359: Overcoming the Scale Obsession: How to Track Progress without Losing Your Mind

Introduction 

You're listening to Biceps After Babies Radio Episode 359.

Hello and welcome to Biceps After Babies Radio. A podcast for ladies who know that fitness is about so much more than pounds lost or PR's. It's about feeling confident in your skin and empowered in your life. I'm your host Amber Brueseke, a registered nurse, personal trainer, wife and mom of four. Each week my guests and I will excite and motivate you to take action in your own personal fitness as we talk about nutrition, exercise, mindset, personal development and executing life with conscious intention. If your goal is to look, feel and be strong and experience transformation from the inside out, you my friend are in the right place. Thank you for tuning in. Now, let's jump into today's episode.

Hey, hey, hey. Welcome back to Biceps After Babies Radio. I'm your host, Amber Brueseke, and I'm glad you're here because today's episode is one that I know that a lot of people need to hear. We are talking about something that has a way of creeping into our fitness journey and then completely derailing our progress. It's the scale. That little device that somehow holds so much freaking power over us and how we feel about ourselves and how we go about our day and whether we feel like we're doing a good job or a bad job. One day it's your best friend and you're celebrating alongside of it, and the next day it's your worst enemy and you hate it and you just want to throw it into the trash. Does that sound about right? And if you have ever stepped on the scale and seen a number that you didn't like and thought, well, that's it. Today's a wash. You, my friend, are not alone. But here's the thing. It's not the number on the scale that's the problem. It's not. I think a lot of us think that that is the case, but it's not actually true. It's the attachment to that number that is a problem. And so today I'm going to be diving into why that attachment happens, how it can sabotage you, and most importantly, what you can do about that. And so in this episode, I'm going to break down why becoming obsessed with the scale is maybe even a bigger problem than you realized. Why I think the advice to just toss the scale, like hashtag toss the scale, throw it into the trash, stomp on it, beat it into smithereens. Why I think that's actually not the solution that some people think it is. We're going to talk about how to emotionally detach from the scale so it stops running the show for you. And then finally, how the heck you're going to measure your progress in ways that actually feel good to you, that actually empower you, and that actually help you move forward. So if you have been feeling frustrated, stuck, or maybe a little defeated for being honest about the scale, you, my friend, are in the right place. This episode is about to be a game changer for you. So let's dive in.  

Attachment to the scale's number 02:47 

So in the introduction, I made kind of a bold claim that the number on the scale may not be the problem that you think it is, and that there's actually a different problem. And I want to pause here because I think this is actually, before we even dive into this content and this topic, this is something that can really shift things for you. This realization that what you think is the problem to be solved is not actually the real problem. I see this all the time in my clients' journeys. And if we want to actually solve the problem, we have to first define it. We have to actually get clear on what is the problem. And like I said, most of the time, what you think is the problem is not actually the problem. So what is actually not the problem is the number on the scale. Although it feels like a big problem, that's actually not the problem. The real problem is the attachment that you have to that number. 

So what does that even mean, Amber? What the heck does that mean? How do I know when I'm attached? What does attachment even mean? So attachment means that you are wrapping your identity around the number on the scale. That what you've done is you've actually taken two things that are separate, the scale and your self-concept or your identity, and you've actually collapsed it into one. And this is why it feels so deep and the emotion is so great that when the scale is down, you feel awesome and like you've succeeded. And then when the scale goes up, you feel like a failure, you feel horrible. And it's because you've actually attached yourself to that number. You've wrapped your identity, your self-concept about that number. So when it goes in the direction you want it to go, that's a positive. And that means that you're good enough and you're worthy and all those positive reinforcements for our self-identity. And when it goes the wrong way, you've also wrapped your self-identity up in it. This is why fluctuations on the scale can feel like personal failures. That's the problem. It's the attachment to it. 

