WGP 038: How to Measure Your Health Without a Scale

In this podcast I’ll be exploring the Best Ways to Measure Your Health:

  • I’ll explain why tracking your health progress is crucial to reaching your health goals
  • I’ll talk about how your body weight is really a poor measure of health
  • Finally, I’ll give you 5 different health tracking techniques you can use to better manage your health


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Many people set health goals and fail to reach them, why? Two big reasons come to mind. First one is you need to know why you are doing what it is you are doing. Many people fail to reach health goals because they don’t have a big enough why, a big enough reason to push through plateaus and obstacles that will most definitely show up. Having a dream gives you that why; it gives you direction and inspiration to push through right to the end.

Second big reason people fail to meet health goals is that they do not track their health progress. Just as having a dream and setting a health goal is important in that it gives you direction and something to move toward and gives you that drive and that push, tracking your health progress is like signs and indicators that keep you on the best path toward your dream. Tracking and measuring your health is really important in that it gives you clear signs when things are working for you and when things are not.

If you suffer from chronic weight issues, whether you’re overweight or underweight, than the bathroom scale is probably your most prized and most despised earthly possession and why wouldn’t it be. You have been told that body weight is a very important indicator for health. Let explain how this is not 100% accurate.

Your body weight is made up of muscle, bone, fat, cartilage, bodily fluids of several types, and of course water. Whenever you stand on a scale and measure your weight you are weighing the totality of all of these things. This is where the Body Mass Index or BMI fails as a health measurement. The BMI is a measure of body fat (supposedly) based on your weight in relation to your height. If your BMI comes out at 18.5-24.9 you are labelled as having a normal weight. If its 25-29.9 you are labelled overweight. Over 30 and you’re obese.

Now I want you to think of the Terminator himself Arnold Schwarzenegger. During his bodybuilding days his body weight was around 107 kg or 235 lbs and he’s 6’2”. Arnold’s BMI in his prime works out to be 30.2. Meaning according to body weight and BMI that Conan, the Commando himself who helped Red Sonja save the world and who single-handedly took out the Predator is an obese fat hunk of human flesh! Remember over 30 is obese. Well of course that’s not true as Arnold’s body fat percentage when he was competing was only about 5-7% and he was in reality a mass of lean muscle and a chiselled piece of human art.

The bathroom scale is not giving you an accurate number for health. It’s giving you a number, but that number depends on so many things. Is that scale number made up of mostly muscle which is a lot more dense and heavier and healthier than fat? Or is it bone mass? Is that scale number mostly fat?

Imagine you spend a whole month off the sugars and junk food, you’ve quit smoking, and you’re now walking more and doing some resistance training. You start out at 70 kg and after 4 weeks you see on the scale the same 70 kg. Your initial reaction may be shock, horror, and confusion, but if you understand that getting off the sugars means you’re not holding onto as much water as before and that eating more real food and not smoking and doing some weight training can actually build muscle and bone and cause fat cells to empty out and die then maybe that number is a really good indication of how you’ve been doing that month. You’ve burnt off the fat and you’ve built up some bone and muscle.

This is why body weight is not a good measurement to track and using a scale is a waste of time really. It’s difficult to get a real sense of what’s happening with your body and with your health overall when you rely solely on that number you get from the scale.

Let me share 5 more effective ways to track your health progress. These techniques do not need any fancy equipment and are simple and easy to do and they will give you a more accurate measure of your health than a body weight number on a scale ever could.

First technique is measuring your waist-to-hip ratio. This gives you a better measurement of your body composition. All you need is a tape measure and a calculator. Note down your waist circumference (by putting the tape around your waist over your belly button) and your hips circumference (by measuring at the widest part of your hips). Divide your waist measurement by your hips and you will have your waist-to-hip ratio. An ideal number for men is 0.8 and for women is 0.7. Less than 0.95 for men and less than 0.8 for women puts you in the low risk disease group. Above these numbers, .95 and above for men, .8 and above for women and you move into the moderate and high risk disease groups.

