and even a hard leg day can disguise real progress. I walk through calorie balance in plain language, from resting metabolic rate and NEAT to the thermic effect of food, so you can see where results really come from and which levers move fastest for your body and lifestyle.

Protecting muscle is the throughline. I share why rapid cuts, low protein, minimal lifting, and poor sleep push your body to burn lean mass, dragging down your metabolism and energy. Then we get tactical: how to set a sustainable deficit, hit protein targets, lift progressively, and sleep 7 to 9 hours to keep muscle while body fat drops. We also tackle normal daily fluctuations, sodium swings, soreness-related inflammation, and late meals—factors that can shift weight by several pounds without changing fat at all.

The best part is the quiet win most people miss: recomposition. When you gain muscle and lose fat at the same time, clothes fit better, photos change, strength climbs, and health improves—even if the scale is flat. That’s success the mirror and metrics can confirm, especially when you track weekly averages, progress pics, measurements, and gym performance. I also outline our data-driven assessment process—body scans, metabolic insights, and personalized programming—to remove guesswork and keep adjustments grounded in evidence, not emotion.

If you’re tired of letting a single number decide your mood, listen now, take notes, and shift your focus to the markers that matter. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s stuck on the scale, and leave a review with your biggest non-scale win this week.

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Transcript

Welcome And Gratitude

SPEAKER_01 0:00

This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. We share general health and fitness information and professional experience, not individualized medical advice. This content does not replace professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making any changes to your health routine.

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Welcome to Live Transformed, the podcast from Transformed Health Initiative, where evidence-based truth meets real life transformation. Lead yourself, integrate health, value what matters, engage in the process. This is how you live transformed. And now here's your host, Adam Kelly.