Emotional reactions impact progress 04:45 

So why is this such a problem? The reason it's such a problem is because what ends up happening is we have this very emotional response to a number. And I know a lot of you know what I'm talking about. Like you hop on the scale and there's an emotional response to whatever the number comes up. Sometimes it's a positive emotional response and sometimes it's a negative emotional response. And this is happening because we're in our limbic brain. We're in the emotional side of our brain. We have two parts of our brain. We have lots of parts of our brain, but I'm going to break it down into two parts. We have an emotional part of our brain and we have a logical part of our brain. And when you have that emotional response, you can know that you're tapping into that emotional part of your brain. And in the emotional part of our brain, fear tends to run the show. And I know that you know this, but when you make decisions from fear, those are very, very rarely your highest, clearest, best decisions for yourself. I mean, we know that. Usually when we make a decision from fear, it often makes the situation worse. And so I see that a lot of times with the scale. How often have you stepped on the scale? It's up. You feel this emotional response. And then what action do you take after that? You throw in the towel. I see it all the time. You throw in the towel. Why am I even doing this? It's not worth it. I throw in the towel for the rest of the day. Now, what has happened is you've actually made the situation worse. The scale didn't make the situation worse. The number didn't make the situation worse. What made it worse was your attachment to that number, the emotional response, and then your decisions that you make after that to not track, to not go to the gym today, to not try today. That made it worse. Okay. So what didn't make it worse? I really want to be clear with this. What didn't make it worse is the number. What made it worse was your attachment to the number. And then that actually manifests in how you show up the rest of the day, the actions that you take, what you do, and then thus the results that you are getting.  

Okay, great, Amber. So we've identified that my attachment to the scale, my attachment to the number on the scale is the problem. Then throwing out the scale seems like the very, very obvious solution. Let's just get rid of the thing that triggers the problem. And I hear this a lot from people. And I think it comes from a very honest place, a very good place of recognizing that the problem is the attachment. So then let's get rid of the thing that's causing the attachment. And so we have this hashtag toss the scale. We have people on social media who are like taking a hammer and beating their scale or throwing it into a dumpster and feeling like, I'm free now. I'm free from this thing that was controlling my life. Again, I think they're looking in the right place. They're just a little bit off because they haven't actually addressed the issue. Like the issue is still there. It's like if you get a wound and then you look away and you can't see the wound and you go and do something else and don't look at the wound, like the wound is still there. We haven't actually solved the problem. And so while I do think for some women, it can be helpful to break the pattern by getting rid of the scale for a period of time. I'm not saying that that is never the right decision or that you should never do that. I think it can be kind of a pattern interrupt for some women.  

But I think if that is our final solution and we never come back and then readdress the attachment that we have to the scale, we're never actually healing or solving that part of us. And when you don't heal or solve a part of yourself, it shows up in other areas. And my guess is, is that if you have attachment to the scale, you have attachment in other areas of your life that are impacting you. And so learning how to release attachment in this area of your life is going to serve you in so many other areas of your life. I mean, I even see this in business as I'm coaching people in their businesses, that attachment to making a certain amount of revenue, having a certain size business, the attachment to that goal prevents you from actually achieving it. And so I know, again, it may seem like just toss the scale, solve that problem. I can walk on and now I've fixed it. But if you're attached to a number on a scale, chances are you are exhibiting attachment in other areas of your life that is also detrimental to you. And so what a beautiful area where we can focus on releasing attachment, because it's going to serve you not only in your health and fitness goals, but it's going to serve you in so many other areas of your life.  

Pain teaches us, data points reveal trends 09:08 

One of my mentors always says that pain is your greatest teacher. And that really, whenever we have pain or problems in our life, that is an indication that we need to be paying attention because there's something there for us to learn. Pain shows you where you are still attached in your life. And, you know, again, for some clients, it's good to take a step back and a break from the scale and use other data points to determine your decisions. And we're going to talk about that. But avoiding pain doesn't actually help you to fix it permanently, doesn't actually help you to solve the real issue. And I want to help you actually start to dig down and solve the real issue. Because really, in reality, the scale is just a single data point. And I make this point to my MACROS 101 clients all the time. The scale is a single data point, just one. And I don't know if you remember back to like middle school, when you learned about scatterplot graphs, remember scatterplots with all like the dots on the graph, and then you're like, draw the trend. If you have a single data point on a scatterplot graph, you can literally draw an infinite number of lines through that scatterplot, an infinite number of trends through that scatterplot. If you have a couple of data points, and let's say you have like a scale weight over a period of time, you're able to have, you know, a little bit more of a sense of the trends. But if you have a ton of data points on a scatterplot, it becomes very, very obvious as you zoom out what the overall trend is. 

