Why Isn't the Scale Moving When I Eat Well and Lift?

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Muscle takes up significantly less space in the body. As you engage in strength training and focus on building muscle, you might lose fat while also gaining muscle mass. This can lead to the change in body composition you want to see without any significant change in your total body weight.

What is going on, you guys? Yo, yo, yo. Hello. Welcome back to The WarriorBabe Show with Nikkiey Stott, co-founder of WarriorBabe. On this podcast, we talk about mindset, methodologies and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong and feel insanely confident.

I am your host, Nikkiey Stott, and welcome to episode 139. In today's episode, I'm going to share several reasons why the scale may not move as much as you want, hope or expect, and why strength training plays a crucial role in this overarching phenomenon.

As a preface to what I'm going to share: this is about strength training, obviously, but specifically doing it the right way and consistently for weeks and months on end, and why you can expect the scale not to move as much as you'd think. I know a lot of you listening have dabbled in strength training. Maybe you've been doing it for five, 10 or 12 years, however long. You've incorporated it in some way into your fitness regime.

But maybe you've also done F45, boot camps, running, or X, Y and Z along your journey. I'm also speaking to WarriorBabes here, because our fundamental methodology at WarriorBabe is strength training. We have every woman incorporate strength training and pretty much wipe out the things I just mentioned, like boot camps, F45 or Orangetheory, because we know the overarching goal for women is to be more toned and build more muscle.

The way you do that is through strength training protocols. So maybe this is the first time you're strength training consistently over weeks, months and years, and you'd expect the scale to move more, but it's not. I want to dive into several reasons why. But first, to paint some examples: we share the transformations our coaches see inside our company-wide Slack channel.

We call it the client wins area. Coaches drop before-and-after pictures into this channel all the time, multiple times a day, and it's so cool to see. There are so many vastly and uniquely different transformations. I love to see them all, but the ones I really like are when you can see the difference in the pictures, yet there's maybe a one to two pound difference in weight.

Or women are celebrating that they're losing inches while the scale stays about the same. I've talked about this so many times on the podcast. I think there was a really good episode I did back in December, and one more recently, on why the scale may not be moving. In the December one I used a lot of analogies, so if you're someone whose brain likes to see things in pictures and images like mine does, that's a great episode.

For the purposes of this one, though, I want to embed in your brains that while you're on a strength training journey, the overarching measure of your progress is not going to be the number on the scale. It's going to be measurements and, first and foremost, your progress pictures. Take the progress pictures.

I know some of you start your journey never wanting to see a picture of yourself. I totally hear you, and your feelings are valid. But there's a reason you're starting this journey, and you want to capture the whole thing in story form. The best way to tell that story is through pictures, especially when you're trying to change your body composition, because the scale is not going to tell you the full story. The scale is only telling you how heavy you are in relation to your bone mass, your skeletal mass, how much your organs weigh, how much food you ate that day, all of the things.

It's literally telling you how heavy you are, not the full picture of what you're made up of. So as you're on your journey and doing strength training more consistently than you've ever done before, the scale is not going to be your number one measure of progress. Here are several reasons why.

First and foremost, and I've talked about this many times, it's the difference between weight loss and fat loss. Really quick: weight loss is losing weight off your body, and everything gets involved in that. When you lose weight, you lose muscle mass, your organs get smaller, your body just gets smaller. You can still end up looking like a smaller, fatter version of yourself.

You end up in that skinny fat arena. In weight loss, you're not preserving muscle mass; you're using muscle mass as part of losing the weight. Fat loss is when you're eating enough of the right macronutrients and micronutrients to preserve the lean muscle you have, or are working on building, and you're decreasing the body fat around it. That's what creates that athletic, toned, beautiful physique.

These are two vastly different arenas. I think I talked about weight loss and fat loss way early on, in one of the first 20 episodes of the podcast, so if you want to hear me go deeper on that concept, definitely check that episode out. One thing that stems from that concept is that you've probably heard muscle and fat weigh the same. If you Google five pounds of muscle versus five pounds of fat, they weigh the same.

However, muscle is much denser and smaller than fat, meaning it takes up significantly less space in the body. As you engage in strength training and focus on building muscle, you might lose fat while also gaining muscle mass. That can lead to the body composition change you want to see without any significant change in your total body weight.

That's because a pound of muscle is much smaller in volume than a pound of fat. I said this in the December episode too: for the moms listening, think of muscle like the books in your kids' book bags. They're small, they're dense, they're heavy. That's muscle. Fat is like your kid's favorite teddy bear.

It's fluffy, it's voluminous, and it's much bigger when you set it next to a stack of books. A pound of muscle is smaller, denser and takes up significantly less space than that pound of fat. As you lose fat and gain muscle, your body composition changes, and you may get smaller overall and become leaner, even if your total body weight stays the same or only decreases slightly.