Today’s Focus: Fat Vs Weight Loss

What Body Weight Really Includes

Calorie Balance And Deficits Explained

Energy Expenditure: BMR, NEAT, TEF

Brief Coaching Interlude

Types Of Weight Loss: Fat And Lean Mass

Why Muscle Loss Is Bad Weight Loss

Sustainable Rates And Protecting Muscle

Normal Weight Fluctuations And Why

Training Soreness, Inflammation, Glycogen

Body Recomposition And The Scale

Health Wins The Scale Can’t Show

Patience, Nonlinear Progress, Mindset

Assessments, Data, And Personalization

Coaching Approach And Commitments

Wrap Up And Ways To Connect

SPEAKER_01 0:45

What is going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Live Transformed Podcast. We appreciate you for tuning in for another episode. Super excited to get this one kicked off. So I hope everybody's having a fantastic day. It's a great day to be alive, and we are practicing gratitude around here because, as you guys know, life is crazy, the world is crazy, seems like everything's falling apart, but you still have solid people out here who are doing the work each and every day, not being distracted by what they see, not allowing fear to run their lives, and just take complete control. And they're choosing what can I control? Where do I have power and where can I get better? So if you fall into that camp, you will love it here. So uh it's a great day. Um, let's see, where are we at? Today is the 4th of February, 2026. Gonna try to get this episode out today. Um, but it's a beautiful day here in Moore, Oklahoma, Oklahoma City, and we have been just knocking it out of the park today, checking the boxes, got my training in, working with clients, doing the things that need to be done, and making sure that we win on purpose. So, what do I have for you today? You may see the title of this podcast that may kind of give it away, but today we are talking about weight loss versus fat loss and how to determine if you're actually stalled or if maybe you're progressing quietly. Maybe it's in a way that you just don't see or isn't registering. So we have a lot to unpack here. We need to first identify the difference between fat loss and weight loss, okay, because there is a massive difference depending on the situation, and this should determine where our focus is at, depending on our goals. And we're gonna look at things like you know, what does body weight consist of, what's required for fat loss, you know, how muscle loss is bad weight loss. So, not all weight loss is good, just a little uh I guess preview for you guys. Um, things like water fluctuations, body recomposition, health markers that don't show up on the scale, and many other things we're going to discuss today. So I'm excited to share this with you. I know that this has been a place of struggle for so many people. You may be one of them that has just struggled and struggled with fighting against the scale. It feels like the scale always wins, and no matter what our goals are, it's this constant battle of this number that we see and how it affects our mindset, our mind state, and our next action that we take. And this can be a very crippling thing for many people, and an area that we need to have clarity and knowledge and understanding because that is going to keep us locked in, even when the scale is playing tricks on us or playing mind games with us. Okay, so we need to know what's actually happening here. Now, this is in retrospect that we are actually checking boxes each day. So, you know, we need to make sure that we clarify that we can't pick on the scale or just blame the scale because it's not showing what we want to see when we haven't been doing the things necessary to get where we want to go. So, number one is always gonna be number one in every category and topic we talk about, and that is accountability, self-accountability. Okay, that's number one. Can't blame the scale for what your actions didn't do. But when we have been checking the boxes, when we have been doing the things that we need to do, why just sometimes the scale just doesn't seem to be on our side, seems to be against us, and for many people, this is the difference between continuing on and giving up completely. So I'm hoping that you're hearing this in a place of you haven't got here before, or you're here and you haven't decided to quit, or if you have quit on your goals, that this is refreshing to you and enlightening and helps you to just lock back in and get back after it because you deserve to be living in the body that you want to live in for the rest of your life. So, what is the difference between fat loss and weight loss? Well, you may not have known there's a difference, but there can be a massive difference. So, weight loss it refers to our overall body mass. So, how much gravity pool we have towards the earth, or if you are not a believer in gravity, uh, you know, just how much space we take up, all right, how much weight our body has all together, okay, our entire body. Whereas fat loss has to do specifically with lowering our adipose tissue or our body fat tissue to a lower, healthier amount. Okay. So they are not one in the same. One is very specific, one is very general. So that's the first thing that we need to clear up. If your goals are most people that set the goal to lose weight, what they actually mean is they want to lose fat because I don't think anybody is out to try to lose muscle unless they're just overly muscle and they need to pull some back for whatever reason. Maybe they're a competitive bodybuilder and they're switching sports where they need to be lighter and more flexible and less weighed down by the extra muscle mass, whatever that situation may be. That's very rare that people need to lose muscle or desire to lose muscle. So when people think of weight loss, they're actually thinking of fat loss. Okay. So we definitely need to clarify that if we're ever going to understand what's happening on the scale and what's happening with our progress. So body weight consists of everything. It consists of your not just your body fat, but your skin, your hair, your nails, uh, your bone, your blood, all the flu, you know, all the water in your body, um all the connective tissue in your body, your joints, your tendons, your ligaments, uh, your organs, all of that is part of your overall body weight. Okay. Only a portion of that or a percentage of that is body fat. So very important to understand there. So we need to look at what's required for fat loss. Okay, if we know that there's a difference between body weight and body fat, and there's a difference between weight loss and fat loss, what is actually required for fat loss? Okay, so just to keep things as basic and simple as I possibly can, fat loss is about being in a calorie deficit. You may have heard that before, you may not like those two words. I'm sorry, but it's just the reality. It requires a calorie deficit. You have to be eating less calories than your body is consuming overall, on average, to uh get a substantial amount of fat loss happening. Okay, it's there's just no way to work around that. Now, there are caveats, you know, there there are nuances to this. So we have to understand that this is about calorie balance overall, and calorie deficit is one direction we could go, or a calorie surplus is one direction we can go, or a calorie maintenance slash balance is one way we can go. But that's what it boils down to is calorie balance. Okay, so how many calories does your body need to maintain your current body weight? That is gonna be your maintenance calories. So if you ate that amount of calories with the amount of physical activity that you do on a day-to-day basis, if that was to stay the same and you ate that certain amount of food, then your body weight would stay the same overall on average. Okay. Then a calorie deficit is gonna be when we're eating less calories than our body is burning