And that is like, in our fitness journey, if you're just relying on a single data point, you're not getting the full comprehensive picture. It's like looking through a peephole and thinking that I'm able to see everything, I'm able to see the whole entire landscape. You're not, you're fooling yourself if you think that just looking through a peephole allows you to see everything. And that's like looking at the scale and saying that tells me everything. It doesn't, it just tells you one data point. And it isn't even really that great of a data point because what the scale weight tells you is your relationship with gravity. It does not tell you how much fat is on your body, it doesn't tell you how much fat you've gained or lost. It doesn't even tell you like how much water or muscle or whatever. It is literally the total sum of your weight, your current relationship with gravity today versus your current relationship with gravity tomorrow. And a multitude of things can change that relationship. You can lose water weight, you can gain water weight, you can have to poop and then you didn't poop. You can have more like food in your belly. You can be on your menstruation cycle and that shifts hormones, which shifts water balance in your body. You can be more stressed and have more cortisol, which again increases water in capacity in your water retention in your body. 

So there's just, it's not even that great of a data point. If you want to know, am I losing fat? It's an okay data point, but it's just an okay data point. It's not even that great of a data point. And so if you're only using one okay data point, you're missing the bigger picture. And so when we have multiple data points and we can have lots of data points on that scatter plot, now we can really see trends. And that's why I'm always pushing my MACROS 101 clients to gather as much data as possible so that they can make the best decisions possible in their journey. 

How do I detach from the scale? 12:22 

Okay, so hopefully you agree that tossing the scale, getting rid of the scale, doesn't actually solve the real problem. So then what is the solution? And if the problem is attachment, it's really clear that the solution is detachment. Okay, cool. How do I do that? That's always the question that people ask. Okay, I get it. How? Because it's hard because we don't even realize we're not consciously attaching to something. And so if we're not consciously attaching to something, it becomes hard to consciously detach from something that we haven't ever consciously attached to. So then the question becomes, how do I detach from the scale? And that's what we're going to talk through, you know, in this next part of the episode. And I think there's a couple things here that I've helped clients to realize that have really helped them with that subconscious detachment from their goals, subconscious detachment from that number on the scale. 

You are not your body 13:15 

Number one is realizing you are not your body. You are not your weight. You are not your successes. You are not your failures. You are not your productivity. And I think a lot of us, and I'm saying the word us because I'm including myself in this, we have created our self-concept inaccurately. Our self-concept is based around a lot of things that are tangible, right? What I look like is who I am. Where I succeed is who I am. How productive, this is one that was really hard for me, like how productive I am, how successful I am, that's who I am. And I've collapsed those two things down. And the reality is that that isn't me. My successes aren't me. I am outside of my successes. Yes, I do things to create those, but I am not my successes. I am not my failures. I am not how much I weigh. I am not my body. That is not who Amber is on a deeper level. And I think the more that you can really ingrain this into yourself and really start to tease out, who am I really? I mean, this is a question you can spend a lot of time on. Who am I? Who am I? And so many of us define ourselves with these external things. I'm a mother. I'm a business owner. I'm successful. I make this amount of money per year. I weigh this amount. I'm able to bench this amount. Those are not you on a core fundamental level. And so when you can wake up and really realize that, it becomes easier to detach yourself from anything that's happening on the outside, from how much you weigh, from what you look like, from what size your pants are, from again, how much you can deadlift, how good you are at chess. It's easier to attach because you realize that you are not those things. You are so much bigger than any of those things.  

So I think that that realization is really powerful in learning to detach and practicing detachment. I also think one of the best ways to detach is from moving from a limbic and emotional and fear, the fear center of the brain, to more of the rational cognitive frontal cortex of the brain. So I talked about the two different parts of the brain. We have the emotional and we have like the logical. And one of the things that I do that really helps my clients to learn this detachment is helping them to move into that rational cognitive part of the brain. And this is why one of the hallmarks, I talk about those a lot in MACROS 101 of becoming a macro scientist. That's what I'm trying to help clients to be able to do, to be able to become their own coach, be able to know how to adjust their own macros and how to set their macros and how to hit them and all the things that you need to do, these tools that you need to use. I'm teaching you how to be the scientist in your own journey. And part of the hallmarks of becoming a macro scientist is seeing the information that you're gathering throughout your health and fitness journey as data, as not a moral judgment on yourself, as not anything about your identity, as not anything about who you are. Like you are not what you ate yesterday. You are not how well your workout went yesterday. You are separate from that. And when we can start to see it as just data, as just information, then you can create that space and you can delineate yourself between me, who I am, and the data. And then it starts to have a less impact on your ego, on your self-concept, and we can make decisions from that more logical, rational place instead of a fear-based place. And I know you know this, but you're always going to make better decisions from a logical, rational place than you are from fear. We just don't ever make the highest level decisions from that place. And so when I talk about inner work, this is what I'm talking about.  

