If you’ve followed my work for any length of time, you probably know how I feel about the scale.

That opinion was largely developed from my first six months of working at a training gym, where a scale innocently sat in the corner of the bathroom.

We used the scale, along with a handheld device to measure body fat, as a way to help clients get a baseline of metrics for when they started with us.

But what I was seeing on a daily basis wasn’t people using the scale as a starting point to gauge progress. I started to see clients coming in, looking defeated. When I inquired further, I found that when they went in to the bathroom to change for the workout, they’d hop on the scale.

Because it was there.

And if the scale didn’t reflect the change their brains felt it should, based on the effort they were putting in, they were walking in for a workout wondering why they should even bother.

So that’s when I took the scale out of the bathroom and ran it over with my car, and took a sledge hammer to it.

What can I say? I had feelings.

But over the years, I’ve evolved a bit.

If there is one thing that I’ve come around to in my time as a trainer, it’s the understanding that people need a way to gauge progress on this journey. Without it, staying the course can become incredibly difficult. There is a part of our brain called the ventral striatum that kicks in during decision-making to weigh the costs versus the benefits of our physical efforts.

I'm going to re-name this part of our brain Judge Judy. We'll just call her Judy for short.

According to research from Emory University, Judy weighs in on three phases of effort-based decision-making — the anticipation of initiating an effort, the actual execution of the effort and the reward, or outcome, of the effort.

Have you ever started...well....anything and decided it wasn't worth the effort? Recently I did a Facebook post asking where people get stuck in the process. And here is one of the answers:

If this sounds familiar to you, it's not your fault. It's Judy's fault (with apologies to everyone on this list name Judy....)

So how do you get around Judy?

Going back to my comment on measuring progress, this is where I think it's incredibly helpful to differentiate between process goals and outcome goals. Losing weight is an outcome goal. Dropping two pant sizes is an outcome goal.

Making a commitment to walk 7,000 steps at least five days a week is a process goal. Going to the gym twice a week is a process goal. You have complete control (for the most part), over whether or not your process goals happen.

But if your goal is to lose 10lbs in a month, you have less control over whether or not that happens. Sleep, stress, and hormones, just to name a few, can have a dramatic effect on whether or not you lose those 10lbs. So even if you follow a nutrition plan to the letter, you might not hit that goal.

And that's when Judy's all like "FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS HOLY I WILL NOT EAT ANOTHER PACKAGE OF TUNA DUMPED IN COTTAGE CHEESE!"

I mean, that combination of food might gross you out just thinking about it, but it is jam-packed with protein.

In order to get around Judy, you need to trick her by changing the way you measure progress. So I highly encourage you to not only choose some process goals, but find a way to track that process. In order to hard wire a habit, our brains need a little hit of dopamine. That's where habit trackers can be helpful.

If you decide to set a step goal, perhaps your tracker is your watch. My Garmin First Avenger watch buzzes and gives me a giant Captain America sign when I hit my step goal, my weekly activity goal (minutes of activity), and as ridiculous as it sounds, I love getting my shout outs from the Captain.

I have my clients track their workouts through an app - they track everything, from walking, to stretching, to hitting their water goals. Sometimes just being able to check a box is all you need. Another popular habit tracker is the Jerry Seinfeld "don't break the chain" technique, of printing out a blank calendar and making an "X" every time you do your habit.

Whatever your technique is, just realize that it's not your fault if you hit a wall with progress and find it difficult to continue.

It's Judy's.

You're welcome.

Over the weekend, as I watched my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates tank in the waining days of July, I decided to shift my focus to making a pie chart about fat loss.

Yes, the Pirates played that poorly. 

But I also think that journey to fitness and fat loss can be so overwhelming and confusing, that there is merit to keeping the focus as simple as possible. 

20% Training

In terms of flat out fat loss, some might argue that 20% is a high number. It doesn’t matter what avenue you choose when you begin training. It could be Crossfit, Insanity, yoga, or running. Where we tend to get lost is wondering which method is going to burn the most calories and get us the best results. It’s so easy to hyper focus on the method of training that you can almost paralyze yourself with indecision about which approach is right.

There's a lot of ways to break down fitness. This is just one way to look at it. 

The best approach is the one with which you can build the most consistency. Yes, I'm a fan of strength training for all of the many benefits (increased bone density, muscle mass and independence to name a few), but you need to find one you and enjoy and stick with it. Which brings me to my next slice of pie. 