on a daily basis. We are in a calorie negative or a calorie deficit. So now our body is required to get calories to sustain life from somewhere else. We can't just create energy or create calories out of nothing, it has to come from somewhere. So we can either get calories from the foods that we eat, the liquids that contain calories that we drink, or it can come from our own body tissues in the form of muscle or body fat, but also muscle tissue. Okay. Very important. Put a little uh bookmark in that part because we're gonna come back to that. So that calorie deficit is what's required for fat loss. So then, if someone wanted to gain weight, gain a you know, a large amount of muscle tissue, or just gain body fat because maybe they're they're under their body fat's at a too low of a level, uh, which happens, then they want to be in a calorie surplus. So they're eating more calories than their body can burn on a given day over time. That's a calorie surplus. That's gonna we lead to weight gain. Again, notice I'm saying weight loss and weight gain based on that calorie deficit or that calorie surplus. I'm not saying where that weight is gaining or losing. That's where we get into more of the weeds of things and more of the details because we want to make sure we're losing we're losing the right weight and keeping or gaining the right weight, okay? The right tissues. So that's basically just a simplified version of how fat loss works. Now, again, like I said, there's caveats and nuance to that. So it's not just about how much we consume or how much we don't consume. You have the flip side of that coin, which is gonna be expenditure, your calorie expenditure each day. So how many calories your body is burning each day. And this is influenced by many things. Number one is gonna be your BMR or your RMR, your raise, your resting metabolic rate or your basal metabolic rate. This is basically how many calories your body burns per day just to keep you alive, just to keep your organs working, and without opening your eyes, without moving a bot, without moving a muscle in your body, just the natural processes of light, of life, that is your resting metabolic rate. Okay, so that takes up around like 70%, sometimes more, of our total calorie expenditure for the day comes from just keeping us alive, keeping our organs working, keeping our heart pumping blood through our veins or through our arteries, um, keeping oxygen coming in and fueling cells and getting rid of carbon dioxide, all these different processes, all of our thought processes that are happening require energy, calories to operate. So that takes up a big amount of our calories. Outside of that, we have physical activity, and there's different types of physical activity. So you have what's considered as exercise, so that's going to be intentionally moving your body in the sense of movement. So you're you're intentionally moving, right? If that's working out, cardio, running, walking, those types of things, and you're intentionally doing it for the benefits, that's considered exercise. Then you have what's called neat, which is non-exercise, um, oh boy, non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Sorry, just complete brain fart. And that is basically how many calories we burn that are subconscious or we're not intentionally doing that movement. So this is things like, you know, if you're sitting in a seat and you tap your foot and you're not doing it intentionally, it's just kind of something you do, or trolling your thumbs, or you know, clicking a pin over and over again, or um, you know, pacing the floor while you're on a phone call, but you're not doing it for exercise, you're doing it just out of just your natural reaction. Those little types of things like that, that makes up our neat. So that is a probably the second highest amount of calories we burn each day, is through that non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Exercise, depending on how much you exercise, but for most people, exercise makes up a very small portion of our calorie expenditure. Uh, and then you have what's called um the thermo effect of food. So this is basically how many calories your body burns to digest and digest your food and shuttle those nutrients throughout your body. So, again, everything that your body does requires energy, regardless of how small the process or how big the process. And there's millions and millions and millions and millions of processes happening throughout the body at any given moment, any given second throughout the body. So lots of energy is required just to keep you alive. So we need to again understand where the different areas that we can increase calorie expenditure because this helps us on our journey to lose body fat and ultimately lose weight. Look, I know what it feels like to be frustrated with your health. Trust me. To feel like you're doing everything right, but nothing seems to be sticking. That's why our coaching isn't about perfection, it's about building a system that works even when life gets messy. At Transform Health Initiative, we help busy adults rebuild their health, rewire their habits, and redefine their identity without shame, without overwhelm, and without starting over every Monday. If you're tired of trying to do it all on your own, we're here when you're ready. All right, back to the episode. So there you have both sides of this coin now. You have the intake where your calorie that you're ingesting, the energy that you're ingesting, and then you have the energy expenditure on the flip side of that, how many calories, how much energy your body is burning on a given day. And then it's the ratio of that that determines if you're going to add body mass, again, whatever weight that may be, or reduce body mass. So if we're consuming more calories and our body is burning through just staying alive and through activity each day, then we're going to gain body mass. And the same thing in reverse. If we're consuming less calories that our body is burning through activity or just survival, then we're going to reduce our body mass. Okay. So hopefully that all makes sense. And I didn't go too deep into things. So I want to keep it general because it's easy to go down a certain rabbit hole and never get to the point that I'm actually trying to make. So this is what you get when I just take notes on what I want to talk about, but kind of freestyle it is I can easily go off into a different direction. So let me try to keep things reeled in the best I can. So now that we understand the difference between fat loss and weight loss, what body weight consists of, what's required for fat loss, now we look at what types of weight loss there are. Okay. So you have a few different types of weight loss that happen. One, the one that we're talking about, which is body fat loss. So your body is burning through that stored energy that's stored as body fat and utilizing it for these processes that we just discussed. Okay. This is the one that is the most obvious that we tend to pay the most attention to when it comes to losing body weight. But that's just one factor, that's just one element. Then you also have lean mass, okay? So this is a term that gets kind of misunderstood because most people, when they hear lean tissue or lean mass, they think that's referring to skeletal muscle tissue. Like the muscle actually moves your bones, biceps, triceps, back, chest, shoulders. But that's not what that refers to only. It refers to any fat-free weight in your body. So this is going to include not only your muscle, your skeletal muscle, but your organs, which are muscles as well. Um, it involves it includes your water stored in your body, rather if that's in the sense of inflammation or you know, the amount of water our muscles naturally store and our body naturally stores for balance. Uh anything that's in your GI tract or your gut, so