How are we learning to detach so that when you are detached, you're going to make better decisions. When we can look at it as data, you're not going to throw in the towel and not track the rest of the day, which is what happens a lot of times when people step on the scale. The scale in the morning determines the actions they're going to take throughout the day. If it's a positive, yay, the scale is down. I'm probably going to be more committed to my goals throughout the day. I'm going to be more on track because it's working. And then the opposite of the true, when it goes up or the way that we don't want it to go, it impacts our decisions. It impacts our commitment for the rest of the day. So you can already start to see how it's influencing how you're showing up. So when we can separate out and we can look at it as data, we can make decisions from that logical, rational place. We can make better decisions throughout the day, which is going to net us better results.  

Detach from identity; small wins build success 17:59 

One hard part about talking about the subconscious, talking about these things that we can't tangibly touch or see, is that it can leave people being like, that sounds really great in concept, Amber. How do I do that? How do I actually make that happen? What does that look like on a day-to-day basis? I love James Clear. He wrote the book Atomic Habits, highly recommend it if you haven't read it. But in Atomic Habits, he says that we need to decide the type of person we want to be and then prove it to ourselves with small wins. And so the key here is deciding on what identity you want to have and then make decisions that are going to act in a way that supports that identity. Said another way, how do we act our way into this way of being that we want to hold? And so what is that way of being? What does detachment sound like, look like to you? A question I always like to ask my clients is how will you know when you're there? How will you know when you are detached? That gives you milestones to start to look for so that it can indicate you if you're on the right direction to actually releasing that detachment or releasing that attachment, you know what I meant.  

So you can ask yourself, if I wasn't this number, if I was separate from this number, what would my experience be like getting on the scale? How would that sound in my head? What would I go through? How would I look at that number? And then that's an opportunity for you to practice that way of being when you get on the scale. If I knew that I was not, you know, whatever I ate yesterday, that that's separate from me and I could detach from that, what would that look like? How would my day be different? What decisions would I make? And I will say when I present this to people, the biggest worry, and maybe some of you already have this in your mind of like, Amber, if I'm going to detach from what I eat, I'm going to flip and lose control. I'm going to lose control. I'm going to eat everything. If I am not what I eat, I'm going to eat everything. And so we have this idea that by identifying with these pieces of us, it's helping us be more successful. And what I'm hoping you're starting to realize is that there is a cost to that. And it actually, I know you think it's helping you be more successful, but in reality, it's actually getting in the way of your success. It is actually preventing your success.  

Control is not your highest level of being 20:26 

And that is because there is this myth that a lot of us think that the more we can control things, the more successful we'll be. Right? Does that land for some of you? It lands for me. Heck, I just want to control, control, control. I just want to control everything because I feel like the more I can control things, the more successful I'm going to be. And I've actually learned that it's the opposite. Control is not your highest level of being. And this is the way that I explain it to my clients a lot of times, is that a lot of times when people come into MACROS 101, they feel very out of control. You feel out of control with your food. You feel out of control with tracking. You feel out of control with your workouts. You feel out of control with the scale. You feel out of like, you just don't feel like you have any control in this area of your life. And a lot of times I hear from clients, I'm really good in other areas of your life. I'm really committed in other areas of my life. I'm really successful in other areas of my life. Why am I not successful in this area of my life? Why do I not have the control or the integrity or the commitment that I have in other areas of my life? What's that about?  

