Health & Fitness with Ricky Parcell
What you’ll learn by measuring your body fat, weighing yourself and tracking your progress for an extended period of time is the importance of body composition – the ratio of fat to muscle in your body – and how training and nutrition affect it.
Even if you decide not to measure and track your body composition, what I consider essential to your success is that you understand body composition on an intellectual level: The big idea you must internalize, to the point that it influences every choice you make, is that weight loss and fat loss are NOT the same thing.
This may seem like a ridiculously obvious point, at least to advanced trainees or to anyone who has attended www.thebodycamp.com here in Ibiza! But for most typical dieters, body composition is not even on their radar…
Weight loss is not always fat loss, and therefore weight loss is not always a positive outcome. Weight loss can include water, glycogen, the contents of your digestive system and muscle tissue. If you lose muscle weight, you are working against yourself.
Weight gain is not always fat gain and therefore weight gain is not always a negative outcome. Water weight can fluctuate dramatically day to day. And of course, if you gain weight in the form of muscle, that’s a positive outcome.
Although it’s ideal to measure your body composition, simply having this new knowledge about the difference between body weight and body composition is enough to help start changing behavior.
For example, once body composition and the importance of muscle is on your radar, you will know that diet alone is a bad idea, because diet without training leads to greater losses of muscle when you’re dieting in a deficit.
This revelation is enough to get many people to start resistance training for the very first time, and from the day you pick up your first weight and lift it, your results and health will automatically improve from that point forward. It’s a watershed moment.
Remember this simple mantra: whether it’s in business, relationships, sports or fitness –What Gets Measured Gets Improved!
Aside from the education you get about body composition versus body weight, why else would you want to measure body composition? Motivation!
And while we’re learning new mantras, try this on for size: “What gets inspected, gets respected”.
In any organization, whether business or a sports team, the instant that performance is measured and tracked, performance starts improving. It’s all about accountability!
I understand that you can track progress visually, but the more types of feedback you have, the better. Why not track visually and by the numbers? Doesn’t it make sense that seeing how you look in the mirror and in photos, combined with weight and body composition data has more value than one or the other by itself?
Ricky Parcell • Master Coach • Program Creator
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