again, that's not body fat, but that still registers as lean tissue, fat-free mass on your body. Uh, any fluid shifts that happen throughout the body, glycogen stores in your muscle and in your liver, all of this is included in that fat-free mass, okay? So important to understand there because if you go get a body scan done and it says you have a super high amount of lean mass, people are like, oh, look at all this muscle I have. Well, that's not necessarily what it's saying, okay? So we need to clarify that. So if we're losing weight, did you know that it's not only body fat that we can use as an energy source, we can also use muscle tissue as an energy source. And the body is very is a very uh magnificent, uh, mind-blowing machine. Okay, I believe in creation. So a a machine that was created by the ultimate thinker of how can I create something that's going to be self-sufficient and self-sustaining for years upon years upon years upon years. And the human body is amazing like that. So we have the ability to gain tissue, body fat and muscle tissue, but we also have the ability to use those tissues as an energy source if we are void of enough energy in our environment, aka food. So our body will use body fat and muscle tissue as an energy source. Now, here's the interesting part that really is where our biology works against us in our current environment. Okay. So back in the day, back in the old days with our ancestors, everything was about survival. Okay. It was about trying to find food so you don't starve, so you can live long enough to pass on your genetics to the next generation and then keep them alive long enough without starving or you know, other dangers out there, so that they can reproduce and keep that system going. So our bodies were designed with the ability to store energy in different tissues to have readily available when we're out of food. Because if we weren't able to store body fat or muscle tissue, then the moment that we don't have enough energy coming in from food, we it would wreak havoc in the body because the body would start shutting down because there's not energy to use. So our body was created with the ability to store energy to use in a time where calories are not available. Well, now you fast forward thousands and thousands and thousands of years, or however you want to look at the time that's passed since man was man. And now we live in an environment where calories are everywhere and scarcity is rare. Whereas back in the day, calories were rare and scarcity was everywhere. So now we're in a situation where we still have the same biological processes as far as being able to store energy into tissue to use later, but now we don't really need that as much because we have ample food everywhere, and most of us are trying not to eat too many calories versus trying to find calories so we don't starve to death. So now our bodies are really good at storing tissue, but not so great at using that tissue as energy because we don't really have a demand on it. And what's interesting is the human body prefers to store body fat because it can utilize it for a longer period of time, it can it can break it down slower over time, and we can store a very large amount of body fat tissue without even being considered obese or even overweight and live off of for quite a bit of time, even if you're at a healthy body fat percentage. So that is a really good thing there. Now, the same thing with muscle tissue, we're able to store muscle tissue so our body can use it as energy, but also obviously this adds to strength and things like that. Now, we kind of see muscle as just aesthetics only today because most of us don't live a physical enough life where having more muscle and more strength is truly a benefit for our lives, it's more of a luxury now. Unless you're like an athlete or something of that nature, so our bodies can store body fat and build muscle and store muscle tissue. But the body fat is so important to our bodies to maintain that our bodies can actually prefer to use muscle tissue as energy over body fat in certain circumstances in certain situations. So we basically just need enough muscle tissue on our bodies for the activities that we need to do, which in most people's life is not very much activity, not very much strength required movements anymore, especially. So we need a very small amount of muscle tissue because muscle is very strong and is very dense. So we don't need a very large amount of muscle tissue to get by and to do the things that we needed to do. So when the body is looking at the the chance of starvation and circumstances put it in that state, it has to decide do I want to use this body fat that if I run out, I'm guaranteed to die? Or I've got all this nice muscle mass that's stored over here that's really kind of excess. I don't need this much to survive. So I'm gonna strip off some of this muscle tissue, utilize it as energy, also break it down for amino acids if I'm not getting enough protein in my diet, and use those amino acids for all the processes in the body that protein is important for outside of building muscle tissue. So that the when the body has to come down to that choice, it's going to choose muscle tissue over body fat. Okay, so important to understand there, and if we're losing muscle mass, we're getting more unhealthy, not healthier. So all weight loss is not good weight loss. Fat loss, if we're in an unhealthy state of body fat or we have an unhealthy amount of body fat, fat loss is going to improve our health. But in almost all cases, losing muscle mass is going to deteriorate our health and harm our health more than it's going to help our health. So we want to make sure that we're losing the right tissue. Okay. So I'm just scan through my notes here real quick and see if I just kind of wrote down some statistics and things like that to discuss on this topic. Um, so as far as the difference between losing muscle versus losing fat, there's some factors that come into play here that's going to determine that. So, overall, during a calorie-restricted weight loss program or plan or time period, approximately 75% of weight loss is fat mass. Okay. So that leaves about 25% of lean mass that's lost if it's not actively protected. Okay, if we're not doing the things that's required to sustain muscle mass and build muscle mass while we're losing body fat, we have a much higher rate of losing muscle and much higher amounts of muscle loss versus if we do the things that are needed to prevent that. So that 25% on the bottom end, this can be a much larger amount of lean tissue loss without things like resistance training, weightlifting, or weight-bearing activity that puts stress on the muscles and adequate protein intake. Okay. So if you are doing a super hard diet and you're doing a bunch of cardio and your protein's low because your calories are so low and you're not prioritizing protein and you're not strength training, the chances of you losing quite a bit more muscle than body fat goes up substantially. And this is even more of a dagger when it comes to sleep. So we know through studies that those that get less than six hours of sleep on an average versus those that get seven to nine hours, seven to nine hours of sleep, the people with the least amount of sleep tend to lose way more muscle mass. Sometimes up to 80% of the weight that they're losing is actually muscle mass loss, not body fat. So they're dieting, they're eating a calorie deficit, so they're hungry, they're tired, they're exercising, they're doing all the things, but because their sleep is trash, they're actually losing the the organ that's going to help keep them healthy and strong, and not losing the one that they're doing all this to lose in the first place, which sounds crazy, right? Until it's time for us to actually get adequate sleep, uh, it's sometimes a harder judgment call