And so they come into MACROS 101 because on some level, they feel like macro counting is going to give them some control in their life. And you know what? It does. It does give you more control. There is an element of control in tracking, in knowing how much you're eating, in being intentional about what you're eating. Like there is some element of control. And for a lot of people, that feels really, really great because being in control feels way better than being out of control. I know you know what I'm talking about. And so it gives this illusion that because being in control is better than being out of control, that that is the pinnacle.  

Macro counting builds trust, not permanent control 22:16 

The thing I want you to start to realize is that that control is not a pinnacle control as a weigh station. And so this is why my ultimate goal with all of my clients isn't to have them count macros forever. It isn't for them to hyper control and hyper fixate and hyper whatever forever. But that macro counting is a weigh station to the next pit stop. And what is that? It's trust. And so we have this beautiful evolution and this beautiful journey of going from out of control to feeling more in control with food to then being able to trust yourself around food. 

And I think that macro counting is such a beautiful weigh station because it is near impossible. I won't say it is impossible. So I think there are some people who can do it, who can jump from feeling very out of control with food and they can jump all the way to just trusting themselves around food. There's some people who can do that. But for a majority of the population, I find that that is way too big of a jump. It's way too far outside of their comfort zone. And so they don't ever actually make that jump. And so what I've found is that making a smaller jump from feeling out of control to feeling in control and using macro counting as a tool in helping you feel more in control can help to quiet your brain down a little bit, can help you feel a little bit more comfortable, a little bit more confident in yourself. And then I can help clients make that transition from feeling in control to then trusting themselves around food and being able to release some of the control that they have. Because you don't have to hyper fixate, you don't have to hyper control everything. And in fact, when you can get to that place of trust, that's a really beautiful place to be. And so that's ultimately where I want to get all my clients. It's like I see macro counting as a weigh station. I see macro counting as a pit stop. I see macro counting as a tool that's very useful and helpful and comes from a scientific background and allows you to be able to make a lot of progress in your journey. And I never want anybody to feel like that's the end destination.  

The end destination is for you to be able to feel all those things, but to do it from a place of trust with yourself, with your body, with your ability to be able to make decisions, with the integrity that you've built with yourself, with the commitment that you've built with yourself. And that's a different, that's a next step that is really valuable for people to be able to make. And that's what I love to do. We do that a lot more in my alumni program. So after you go through MACROS 101, you have the option to come and continue to get coaching for longer in our alumni program. We called it Beyond MACROS 101. And that's a lot of the work that I do in that program. We're doing a lot of the work with the macros and feeling more in control and seeing that physical results and the physical success in MACROS 101. And then it takes a little bit longer. So you can come into Beyond MACROS 101. We can do a lot of that, even further, deeper inner work to help you to continue to have that progress towards that place of trusting yourself. 

Quantitative data 25:13 

Okay. So the last section I want to talk about, if the scale isn't the end-all be-all, and if it actually doesn't tell me as much as I think it tells me in my fitness journey, then what should I be using to measure progress? What should I, what data should I be gathering that can be very helpful in making data-driven decisions? Because that's a hallmark of becoming a macro scientist. It's something I teach inside of MACROS 101 is how do you, instead of just guessing, instead of just being like, I feel like we want data to back up our decisions. We want data to back up when we adjust our macros. We want data to back up how we tweak our workouts. We want data to back up these things as we're making decisions. So if we know that, what data should we be gathering? So I like to distinguish between qualitative and quantitative data points. And I advise my clients to be gathering both qualitative and quantitative data points.  

So if you're familiar with the research world, you know that quantitative data is all about numbers. It's things that you can objectively measure that you can put a number next to. These are ones that our brain really likes because they seem very cut and dry. It's one of the reasons people love the scale, because all they have to do is they have to get on it, and it's a very cut and dry number. And it feels very reflective of the goal that they're trying to hit until you realize that it is actually not that great of a data point because it can be skewed by a whole bunch of different things that have nothing to do with fat loss or fat gain. So when you realize that, you realize, yeah, it is a data point, but it's actually not the really awesome, fantastic data point that you thought it was. It's not actually a one-to-one relationship with fat loss, which is what we really want. We want fat loss, right? Not just weight loss. You don't want to just lose weight. If you just wanted to lose weight, you could cut off your hair. You could pee, and you'll lose weight. Okay? Because you don't actually want to lose weight. What you want to do is lose fat, and the scale doesn't actually have a one-to-one relationship with fat loss or fat gain. 