10% Patience

This number also might be a little low. Patience is the part of the process where you stay the course. Choose one method of training and stick to it. Choose one nutrition approach and stick to it. It’s tempting, even for fitness professionals, to jump from program to program when someone else releases a new product or we find something new. It's tempting for non-fitness professionals when you start a new bootcamp program and then find out a friend lost 50 pounds doing insanity and another lost 30 pounds by joining the new gym down the street. The next thing you know, you've jumped to so many different programs that nothing has worked. 

Choose an approach - choose a gym, choose a coach to work with, choose a nutrition approach and stick with it for six months. 

30% Nutrition

You’ve heard this before and you’ll hear it again - you can’t out-train a bad diet. It doesn’t matter if you burn 1,000 calories in a workout, fat loss won't happen if you aren't keeping your eating habits in check. Nutrition is so important that you don’t even need to train to lose weight. If you are on point with your nutrition, and on point is different for everyone, then you will lose weight regardless of what you do in the gym. 

40% Kindness to yourself

I think I need to be clear about something here:

Kindness to yourself is not apathy. It’s not a free pass to say I’ll eat what I want, drink what I want, and throw in the towel on this whole process because it’s just not working anyway.

That’s apathy and I can promise you from experience, that’s a dangerous place to be. (Click here for a post on apathy.)

Kindness is caring enough about yourself to make the best choices for you on a given day. Kindness is where you take into account your stress level, mood, and life demands and make the decision, especially in regards to the intensity of your workout, that is best for you.

Some days your body might feel so wrecked by a lack of sleep and life stress that you need to make careful choices about your self-care. Maybe it's a nap, maybe it's a massage, maybe it's 30 minutes in a Starbucks with your headphones on and a good book. Maybe it is a kick ass workout. You need to be the judge of that. 

Kindness is most certainly not beating yourself up more when life is already taking its punches at you. Because beating yourself up for what you did or didn't do the day before serves you no purpose. 

There are a number of different pieces to figuring out which approach to fitness and fat loss is best for you. But I firmly believe that if you focus on nutrition, are patient with your approach, self-aware of your own needs and kind to yourself about those needs, and do some type of training, good things will happen for you.

And that is my hope for you. 

I was given a t-shirt two weeks ago that said:

Stop Exercising. Start Training.

I don’t often agree with slogans on Nike t-shirts. With the exception of the Bo Knows series from the 90’s. I was always pretty sure that Bo knew everything.

Chasing a chicken to help you beat Apollo Creed is a version of training. 

Are you exercising? Or are you training? And what’s the difference? And why do I ask so many questions?

Good question. 

Before we talk about exercise or training, let's start with physical activity, which is described by the Center for Disease control as any activity that gets your body moving. Also according to the CDC, adults need at least two and a half hours every week of physical activity. So doing things like brisk walking everyday (to understand what brisk walking means, check out an earlier post I wrote here), hitting your Fitbit step goals, playing with your kids and grandkids - this is physical activity. 

If you are sedentary in your job then finding ways to be physically active after work and on weekends (or even during the workday with walking meetings or walks on lunch breaks) is an important place to start. But it's just that - a starting point. 

The next step is to add some type of exercise in to your weekly routine. 

Exercise is a physical activity performed for the effect that it produces today - right now. Mark Rippetoe describes it as “punching the physical clock.” When I take my basset hound out for a walk, we’re exercising. Or, lying on the sidewalk because it’s hot and he protests and then I carry him back to the house. So I’m exercising. As a kid, I went outside and threw a ball off of the wall over and over again. My adorable parents go to their local gym three times per week and use the elliptical and weight machines and bands. 

When you start to exercise with a particular performance goal in mind, your physical activity transforms from exercise to training. This is why we train for a 5K or a marathon - we train for a power lifting meet - we train to catch a chicken because it will help us defeat Apollo Creed....

Last night at the gym, I had a long conversation with a client who’s been with us for over a year. She’s lost a lot of weight, kept it off, and is starting to get antsy. I would argue that she has outgrown exercise - now she’s ready to train. She likes the idea of taking her fitness to the next level and is bored with exercise for the sake of exercise. She has built a strong base and is ready for more. That more might be a mud run or an obstacle race - it might be a push/pull meet (powerlifting meets that have only a bench and deadlift, no squat), or maybe running a 5K or 10K.

She doesn't have to sign up for an event like a run or power lifting meet to start training though. She might start training for a 1.5 times bodyweight deadlift. Once she sets a performance goal and gears her workouts towards hitting that goal, she is now training.

There is no one right place to be, depending on where you are in your personal journey. Physical activity might be the goal - and that’s ok - we all need to start somewhere. But if you have been exercising for a long time - going to the gym three times per week and riding the recumbent bike while watching t.v. and are frustrated that you aren't seeing any changes in terms of fat loss, then it perhaps it's time to stop just exercising and start training with a purpose.