Fitness Blogger Urges Us to Stop Obsessing Over the Number on the Scale
It’s amazing how many of us live and die by the number that flashes up on the bathroom scale. You may have been working out like a demon and ditched junk in favor of eating clean, but if the figures on the scale remain stubbornly fixed, or even — horrors — go up, well, defeated just isn’t the word.
But the scale doesn’t always tell the whole story. Which is why fitness blogger Kelsey Wells is urging her 300K followers to stop being slaves to the scales and letting weight define how they feel about their bodies.
Taking to her Instagram, the 26-year-old who runs fitness blog My Sweat Life penned an empowering post explaining that weight isn’t necessarily an accurate reflection of health. Sharing three side-by-side selfies, the first taken two months after giving birth (145 lbs.), the next when she reached her “goal weight” (122 lbs.) a few months later, and then how she looks today after putting 18 lbs. back on (140 lbs.).
“There is only a 5 pound difference between my starting and current weight, but my body composition has changed COMPLETELY,” Kelsey wrote. “I have never had more muscle and less body fat than I do now. I have never been healthier than I am now.”
Kelsey said if she were measuring her progress by just weight alone, she would have failed miserably, but she takes a number of other factors into consideration such as strength, ability, endurance, and of course, most important of all, happiness.
Explaining that she used to allow her weight to totally affect her self-esteem, Kelsey told her followers that after putting on more weight than she expected during her pregnancy, she was desperate to get back to her “goal weight.”
“I weighed 130 lbs before getting pregnant, so based on nothing besides my own warped perception, I decided my ‘goal weight’ should be 122lbs,” she wrote.
And five months postpartum and two months into the Bikini Body Guide workout program, she reached her target. But, as she followed the regime, she started to build muscle and gain strength. Now she weighs 18 pounds over her goal weight and has gone up two dress sizes.
“According to my old self and flawed standards, I would be failing miserably. THANK GOODNESS I finally learned to start measuring my progress by things that matter — strength, ability, endurance, health, and HAPPINESS,” she writes.
Instead of focusing on weight, Kelsey wants to encourage people to use other indicators of fitness and health.
“Take progress photos and videos,” she advises. “Record how many push-ups you can do, etc.”
And Kelsey isn’t the only one to believe that scales, as a measure of health, are flawed. Personal trainer Joe Wicks, aka the Body Coach, doesn’t allow his clients to weigh themselves, referring to scales as “the sad step.”
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