Okay. So that's quantitative data. Our brain really likes quantitative data, but qualitative data is just as important. And in the research world, we need both. We need quantitative and qualitative research studies. So qualitative data captures more of the characteristics, the observations, things that are subjective. It's not as easy to quantify qualitative data, but again, it is just as important when it comes to research studies. And for us learning about the world, there are a lot of qualitative research studies that teach us a lot that aren't giving us numbers, but help us understand our world a lot better.  

A great example of a fantastic qualitative researcher is Brene Brown. So Brene Brown has done lots and lots of research studies, and most of her research studies, if not all, I hesitate to say all because I haven't read every single one of them, but most of her research studies are qualitative research studies. She's interviewing people, and she's finding trends in what they say. There's no numbers. It's not like people rated a number. She's listening to their story. She's listening to what they're saying. And what she's doing is she's finding patterns in what they're saying, and then she's extrapolating that to a larger population. And then when we hear the things that Brene Brown says, and we go, oh my gosh, that's so true. I never thought to put language to that. You're so right. It's because she talked to a bunch of different people and saw a common experience through humans and was able to then communicate that. Her work has changed my life and has changed a lot of people's lives, but none of her research is quantitative. It's all qualitative. So while our brain really loves quantitative data, qualitative data is just as impactful and just as important in gathering in our fitness room.  

So the quantitative data points that I have clients gather, one is what are you eating? So lots of people don't recognize this as data, but you know that what you do creates the results that you want. And so if you track what you're doing, i.e. how much you're eating, i.e. how many calories you're consuming, each of the macro breakdown of what you're consuming, how much fiber you're consuming, those are numbers, those are quantitative data points, and you can start to link what does and doesn't work for you. Now when you understand this and you really can grasp that what you eat is a data point that is communicating to you, you realize how silly it is to not track your macros just because you don't know exactly how much you ate. Or even sillier, when you don't track your macros because you went over, right? Because, and I tell my clients this all the time, my MACROS 101 clients will know this, some data is better than no data. Some data is better than no data. And when you look at numbers and stuff, you can you can be like, yeah, okay, I can get that. I can grasp that getting, you know, at least a couple data points is going to be better than getting no data points. And yet we don't make that connection with the food that we're eating. And so we do silly things like, oh, I'm not going to hit my macros today, so I'm going to stop tracking. Or I don't know exactly how much I ate, so I'm not going to track it at all. Track something, get something, get some data. Some data is better than no data. Okay, so that's a quantitative data point that's really valuable. 

Other quantitative data points that can be really insightful is your daily activity level. You can kind of extrapolate this with the number of steps you're taking a day. So that gives us some data and information. How much sleep you're getting and the quality of sleep that you're getting. Again, another quantitative data point that is really influential in your fitness journey. Your weight is a quantitative data point that I have clients track. I, however, recommend instead of comparing a day-to-day weight that you do seven-day averages and you're comparing seven-day averages to each other to kind of smooth out some of those variability of the natural fluctuation to data of day-to-day weights. And then measurements is another big one that I have clients take so that you're doing body measurements over time and able to utilize that as a data point to see how your body is responding to what you're doing.  

Qualitative data 30:57 

So those are some of the quantitative data points. And then some of the qualitative data points that can be very valuable, the amount of stress you're under. Again, it's kind of hard to quantify the amount of stress, but this is a qualitative data point that does make a big difference. We know that stress makes it harder to lose weight. We know that chronic stress makes you make worse decisions when it comes to your food. It can impact your hunger and fullness cues. So stress impacts your journey a lot. And again, it's not, there's not like a, I can't say I have a 7.52 stress level right now, but there is some qualitative understanding of like, I am in a more stressful time of my life versus I have, you know, it's a lower stress period. Consistency, another qualitative data point. How consistent are you being? Again, it's a little bit harder to put like exact number on this, but what is your consistency? What's your follow-through? How often are you hitting your numbers? How often are you close? How often are you really far away? How often are you getting the right amount of sleep? How often are you doing your workouts? What does that consistency look like? Progress photos is a huge one that I have clients track. Taking those progress photos again is qualitative, but we can see a lot of progress, especially over a longer period of time. We can see a lot of progress in those progress photos. And sometimes you'll see indications of progress that don't actually show up in your quantitative data points. You'll see, you may weigh the same amount, but you can see in those progress pictures that you're actually having a lot of progress be made. Again, that's why those qualitative data points can be so important as well.  