That's what I mean about the testimonials I was sharing a few minutes ago. You put two side-by-side photos of the same person together, and you can see they're losing fat, gaining muscle or preserving their muscle tone, their body composition is changing, they're getting smaller and leaner, but their body weight hasn't significantly changed. I want to pin that right there, because think about how many of you may be on your journey

not paying attention to the photos and relying solely on what the scale is telling you. You are missing so much of your story. You're letting that number define you when you're probably putting in all this hard work and doing it the right way, but you're not paying attention to the real North Star of progress, which is your progress photos.

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So wrap your head around that. As you gain muscle and lose body fat, your body composition changes. Because muscle is denser and takes up significantly less space in the body,

your body and your body composition are changing the way you want them to. But you're attached to the measure of progress you've probably been attached to your whole life, and you're relying on it to tell you how you're doing. It won't, because you're gaining more dense muscle, and that outweighs the weight going down on the scale. Does that make sense? I don't think I've ever articulated it that way before.

I don't want to say you're counteracting it, because you want that to happen, but you're gaining dense muscle, so the number doesn't drop. Take me, for example. I started my journey at 140 pounds. I now weigh 150 pounds, so I'm 10 pounds heavier. But my body is drastically different, smaller and leaner, because I put on muscle mass. My previous 140 was skinny fat, because I just focused on losing weight.

If I had allowed the scale to define me and my progress, I probably would have given up a long time ago, because I really didn't see the scale move much when I first started my journey. I was gaining muscle. So please remember that as you enter the world of strength training, because it is so badass. It's so awesome. Side note,

but I think it's important to say here: strength training is challenging but rewarding at the same time. You're stimulating your body to be challenged every single time you do a workout. And the results that come from that, muscle on a female body, are an embodiment of strength, dedication, perseverance, determination, growing and evolving.

Tony Robbins said this: you can look at somebody and tell how they live their life. You look at a woman with muscle and think, damn, that woman works hard. So think about that. And bringing it back in: continue on your strength training journey and don't let the scale get in the way. That's what I'm trying to say. You'll probably weigh slightly less, the same, or more, like me in my case.

If you're solely attached to the scale, it's going to ruin your journey to getting the results you want. So that was one of the main things I wanted to talk about. Another reason the scale may not move as expected when you start incorporating strength training is water retention. That's a common and natural response when you're doing strength training exercises and routines.

Understanding this process can really help you manage expectations about the weight changes and physical changes you're seeing. Think about it like this. When you engage in strength training, especially high-intensity workouts or new exercises, you cause microscopic tears in your muscle fibers. That happens as you consistently adhere to a strength training routine.

Every single time you train or add new exercises, as I always say, you're breaking down the muscle in the gym, and then you're building it up and repairing it afterwards through what you eat, how much water you drink and how well you sleep at night.

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This is a normal part of the muscle-building process. In response, the body initiates inflammation and healing processes to repair those damaged tissues, and damaged in a good way. You're breaking down the muscle fibers and causing those tears, so the body gets a little inflamed as it starts the healing process to build back those tissues and those muscles.

Part of this inflammatory response involves fluid accumulation, which can affect areas of the body. Think about it like this: you do a massive leg day, step on the scale the next day, and it's slightly up. That's because you just worked some of the biggest muscles in the body, and your body is aiding the recovery process by pulling fluids and water into those cells.

It's temporarily causing water retention to aid in the healing process of repairing that tissue and building back the muscle. The retained water is inside the muscles, and it's helping. It's literally transporting all the nutrients necessary for repair and recovery into the muscle. The water is pushing into these tissues, bringing in nutrients and fluids, and helping it all recover.

This can lead to a slight, temporary increase in your weight and a slightly swollen appearance. But keep in mind that this is so important when you're trying to build stronger muscles. So when you've had a killer leg workout or a killer back day and you're taking progress photos the next morning, keep that in the back of your mind.

Same if you're stepping on the scale to weigh in. I'm going to plug this here: I've talked before about the different levels of weighing yourself on the scale. Once you get to the point of understanding it's just a tool and a resource, this will make sense. Starting out, you weigh yourself weekly, one day a week. But given what you did the day before that one weigh-in, say a leg day,

you could naturally be higher on the scale, because your body is holding on to a bit more water. And then there's the next point I'm going to talk about, glycogen storage. I've talked about it before: carbs are broken down into glycogen, which is stored in the liver, and it holds on to water. So say you had carbs at the end of the night and you weigh yourself the next day. You're probably going to see the scale go up, and that's the only measurement you're using that week.

Then the next week, maybe you had a lighter workout, so when you weigh in the next day, the scale goes down, and you're like, yes, I'm dropping weight. But the week after, you weigh in the day after a back day, there's all this water retention again, and it goes back up. Weekly weigh-ins are good at the beginning of a journey, but these things can happen, so you need to understand what I'm saying here. If you're attached to the scale, you're letting your mind tell you that you're not losing weight.

But it's because you weighed in after a killer back day, like I said, and you're holding water, so you're up. Then maybe the next week you had a softer recovery day before, so you dropped weight. The following week you had a killer leg day, weighed in the next day, and it spiked from that water retention. The week after, another killer leg day, and nothing's changed. You see how that scale could really make you spiral? All of a sudden it's, nothing's happening, I'm not making any progress.