to make. But nonetheless, that's very important to understand, okay? So from here, now that we have discovered that not all weight loss is good weight loss, and muscle loss is a big problem, which can lead to a lot of health issues. It can lead to lower resting metabolic rate. So you burn more less calories at rest because the more muscle mass you have, the more calories you burn overall. So if you have less muscle mass, your body's gonna burn less calories at rest, which means you either have to eat even less calories or you have to move your body a whole lot more to burn the rate of calories needed to reach your goal versus if you have more muscle mass. So um that's a negative impact there as well. Plus, energy can be hit, strength can be hit, bone density can be hit. Just a lot of negative things can happen if we're losing muscle mass over body fat, or if we're losing a high amount of muscle mass versus body fat because we're not structuring things right. So we definitely want to avoid this. And this is something I've seen countless times, something I went through myself, but once I learned and started working with people, I've seen it countless, countless times where everybody's in such a rush to try to lose so much weight and make these things happen. At the end of the day, you have to understand, guys, that fat loss takes time. Okay, it takes much more time than you think it should take, and that's just that's the unfortunate part of it. I don't like it. I'd prefer we could just diet for a week and be whatever body fat percentage we want to be, but that's not the way it works, guys. And especially if you have quite a bit to go, it just takes time. This is just something that we have to accept. And the faster that we can accept this and process this, the better off things are gonna be, and the quicker we're going to be successful because it's less chance of us just drawing things out from not being serious or being in and out, in and out, hot and cold. So just understand this, guys, it takes time, all right. So with understanding that this takes time, we need to know what is a sustainable rate of fat loss to begin with. Because if we're planning a diet or we're dieting or we're exercising or whatever, and we're wanting to get to a certain goal weight, say you weigh 230 and you want to get down to 200, then um how you structure that is very important to make sure that we're losing body fat and minimizing lean tissue loss. So the human body, unfortunately, can only lose about half a pound to a pound a week of body fat without losing muscle mass, and that's a sustainable amount. Okay, so now the body can lose more than that, but the risk of losing muscle mass goes up substantially if we try to lose too much weight each week, and it can make life a whole lot harder. So typically that's about the average amount most people will lose. Now, this is based on your body weight. So again, this is think of it more as like a scale or a range versus a specific number. So if someone has a hundred pounds of body fat to lose, then they're gonna be able to lose a higher amount of total body weight per week versus the person who only has five pounds of body fat to lose. So based on the percentage of body fat you have to lose, the amount of pounds lost per week can change based on that percentage, but it's still based on that same percentage, okay? And that's usually about one to two percent of your body weight per week, is what most physicians and experts say is a pretty sustainable but aggressive, but still sustainable rate of loss. So again, if you weigh, you know, 200 pounds, that's about two to three pounds of body fat loss per week is still considered sustainable, depending on the amount of body fat that you have. Now, again, if you're 200 pounds but you're 8% body fat, you want to get down to 4% body fat, so you can do a bodybuilding competition, then that's completely different than if you weigh 200 pounds but you should weigh 140 pounds and you have 60 pounds of body fat. That's completely different story. So we need to again understand that this is based on your overall weight and percentages, not hard, strict numbers. Okay. So important to understand, we want to keep muscle tissue as much as we can and focus on primarily losing only body fat or losing as little muscle as possible. This is the best outcome you could possibly have. So we do this by adequate protein consumption, by resistance, progressive resistance training. So weight lifting, calisthenics, whatever that looks like, that's getting harder each week. So you're putting more demand on the muscles, giving them a reason to build more or to sustain what's there. Because if you don't use it, you lose it, or if you don't use it enough, then you're gonna lose some of it. So those are the important things to make sure that we're minimizing lean tissue loss, okay? So the next part to look on this, now that we've identified what we want to lose, how we want to lose that, what we want to keep, we need to look at why the scale can be such a mind game. Okay. So one thing we need to understand is weight fluctuations are normal and a natural part of health transformation or weight loss. Okay. Fluctuations are guaranteed to happen. I don't care how strict you are, how on how locked in you are, how on point you are, it is a guaranteed it's going to happen along the way. Okay. And what's crazy is normal day-to-day body weight fluctuations can be up to one to three percent of body weight, if not more. So that for a 200-pound person, they can naturally fluctuate like two to six pounds independent of fat loss change or fat change. So just by the day-to-day weight fluctuations can be such a huge shift in body weight, regardless if fat loss is happening or not. Okay, and regardless if muscle gain or loss is happening or not. So, what is this fluctuation that's happening? Why do we see this fluctuation? So, a lot of times when we see big drops in the scale weight, this often reflects uh water loss and lean mass loss, not superior fat loss. Okay, so just because you lost five pounds this week doesn't mean you lost five pounds of body fat. There's also going to be water loss there. You may have lost some inflammation or lowered inflammation levels. Um, you may have depleted some of the glycogen that's stored in your muscles. So basically, when you eat carbohydrates, the body breaks it down into glucose that goes into the blood. That's blood glucose. That glucose is first shuttled to your liver. It's converted into glycogen there, but it's also shuttled to the muscle. And when the muscle uptakes it, it converts it to glycogen as a stored form of energy that can be released whenever you are exercising, moving your body, whatever that may be, or when food is lower, the body can pull that glycogen out of your liver and out of your muscles to use as a quick, readily available source of energy. Okay, so all of those things can play into those fluctuations. So even with water fluctuations, guys, you can see a vast change day to day. Things like sodium intake, so how much sodium you ate today versus the day before. Um, you know, inflammation. Again, inflammation tends to cause water retention, at least acutely, if not chronically. So this is something we see as well. Um, you know, food that's in your stomach. So say that, you know, yesterday you weighed 200 pounds, today you weigh 203 pounds, and you're like, what? Like, I know I ate the calories I was supposed to. I hit my macros, I did my work, I checked all the boxes. How am I up three pounds? Well, you didn't realize that last night, instead of having dinner at six o'clock with the family like you normally do, you went out with the guys, and although you tracked your meal for that evening, you ate at nine o'clock at night versus six o'clock at night. So now that's three hours less time of digestion and shuttling those