Dr. Sarah Stombaugh:
This is Dr. Sarah Stombaugh and you are listening to the Conquer Your Weight Podcast.

Announcer:
Welcome to the Conquer Your Weight Podcast, where you will learn to understand your mind and body so you can achieve long-term weight loss. Here’s your host, obesity medicine physician and life coach, Dr. Sarah Stombaugh.

Dr. Sarah Stombaugh:
If you have ever felt like you’d step on the scale in the morning and get really frustrated when you’re seeing the same numbers over and over again, despite knowing there’s changes that are happening in your body, you feel like you’re stuck, you feel really stuck in this place of frustration and you’re wondering, oh my gosh, is anything going right here? This episode today is for you because we are going to be talking about measuring non-scale victories, those wins beyond what we’re seeing on the scale. And I think it’s so common during the weight wash journey that every morning or every week whenever we’re stepping on the scale, we see that number and we use that as a soul judge of how our weight loss journey is going. We’re really focused on that number on the scale and that is one important measurement that we’re taking.

But what’s really amazing is that when we focus on the non-scale victories, we start to see a lot of other changes that are emerging in our life. I’m Dr. Sarah Stombaugh, obesity medicine physician, and this is something that I’m talking with my patients about every single day because the non-scale victories, these are all of the wins that we see in our life beyond just that number on the scale become really, really powerful. So non-scale victories can look like a lot of different things. It may look like also other body victories. So seeing that maybe clothes are fitting differently or needing to go out and buy new clothes because the waistband of your genes is now too tight or too loose. It was maybe tight before and then I got comfortable and now it’s too loose. You’re needing to buy new belts or punch new holes in your belt.

You’re seeing some of these changes. You might be seeing other improvements in your health. So even if you haven’t seen movement on the scale, you might see that your hemoglobin A1C or your blood sugar numbers are looking better. Maybe your blood pressures are improving, maybe your cholesterol. You’re seeing other things, the way your body’s energy or your stamina, your pain, your mobility, the way your body just fits and functions in different spaces. So let’s talk about these because I want you to train yourself to look for some of these different non-scale victories in your life because they are going to be what keeps you going on the weight loss journey. Now when we think about what is the number on the scale, it’s so easy for us to see a number in the scale and it’s true.You step on the number on the scale and you just get a fat spat back out at you.

But just because the number on the scale is reflecting one thing does not mean A, it’s reflecting fully accurately. There may be other factors that are changing the number and the scale or B, that’s really the only thing we want to pay attention to because we are seeing the number on the scale as a total combined number that is adding up your weight of what is your fat mass, what is your muscle mass, what are your bones, what are your organs, everything that’s inside your body and then things that are going to fluctuate. Things like water levels, things like your glycogen levels, so certain types of energy stores that have us holding onto more water. What is our excrement? So if you’re constipated, for example, it is very common that you might be holding onto one or a couple of pounds worth of excrement inside of your GI system. So if you’re constipated, if you’ve traveled and you are maybe a little bit swollen, you notice that your legs or other parts of your body are feeling swollen. Maybe you had a day where you ate a particularly high amount of salt, for example, and you feel that also feeling like maybe your rings are fitting a little bit of tight or just feeling some swelling in your joints. Maybe you are a woman who’s on her menstrual cycle and noticing that there’s bloating that comes with that. Very commonly I will have patients who notice three to even five pounds of weight gain that happen cyclically every month that they’re on their cycle and it just has to do with bloating and fluid retention that happens during that period of time.

And then all of a sudden their menstrual cycle finishes and the weight just falls right back off.
So there’s all of these things that affect the number on the scale. And what can be really frustrating is the number on the scale is just that. It’s just a number, but it’s not giving us a breakdown of where did that stuff come from. So when we’re stepping on the scale, for one, I want you to think about, does this number make sense? Is there something else that’s going to be throwing it off? Am I constipated? Am I holding onto salt and holding onto water, for example? A lot of times our brains automatically will jump to, okay, was that one dessert that I had or that meal that I had? And oh my gosh, and I’m so bad and things aren’t going as according to plan, but does this number make sense to me? Because it becomes really powerful to see month over month when we see some of those shifts that happened.