Along this body composition line of thinking clothes are a great way to track progress. Are your pants or dresses starting to feel more loose or tight? If it’s tight is it due to more fat or more muscle tone? How to tell? Use a mirror and a camera. Your memory tends to be a bit biased and flaky when it comes to your body image so taking photos of your half-naked body in the mirror is a great objective assessment of your body composition over time. I suggest keeping the snaps to once a week. You can overdo tracking your health progress. We want to keep it nice and balanced so once a week taking your measurements will keep you from getting too neurotic.

Second way to track your health progress is by keeping a food and poop log. This is seriously important data you need to manage to keep on top of your health. By logging your meals, snacks, and drinks you will be able to see how well you’re keeping to your lifestyle eating plan. Remember diets are great, but healthy eating is part of your life not separate from it so healthy eating shouldn’t be something you feel forced into doing, but something that’s as natural as breathing or brushing your teeth every day. So you can use this food log data to help track down root causes of any health issues that come up.

By logging your, logs, poop that is, and using the Bristol Stool Chart as your tool to compare your stool you can get an overall picture of your lifestyle and how healthy it really is. Your body rarely lies and if your poops are in the constipated or diarrhoea ends of the Bristol Stool Chart that means some part of your lifestyle is not working for your body and needs to be isolated and changed. Luckily you’ve been tracking your food intake so you can use this as a tool during your stool analysis.

Okay third way to track your health is to see if you can hold a 60 second plank. A plank is a position you hold horizontally on the ground where you raise your body and rest on your toes and your forearms and elbows. If you can hold a plank using good form and I’ll put a link to a video in the blog post for this episode so you can see what that looks like, if you can hold a plank for 1 minute your core strength isn’t that bad.

This fourth technique may seem easy for you young’uns out there, but it’s still a valid test and may even show up some faulty movement patterns or stiff areas of your body that you didn’t even know existed. It’s called the Sitting-Rising Test or SRT for short. This test involves sitting and rising, duh, but using only your legs. You start off with 10 points, 5 points for sitting and 5 points for rising and each time you use another body part for support like your arms or knees you lose 1 point. The SRT is measuring many things including muscle strength, bone integrity, mobility, balance, and motor coordination, but ultimately it highlights your longevity. The goal is to keep the 10 points and sit and rise without assistance. This indicates a reduced risk of death from all causes, but don’t worry if you can’t get a perfect 10. Just note down your number today and once a week or month retest and see how well your lifestyle changes are working for you.

Fifth and final tracking technique is probably the most important – logging (journaling, writing down) your thoughts, feelings, and the results you’re getting in other areas of your life. So has your thinking and your ability to focus improved? Have your moods improved or are they more stable? Has your outlook on life improved or gotten worse. How are your family and work relationships? How are your career and financial goals coming along? Have these all improved?

The first four techniques that I mentioned even if they are all showing improvements in your health in the right direction this doesn’t mean all is well in your life. Your body composition and fitness is one part of your health and your health is one part of your life.

This final way of tracking your health progress, logging how you think and feel and how you’re performing in the world really shows whether looking good in the mirror and planking yourself for days on end is really working for you or not. I mean what’s the point of having 10% body fat and being able to deadlift a car if you are secretly depressed, broke, and you have no-one else to share your health with. Health is one key to a happy life, don’t forget that and this last tracking technique brings all aspects of your life together.

Millions and I mean millions of kilos and pounds of human tissue have been lost and found over the years due to people not having a dream and not having the ability to follow that dream the simplest way possible. By using these 5 health measurements you will steer yourself toward your health goals a whole lot easier and happier than if you were to use a single number you get from a scale as your only measurement.

Archimedes, an ancient Greek mathematician, he said:

“Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.”

Well the scale definitely isn’t the place to stand if you want to make effective long lasting change happen. So here’s to tossing out the scale and thinking that your health is tied to a single number. Your health is dependent on so much more and then some.

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