things around and rebalancing sodium and water levels that your body has before you weigh in at the same time the next day. So part of that extra weight can be the water retention from the sodium that we consume, which is a natural pro natural process of consuming sodium. Uh, it could be part of the food that's undigested that's still in your system, still in your GI tract it somewhere. So that can be adding to that extra weight, and that is completely independent on if you hit your macros or got your activity in for the day, the day before or not. That's just based on what's still left over. So little things like that can affect scale weight as well. And there's there's numerous other situations that can affect the scale weight and what we see that are completely irrelevant to if we're losing body fat or losing muscle or whatever. Um, so that is very important to understand. So let me see what else I have on my notes here as far as fluctuations. So um looks like that is it on that. All right, so we know that water fluctuation is gonna happen. Like I said, regardless if you're perfect with everything, that's just part of the process, it's gonna happen. Okay. And so this is where a lot of people get thrown off because they did everything perfect, the scale goes up. Oh, well, I just I'm broken, I can't lose weight, I don't know what I'm doing. I should just give up. No, just stick to the plan. Understand these things are normal and natural, it happens to everybody, and with our coaching, this is something that we know how to weed through and to eliminate those fluctuations in a way that we can really see what's happening on a week-to-week basis. Okay, that's why working with a coach can be very helpful if they know what they're doing. So, next, what else can be happening that's stopping the scale from going in the direction we want it to go? Could be water fluctuations, sodium fluctuations, inflammation, all those things. Uh, there's actually something that happens, and I'm not going to give you the scientific name because I would butcher it. So I'm just going to describe the process. But basically, when you train a muscle really hard, you create damage. Okay, you're damaging the muscle fibers. You're having little micro tears in those muscle fibers. Well, that causes inflammation into that area of the body as part of the healing process so that it can build more tissue and stronger tissue. So, this is a good thing. This is inflammation that we want to happen because we strength trained, it damaged the fibers or the cells. Muscle fibers are muscle cells, and part of the healing and recovery and rebuilding process is inflammation comes with it. Well, so say that you train legs super hard the next day, the scale weight's up. Well, because of the fact of that muscle damage, that inflammation, water tends to get stored in that area more as part of that inflammation process and recovery process. So this is totally natural, totally normal, and is completely irrelevant to hitting your macros or getting your activity in the day before. But again, if you don't understand that, you can see the scale went up and you're like, man, I crushed my workout yesterday. I did all the things, checked all the boxes, and I'm still the scale's still going up. Well, why am I even doing this to myself? Well, understand again, there's things that we can't see that are that are having an effect on what we do see on the actual scale. So another thing that can affect what we see on the scale, and if the scale is not moving, and this is the most important one, in my opinion, and the one that is the biggest benefit, not a drawback, is what's called body recomposition, okay? Which is basically your body swapping out tissues. Typically, what we think of body recomposition in a positive sense would be gaining muscle tissue at the same time that you're losing fat tissue. Okay. So the negative side of body recomposition would be losing muscle tissue while you're also gaining fat tissue. So there's two sides to body recomposition, but typically when you hear of body recomposition or body recomp or recomping, however, somebody says it, they're talking about the positive one because that's what goals are usually built around are positive outcomes. So body recomposition, again, is when your body is building muscle mass at the same time that it's burning body fat mass. Okay. And this is the best of both worlds because we know more muscle tissue tends to mean better health outcomes and a longer life and higher quality of life throughout those years. And lower body fat entails the same benefits, okay? So that's a win-win situation happening. However, it may not look like a win-win situation because it will not show up on the scale. And this is the biggest battle that I have, not with clients, but I'm helping them fight this battle of their own. And that is understanding that if you are strength training, especially if you haven't strength trained before, and you're getting inadequate protein, especially if you haven't got inadequate protein before, your body's going to be building muscle mass at the same while it's also burning body fat, not the same rate, like the same amount, but simultaneously gaining muscle mass while losing body fat. And again, this is a win-win situation, but it's a win that does not show up on a body weight scale because the body weight scale is only measuring the amount of body mass you have, it's not differentiating between what type of mass your body consists of. Okay, so this is what we want to see is body recomposition happening. So this is a this is a wonderful thing, and it this is where we have to get out of that old mindset, that old 80s mindset of it's all about the scale weight and seeing the smaller number the better, and being as skinny as possible and thin as possible is all that matters. And I'm so glad that as a society and culture, we're moving away from that and realizing that muscle is health, that it is a health organ, and that having more has better health outcomes, and having less body fat has better health outcomes to a certain point. Okay. So I'm really glad we're getting past that point. But part of that culture, part of that mentality still rests with a lot of people, especially my clients who are typically 35 to 55 year olds, so they, you know, came up in that time or right after that time and have been heavily influenced by body weight culture, okay, and diet culture in general. So since we can't see the differences happening between the muscle we're gaining and the fat we're losing, there's other ways that we can determine these things, but also just having this knowledge and knowing that you're doing what's required to reach your goals, you can trust the process rather than just depending on feelings and emotions and what a number on a scale says. So that is very important to understand, guys, because again, this is the best outcome that you can have is gaining muscle tissue while also losing body fat. So I've had clients that literally we we did comparison photos from exactly one year apart, literally January 4th to January 4th. They were the exact, I'm thinking of one client specifically. She was the exact same body weight down to the decimal. It was like one something, something, point, something, something. And if she was the exact same weight on this day, which was pretty wild in itself, made for a great experiment. And her first thought was, golly, I know I've made improvements, but how am I still the same body weight? Well, when we did the progress photos, we saw that it looked like nearly if you would have cut the head off, it would have nearly looked like two different bodies, but the same body weight. Why? Because she built a crap ton of muscle during that year and also pulled off a bunch of body fat. So she looked completely different, felt completely different, but her body weight was