Or I’ve had patients who recognize every time they get on an airplane, their legs get swollen and so they just don’t weigh themselves for three or four days until they’ve returned home from the trip. So starting to think about, okay, does this number make sense? And even if it does make sense, even if you’re thinking about, okay, it’s stable and I’m not seeing changes, are there other things that are happening? One thing that a traditional scale does not tell us is what is happening with our fat mass versus what is happening with our muscle mass. One thing that’s really powerful, if we were to take five pounds of fat and five pounds of muscle and put them on a scale, they would balance one another out. But the volume of those two things were very different. If this is our fat and we thought about what is five pounds of fat, it would be this big globular thing where five pounds of muscle would be this small little brick and they would balance each other out so the number on the scale would be the same, but the volume of the fat would be much larger compared to the volume of the muscle.

And we see that reflected in our clothing size, for example. So someone who alongside their weight loss journey is getting more active, maybe they’re doing resistance training and working putting on muscle onto their body, one of the things that’s really amazing is that we will see that and they’ll feel those changes, they’ll feel stronger, they’ll feel more energized. They might see that looking in the mirror, even their body looks smaller, their clothes are fitting differently, yet the number on the scale is the same. And so that can be a situation where we’re not excited, like we’re feeling, okay, nothing’s happening here. And that’s where those non-scale victories become even more important beyond just the number that we’re seeing on the scale. So I want to encourage you to start to pay attention to what are those non-scale victories and sometimes they’re really, really subtle. And so I like to ask this question at least once a month, what is different about my life right now?

Maybe what’s easier about my life right now compared to last month or compared to a couple of months ago? Because it’s amazing to see how these changes start to add up over time. Some of them will be really smack you in the face, obvious, but other ones are more subtle recognizing, wow, I walked up the stairs and I didn’t feel winded when I got to the top. I got on the ground to play with my children or with my grandchildren and it was easy for me to get down. It was easy for me to get back up off the floor and I did that without really thinking about it. Maybe there’s activities that you’ve not been able to do comfortably or not been able to do at all because of your body weight and seeing how all of a sudden maybe you’re traveling on an airplane or you’re fitting, you’re going to the movie theaters and recognizing, wow, I fit very differently in the airplane seat or in the movie theater.

I have patients who have those moments of I didn’t have to ask for a seatbelt extender. Those ones tend to stand out really significantly in our mind, but just noticing how does my body feel? How does my body function? How is my body fitting differently in space? It’s amazing to look at different activities like going on an airplane, riding a bike, riding a horse, sitting in a movie theater seat, sitting in a chair. Maybe you’ve been at a location where the chairs are too small or too uncomfortable and you’re worried that the chair would break and now you feel like you can sit on that chair very confidently without feeling worried about that. Maybe you’re noticing that there’s activities like going on a rollercoaster or things that just didn’t feel accessible to you before. Those type of victories add up in a really significant way.
We might also notice things like our energy level or our stamina. Sometimes this is reflecting other things like maybe if we have sleep apnea that’s starting to improve alongside of our weight loss, we’re getting a better night’s sleep every night and we notice throughout the day our body feels more energized. I have patients that even before we’ve seen huge amounts of weight loss on the scale, they start to notice that their joints, their knees and their hips in particular are feeling a lot better. They’re having less pain in those and things are improving. Sometimes urinary symptoms, so things like urinary incontinence, having leakage, for example, that will decrease. And so there’s all these little subtle changes that start to add up over time. When you step on the scale and you see that the number is the same, let’s say, and you’re like, “What in the world is going on? I have been working so hard. Why am I not seeing movement on this scale?” I want you to imagine that you’re having that conversation with a friend. Someone else is asking you this. I want you to take a step back and I want you to look at it from a logical standpoint. Hey, what else is going on here? Either A, are there changes that I’m not paying attention to? And B, let me pay attention to those. What is different about my life right now than it was a few months ago? What is easier about my life right now compared to what I was a few months ago? Asking that question can be really powerful and highlighting what those non-scale victories look like because if you don’t, it is amazing how we get stuck in this place of always sort of looking to the horizon. And this can be so damaging from a psychological standpoint.