Non-scale victories 32:23 

And then things like non-scale victories. These are things that aren't something you track on a day-to-day basis, not a number, but things like when your rings fit differently, or you're able to wear a ring that you used to not be able to wear. One I hear a lot is like watch bands or a belt. I used to go to this hole when I was putting on my watch or when I was putting on my belt, and now I can do a smaller hole. That's a non-scale victory. Things like a better relationship with food. Maybe you struggle going to parties because you're stressed about food the whole time you're there, and you realize you go to a party and you're not as stressed as you used to be. That's a non-scale victory. Lots of things can happen in our journey that are harder to have a number next to it. It's more qualitative, but that doesn't mean it's not important data and information for us as we start to make those data-driven decisions in our own journey. 

Those are some of the ways that we can measure progress outside of the scale. Again, we're not necessarily tossing the scale out, but what we're doing is we're creating multiple data points. We're really filling out that scatterplot chart that's going to give us a much better indication of the trends, of where we're going, of if we're on the right track and we need to just keep going, or are we not quite on the right track and we need to make some adjustments. The data is what tells us those things. It's what communicates to us. It is what I love to help clients learn to understand and interpret inside of MACROS101. The whole process I'm teaching my clients inside of MACROS 101 is how do we set our macros? How do we start to hit those numbers? How do we take feedback and information from our body, figure out what the data is starting to tell us, interpret that data, and then make new decisions or make new tweaks or adjustments, know exactly how to make those moving forward so that we can get closer and closer and closer to our goals and ultimately be able to hit it a lot more efficiently and in a way that aligns with our value system and the things that we want to do. That's the whole idea of becoming a macroscientist that I teach inside MACROS 101.  

Side note, we will be opening up MACROS 101 here soon, so if you're interested in coming and joining and learning this whole process, definitely get on the wait list by going to bicepsafterbabies.com/waitlist, and then you'll be the first to know when we open doors to that program. 

Key Takeaways 34:34 

All right, so let's wrap this up with some key takeaways from today's conversation. First, scale obsession. It all comes back to attachment. When we tie our worth or identity or self-concept to a number, it is no wonder that it can feel so defeating when that number doesn't say what we want it to say. Second, tossing out the scale may feel like a quick fix, but it doesn't actually solve the root issue. The problem is still there, and avoiding it doesn't help you break free from the detachment. It just kind of sidesteps it. And like I mentioned before, you are likely attaching in other areas of your life, and this is a skill you need to be able to learn if you want to live a happier, healthier, higher level of life. So the real solution is detachment, realizing you are not your weight, you are not your body, you are not your successes, you are not your failure, and when you step back and separate yourself from that number, you discover a new sense of freedom that feels so much lighter. And finally, progress is about the big picture, and so when you track a variety number of data points like consistency, non-scale victories, measurements, you know, progress photos, how you feel, you get a much more complete and empowering view of your journey.  

So here's what I want to leave you with. Your journey cannot be defined by just one number. You have the power to shift your focus, to let go of judgment, and to embrace the full picture of your progress. And when you do that, you will be amazed at how much easier it is to show up for yourself and to keep moving forward. So that wraps up this episode of Biceps After Babies Radio. I hope I gave you the encouragement that you need to take back control and redefine progress on your own terms. I'm Amber. Now go out and be strong, because remember, my friend, you can do anything. 

Outro

Hold up, sister friend. Do you love Biceps After Babies Radio? If so, the best way to say thank you is to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on iTunes. I know every podcaster wants you to leave a review, but it's because those reviews help the podcast to reach more people. And I do truly want to know what you think. If this episode resonated with you, will you also please share it? Either send the link to someone who would find it valuable or take a screenshot and post it to your social media and tell your friends and family why they should listen. Make sure you tag me @biceps.after.babies so I can hear your feedback and give you a little love. And you know, if you aren't already following me on Instagram or Facebook, that's the perfect time to hit that follow button. Thank you for being here and listening to Biceps After Babies Radio.