the exact same. Okay. And I see this time and time again, especially when someone is closer to their goal weight or in a healthy body fat range, but they just want to improve it. That even more, this becomes more of the rule rather than the the exact the um oh well you know what I'm trying to say it becomes more of the rule rather than the exemption, okay. That's typically what we see the most. So super important to understand there, guys. And there's certain health markers that aren't measured on the scale outside of muscle tissue, okay? So you have things like bone density. So higher bone density means less chance of breaking bones, less chance of developing diseases, chronic diseases like osteoporosis, um, you know, lots of other health benefits that come from having denser bones, stronger bones. But the main thing is as we age, less chance of falling and breaking a hip or breaking an arm or breaking a leg. And that's usually when that's the beginning of the end for a lot of elderly folks. But with strong bones, your risk of that is much smaller. And if you're doing it correctly, which is really the only way to do it, through resistance training or through weight-bearing exercise, you're also strengthening the muscles, which helps keep balance. So you have less chance of a fall. But even if you do fall, you have a much lower risk of breaking something than if you weren't strength training and getting in protein and thickening up your bones. So that doesn't show up on a scale. Uh performance factors. So making improvements in the gym and your training, getting more reps in, getting more weight in, all these other benefits that happen in the gym, they don't show up on the scale. Things like mobility and flexibility and energy, all these benefits, they don't show up on the scale. And we can literally sabotage ourselves because we see this scale number, although we know all these other benefits have happened, all these great things are going on, but because of that scale, this can throw us off and make us fail. And we can completely throw away all of the wins that we've had and that we've been registering on a day-to-day basis, based on this one second of looking at a number on a scale. And it's a tragic thing to happen, but it happens more times than not. And I'll tell you, even as someone who has been in this world since see, I graduated college for training in 2012. So, you know, dating myself the last 15 years as somewhat of an expert, to all the way before, then just as my own personal health journey and weight loss journey, um, you just this is this will always be a mind game for many of us. It's just how well we can control it and how quickly we can snap back to reality and realize what's happening. So, even myself, if I'm on a fat loss phase and I'm checking the boxes and doing all the things and being dedicated and committed and disciplined and all that, and yet that scale does not move in the direction I think it should. I have about five seconds where I get frustrated and irritated and sometimes angry. And I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. You've got to be. I knew I was gonna wake up and see a smaller number, but here I am, and the number went up. And then I think in my mind, well, dude, what did you do yesterday? Did you check the boxes? Oh, yeah, I did check the boxes. Okay, so what's the problem? Oh, wait, there isn't a problem. Moving on. But I tell you guys, that's taken decades, literal decades, for me to be able to do. And I still have that five-second, 10-second window of thought process. It's not gone. After all these times, all these years of doing this, all these years of helping people and seeing that the systems and processes and standards work, I still have this battle on a regular basis, okay? So no one is exempt from this. And if you've had a big transformation or working on one, you're gonna be even more susceptible. It is what it is, accept it and move on, okay? So I digress there. That's what I want to see for everybody is just you know, accept what is and move on. Now, again, like I said at the beginning of this, if we know that we are the reason why we're not progressing, if we know we haven't been checking the boxes, then we can't be mad at what the scale says, okay. But if we know we've been checking the boxes, we know we've been doing the process that works, it's been tested and proven, and we know it works, then we just have to be patient and be willing to trust the trust the process because again, fat loss takes time and it's not linear. You're not gonna have a drop, drop, drop, drop. You're gonna have a drop, rise, stable, stable, stable, drop, drop, stable, drop, rise, rise, rise, stable, stable, drop, drop, stable. It's never just drop after drop after drop. Okay, same thing with gaining mass, same thing. It's it's up, down, stable. It's not just linear up every single week. Okay. The faster that you accept this and respect that part of the process, the better success you're gonna have and faster and keep it even longer. Okay, so um, other, you know, metabolic health markers aren't measured by the scale either. You'll never know that you're improving here. So things like your strength, your insulin sensitivity, your sleep, n all these things can have a vast improvement that will never show up on the scale. But which one matters to you more? Feeling better, sleeping better, less chance, less risk of chronic disease, or the scale saying something specific? I know that sounds silly and almost like I'm demeaning it or you know, just kind of mocking people, but I'm totally not. I have to ask myself the same thing. What matters more? The way I feel, or the number that I see, what matters more? What matters more? How I feel, how I can live my life, or what I see in the mirror, which one matters more? And I know that the healthy, the healthy habits that I do on a daily basis, that's gonna benefit the former. And then the latter is gonna benefit as a result of the former benefiting as a result of doing those healthy habits that gets the results. Okay, so you just keep winning and winning as long as you don't stop and don't quit. So I'm gonna wrap all this up because this went way longer than I wanted to, but I kind of figured it would because it's a very important topic, and there's lots of factors here, and I could probably talk for the next 12 hours about all the different things that can affect our scale weight and what we see and if we're actually stalled or not. But I wanted to nail down some of these facts and these points here so you can rest easy and know that if you're doing the work and you're checking the boxes and you know that you're following a plan that actually is set for success and not just random workouts and random eating and random calories and random everything, but it's structured based on the evidence that we have, based on someone who's done this before and has helped other people achieve it and have achieved it themselves, then you can rest easy knowing that that number is just a data point. It's something that we log as any other data point that we would. You go to the doctor, get your blood pressure done. It's just part of the natural standard of things, and then we go on about our business. Okay. That's the biggest thing. And if you work with a professional, this is one of the biggest benefits, is you take out the guessing game, you take out the confusion and the worry and all that, and you can just get a solid plan that is going to work as long as you work it. And then you can focus all of your energy on being disciplined and structured and making the things happen rather than stressing if it's gonna work to begin with or if it's working at all. Okay, that's a lot of wasted energy that we put there when we need all of that energy going towards being disciplined and structured and building habits and replacing poor habits