So let’s say that you have a 100 pound weight loss goal and you imagine, okay, I’m getting to this 100 pound weight loss goal and you lose 10 pounds, you lose 20 pounds, you lose 30 pounds. You’ve still only, and the big air quotes if you’re listening to this only, but you’ve only lost 30 pounds. If we’re looking at, oh my gosh, I still have 70 pounds to lose, we measure that gap sometimes and we feel that deficit. So we feel that distance of like, we still have to get to a hundred pounds, for example. But if you stop at where I’m at, oh my gosh, I’ve lost 30 pounds. And look back to let’s say a few months ago when your body was in a larger size before you had lost that 30 pounds, what has happened during that time? A, let’s celebrate those 30 pounds because sometimes we’re so focused on having to wait to celebrate until we get to the achievement that we don’t even stop to celebrate where we’re at. So A, let’s make sure that we’re celebrating the 30 pounds that did happen and B, what did it take to get there? What’s different over the last 30 pounds? How are your clothes? How is your life? How is your pain? How is your mobility? How is your energy? How are your activities day-to-day? Are you noticing a difference in those? Because I’m guessing that the answer to that is yes. And I want you to train yourself to look at that comprehensive picture. Beyond just the number on the scale, what else has changed? What else is going on? Now, if you are someone that’s stepping on the scale, brings up a lot of emotional challenges, I want to offer to you that while it can be really helpful data, we do know that it’s not always helpful for you to be the one that’s interpreting that data.

Certainly in the eating disorder space, there are scales that are available that you do not have to even know the number. So you step on the scale and see a four digit alpha numeric code that means absolutely nothing and you send that to your healthcare team. They can interpret that number and track what your weight numbers are looking like without you having to do that. This has been something that I’ve implemented with many of my patients and it can be phenomenal because we’re getting the data consistently and I’m able to see and interpret those numbers and then, but you’re not seeing that day-to-day.You’re not having the ups and downs of having to step on the scale, see the number and feel the disappointment that comes up with it. So even if you are training yourself to look at the non-scale victories to think about it logically to recognize, okay, I’m gaining muscle while I’m losing fat, of course I’m not going to see the scale move maybe at all or see it move as quickly, that is okay.

If the scale is bringing up too much drama to you, I want to offer that you do not have to look at the scale and there might be other ways that we can track that data without you having to know that data right away. And then we start paying attention to other things and really just paying attention to our body. And that’s where sometimes the magic happens because we can start to track things like, wow, today I noticed that my clothing was feeling too large. Today I noticed my body felt smaller when I was doing this activity. Today I noticed that I felt I had more energy. Today I noticed I was constipated and felt like I was really bloated. Today I noticed that I was swollen or starting my menstrual cycle. And we then re can apply that data to the scale and we start to see, oh, isn’t it interesting you were seeing these changes and it was reflected in the scale. So sometimes we can start to reintroduce the scale over time, but you do not have to know the number and the scale if it is not helpful for you. So whether that’s something like a blind weight scale, whether that’s something where you are going into the doctor’s office and you say, “Hey, you can take my weight, but I don’t want to know the weight number.” Those are options that are available to you and especially when done in combination with someone like myself who focuses on supporting patients in this way, can be a really powerful way to track the data.

But if you are not already paying attention to non-scale victories, I want to encourage you to do that. And even if you’re like, “Okay, Dr. Stombaugh, I’ve heard you say this type of thing before, but I don’t always do it, this is my challenge to you.
Ask that question. What is easier? What is different about my life right now compared to a few months ago?” And I really want you to pay attention to those numbers as well because it starts to build your confidence in yourself recognizing that, hey, this is actually working rather than feeling discouragement, especially when discouragement is not necessary and not even the right emotion to be feeling in that situation because maybe things were actually going okay. If you are looking for someone to support you in your weight wash journey, I would love to be that person. I see patients throughout the states of Illinois, Tennessee, and Virginia by telemedicine and in person in my Charlottesville, Virginia office. You can learn more at www.sarastombaughmd.com. You can find everything about my medical practice there. I do also have an online program called The GLP Guide for people who are starting the GLP medications or who are using them and still have questions.

We have a lot of great tools, everything from how to use the medications, but also including a lot of this behavioral piece. And this is a piece that you don’t always see. People are very focused on, okay, what’s the nutrition? How do you inject the medication? We’ve got that information too, but we also focus on that behavioral piece so that you can feel you get the comprehensive support you deserve. You can learn more about that on my website at www.sarahstombaughmd.com/glp. Thank you so much for joining me for today’s episode. We’ll see you all next week. Bye-bye.