I see this all the time, especially with clients inside WarriorBabe. They say, I haven't lost any weight. Well, have you taken pictures? Is there a significant change in the pictures? Because I guarantee you there is, even though your weight is going up, down, up, down. The one thing that is never linear is weight loss. It always comes with spikes. What can be linear is your fat loss, getting an idea of your body fat percentage and seeing that drop. Now, clients who have been with WarriorBabe for years, three or four years,

understand the scale as a tool. They understand everything we're talking about on this podcast, so they actually weigh themselves daily. You see the constant fluctuations, and then you take the average of the seven days. When you do that for weeks on end, you'll see a trend. It won't be a beautiful straight line down, but it will be a bouncy trend down, if you have a lot of weight to lose. I need to put that in there, because not everyone will see that if they're building more muscle.

So keep that in mind too. I just wanted to plug that in, because I think it helps a lot of you. I hope it paints a better picture: oh, I had a killer workout, it's causing a lot of water retention, so when I step on the scale tomorrow, that's why the weight is up. So, we talked about water retention. Another form of water retention comes from glycogen. Glycogen is the form in which your body stores carbohydrates for energy.

It's stored in the muscles and in the liver. When you increase your carbohydrate intake, your body stores more glycogen to fuel your workouts. For every gram of glycogen stored in your body, approximately three grams of water are also stored. So after an intense workout, like I've been saying, or when you carb load, or have a cheat meal or treat meal, whatever you call it, you may notice an increase in weight due to the extra glycogen and the water stored with it.

This is not fat gain, my friends. It's a natural, totally normal, temporary fluctuation in body weight related to energy storage. Just because you're eating carbs doesn't mean they're making you fat. Carbohydrates get broken down and stored in your body as glycogen, which is then used for energy.

Glycogen is the form in which your body stores carbohydrates for energy, and it gets stored in your muscles and your liver. This is why women get so afraid of eating more carbs: they think they're getting fat. No, you're not getting fat. Your body is storing more glycogen so you have more energy to power through your workouts. I used this analogy in the December episode: think of yourself as Super Mario, but small Mario. You eat carbs and fill your body up with them,

then you hit the power-up mushroom, and all of a sudden you're super big, you have all this energy, and you can storm through everything. That's what carbs are doing for your body. They give you the energy you need to fuel your workouts. They're not making you fat. But for every gram of glycogen stored from those carbs, you're holding on to water. Keep that in the back of your mind. It's not fat gain. It's a natural, temporary fluctuation in your body weight from storing more energy to crush your workouts.

So those are the three main things I wanted to talk about today. There are other reasons you may not see the scale move the way you want or expect, but I think understanding these three is the most important thing. One: the more muscle you build, the more it takes up a smaller space than fat does.

It's way denser than fat. Think about the books. Muscle is denser and leaner than fat. Fat is like a teddy bear, this voluminous, cute little teddy bear you want to hug. It's fluffy, and muscle is dense and compact. So as you gain muscle, you're also decreasing body fat, but because muscle is denser, the scale probably won't move that much.

Remember that. And remember that as you're working out hard, incorporating strength training more consistently, and as a WarriorBabe killing it with strength training three, four, five times a week, your body is pulling in more water. This is why it's so important to stay hydrated and drink 100 to 128 ounces of water.

I don't care about the half-your-body-weight rule and all that. If you're in the gym crushing it with strength training and sweating, you need to rehydrate from that sweat, and also give your body and cells the hydration they need to aid these healing and recovery processes. So drink your water.

Drink your water. And if you're saying, Nikkiey, I can't drink water because it keeps me up all night, I've heard that so many times. Stop drinking water around six o'clock at night. Start from the moment you wake up; make it the first thing you have in the morning, before your coffee. Hydrate yourself, then caffeinate yourself. Then drink all throughout the day. Set alarms and notifications on your phone to remind you. Then stop at 6 p.m., and I guarantee you won't be peeing in the middle of the night. No excuses. You can't get around me anymore.

And every carb you eat is not making you fat. It's being stored and holding on to water to give you the energy you need to crush a killer workout. So that concludes everything I want to share with you today about why the scale won't move as expected, and how and why strength training plays a crucial role in all of this.

Please, if nothing else, don't let the scale dictate your progress as you move forward on your journey of changing your body composition, becoming a stronger, more confident version of yourself, building more muscle and being able to keep up with your grandkids. You need that muscle to keep up with your grandkids and run around, and to really add years to your life by adding more skeletal muscle to your body. Muscle is an organ. It's an organ of longevity. So don't let that tool, that resource, define your whole story.

It's not telling you major aspects of your story. And take the progress pictures, please, my friends. Take the pictures. Yes, they suck at first. But if you keep going for six months, eight months, 12 months, two years, three years, and you see the after picture, you'll say, damn, I'm so glad I took that before picture. All right, guys. I love y'all. See you next time.

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