and and exercising self-control and all these things that's gonna require every ounce of energy we have. We do not have energy to waste on things that do not matter, okay? So that's where a company like Transform Health Initiative here in Moore, Oklahoma, comes into play. Okay, so we have several ways that we can determine if someone has stalled or if they are quietly progressing. Okay, so we have our elite assessment process where we actually do a body scan that tells us where our skeletal muscle tissue is at, where our body fat's at, where our body fat percentage is at, how much visceral fat we have. So that's the fat that's around the organs that leads to chronic disease and uh inflammation and lots of other issues in the body. We can see um how much inflammation is in the body. We can see uh what our RMR or BMR or resting metabolic rate is, so we know how many calories our body burns at rest, and we can see all these things in a glimpse to really see what's happening under the hood because it's very easy for the scale not to move. And if we're judging our results on the scale in the mirror, which is a slow progress seeing changes physically, then it's much easier for us to quit. But if we can see in a glimpse what's actually happening under the hood, the things that the scale in the mirror don't show, this is what can keep us driven to keep going because we see that our work is actually paying off. And even if it's paying off in a very small amount, the fact it's paying off is what's gonna keep us committed. Okay. So having those assessments, making sure that we're monitoring as many things as we can becomes so important for what we do. And this is how I can pretty much guarantee most people, you know, outside of crazy circumstances, that hey, if you follow the process, because we're gonna build a plan that's specifically for you. You can't give it to your neighbor, you can't give it to your twin. This is made based on your genetics, your biology, your physiology, your lifestyle, your environment, your work, your family, all these things are are tied into the equation to figure out the exact plan that you need to be doing. So if you do those and we are monitoring as many things that we can, we can catch things that are happening before it becomes a problem or before too much time is wasted. So that's a big thing that we do. And then also, probably the biggest thing is how we control adjustments that are made to a plan. So we don't just make adjustments based on emotions and feelings, which is why most people change what they're doing, not because it's working or not working, but based on how they feel. We we don't take that into account when it comes to adjustments. Now, obviously, for part of the plan and process, yes, how you feel is important. But when it comes to adjustments that we make, feelings are out of the equation because feelings don't determine results. We take the data points, we look at everything, we we take your experience and what you're feeling and what you're going through and how locked in you are and all these things, and then we make a determination if an adjustment needs to be made. And I would say probably nine and a half times out of 10, no adjustment needs to be made. We just need to be patient. We need to exercise self-control, we need to exercise patience and just keep checking the boxes, focusing on the next action in front of us, not focusing on how long I have to do this, what's gonna happen in two weeks, two months, two years, but focus on what is the next direct action that I can take that's going to lead me to becoming better. Could be something small, could be something big, could be something quick, it could be something slow. What is the next choice I'm gonna make? And how is this going to determine my outcome? And if we focus on those things and we have a plan and a structure and a process that is going to get us where we want to go, and we just focus on execute, execute, execute every moment. You can't lose, guys. You cannot lose. And I I guarantee people, okay, I have guarantees built in that if you don't see results over a certain amount of time, I give you all your money back because I don't want your money. That's not why I do this. I got bills to pay, I have mouths to feed. You know, this is my career, but I'm not in this for the money. I'm in here, I'm in this for your results. I'm in this for your life, for your legacy, for the impact that you're gonna make when people see you prioritizing yourself and exercising these character traits that are starting to become obsolete in our society, like self-control, self-respect, self-love, you know, discipline, structure, accountability. That's what all the you're gaining out of all this. The the body that's the the results, that's just a byproduct of the character traits that you're building along the way, okay. And that's that's exactly what we focus on the most. And this is how we get people results, okay? We first of all work with people who truly want to change, truly want to improve, and are willing to commit to a process, because if you don't commit, you're wasting my time and your time and your money. So people that are actually willing to make the life changes that are needed and required, they're willing to stick to the process regardless of their feelings, regardless of what they see, regardless of what the scale says, they're willing to stick to the plan. And they are willing to communicate because we cannot know if something is off, if something's going wrong, if you're struggling, if you're backsliding, if you're regressing, if we're not having good communication. So that's key. That's how I pick up a lot on and what adjustments do need to be made based on not just what I see on the data points, but what I hear from you. Because even if things are going great on the data points, you're losing body fat, you're building muscle, all this, but it's putting a strain on your relationships and your work and your life, then is that really that much of a benefit? The the amount of benefit there kind of reduces, even though you're getting results, because it's it's harming other areas of your life that, in a sense, are just as important, if not more important, than your health. Okay. So that's how we help our people win on purpose. And I would love to do this for you if it's something you're interested in. We have online coaching, we have in-person training, but it's all about designing a plan that you can sustain that fits into your life, and that's going to get you the results that you want, and that you learn how to win on your own from the process. So you don't need a coach forever, but you can win on your own. Okay. So that's all I have for you guys today. I want you, I hope it's very clear the difference between just weight loss in general and actual fat loss, which is the goal of most people, why the scale sometimes will stall out and the body weight won't move or won't move in the direction we want, even if we're checking all the boxes, even if great things are happening, we're still not seeing that change and what's actually happening under the hood. We need to understand these things, and it will help you so much. So if you guys have any other questions about anything, feel free to reach out and let me know. Uh, you can go to our website to learn more about what we do, transformedhealthcoach.com. And um, you know, tune into the podcast, social media, very active there. Coach Adam Kelly. We have the THI Live Transformed Facebook group, uh, free Facebook group you can join to get even more content, more assistance. And um, yeah, we're here to help and we would love to help. So I love you guys. We're gonna stop this right under an hour. Gally, I can talk, and um, hope you all have a blessed rest of your week and tune in next week for some more content. All right, love you guys, and uh talk to you soon.