EP 85: Are You Measuring Fitness Progress Over 40 All Wrong?

0:00Hello and welcome back to Becoming Her, Fitter, Better, and Stronger over 40. I'm your host and coach Shauna. I am 47, a wife, a boy mom, and a fitness and nutrition coach, helping women over 40 become their best. After working with hundreds of women and taking myself through a full body transformation, what I can tell you with confidence is that if you're only using the scale to measure your progress, you are short changing your results. If you think the scale is the only thing measuring success, you are likely missing out on the more important changes happening with your body, especially when we're talking about body composition.

0:30By the end of this, you're going to know exactly what to look for instead of just relying on the scale. So you stop quitting during the very phases that are actually going to transform your body. After transforming my own at age 47, I've learned something is that the scale tells you your body weight, but it does not tell you about your body composition, which is much more important if your goals are health, longevity, and let's be real looking fly. Before we jump in, I want to let you know I have a free mastering and metabolism masterclass linked in the description below. Inside, I walk you through the exact phases of transformation so you know what to focus on and when so you can build your best body over 40 and most importantly, keep it.

1:08For decades, we have been conditioned to believe that there's only one way to know if our fitness journey is working, and that is if the scale is going down. Think about it. When you start a fitness journey, someone asks you how it's going, and the first question is, well, how much weight have you lost? No one's asking you how much stronger you are, how your clothes are fitting, what your energy is like. We've attached our success to one number. So if the scale doesn't move, we panic and we think we're failing. We think something is wrong. We think we need to change the plan. That's where I think we've gotten it all wrong.

1:38And while, yes, there is absolutely a time and a place for fat loss, but if that's the only phase you ever celebrate, you're going to miss the phases that actually build the body you're trying to create. Most women I talk to come to me saying, I want to lose body fat. I want to look toned. I want to have more definition. And those goals aren't focused solely around weight loss. Those are body composition goals. And body composition is not built with just a fat loss phase. It's built over time across multiple phases. This is something I wish someone had explained to me years ago. You know, for a long time, I thought progress only counted if I was eating less and watching the scale go down.

2:14But that meant I tried to live in a deficit only to fail at some point, slowly gain the weight back, feel like I failed and start the process all over again. But everything changed when I stopped chasing the smallest version of myself and started to chase the strongest version of myself. Instead of just considering how I was going to lose weight, I started to consider how could I improve my body composition. That right there is the equation that you want because losing body fat and building lean muscle equals looking and feeling toned. That shift not only changed my relationship with my body, but it also changed my relationship with fitness and with food.

2:51Once I experienced that myself, I started helping other women do the same. Take Lila, for example. When she started with me, she had been a chronic dieter, always trying to eat less, and she was maintaining her weight at about 1 ,500 calories. And at 5 '9", 164 pounds, that's not a good place to start fat loss or to grow muscle. So we slowly reverse dieted her, meaning we brought calories up so her metabolism could adjust, and we focused on a plan with progressive strength training, walking, proper recovery, and sleep. We now have her averaging about 2 ,200 calories, and she's maintaining her weight there.

3:24While reversing over these last few months, the scale has fluctuated. Some weeks, it's even trended less, but it's not really changed a ton. If we were only judging her progress by the scale alone, it would look like not much was happening. But when we looked at her photos, we could see her waist was smaller. Her shoulders looked more defined. Her glutes were rounder and firmer. Her clothes fit completely different. Her energy, strength, and her mood all improved. Lila wasn't unique either. The same thing happened with my client Gina. Gina came to me in a cycle of vicious dieting where anytime she wanted to lose weight, she would drop to 1 ,200 calories, fail because it was too low to sustain, blame herself, rebound, and start all over.

4:03We've slowly reversed her to 2 ,000 calories, and while the scale hasn't changed dramatically, she is eating so much more and maintaining. She's improving her strength. Week after week, she was getting stronger in the gym, and little by little, her body started to transform. Her waist is smaller. She's more defined as she has more strength. Her feet no longer hurt after long days, and that's a huge win that the scale will never capture. This also happened for my client, Adrienne, where she came to me stuck with progress eating around 1 ,500 calories. We shifted her focus to getting stronger, took some time to build so she actually had something to reveal later on.

4:38We had a priming phase, a deficit phase, and then reversed her into maintenance where she's now sitting at around 1 ,900 calories. She's leaner than ever, maintains her results with far less effort, and she has her dream body without having to eat as little as possible or live in the gym, which is so important as a busy working mom. and if any of these women had quit because the scale wasn't dropping, they would have walked away right before some of the biggest changes happened. This is exactly why I have every client collect more than just scale weight because the scale only tells you how much you weigh that particular day.

5:11It doesn't tell you if you've built muscle. It doesn't tell you if your waist is smaller. It doesn't tell you if your jeans fit differently. It doesn't tell you if you're lifting 10 pounds more than you did two months ago. That's why we take photos. That's why we look at strength. That's why we keep track of energy and digestion and sleep. Because your body's always giving you feedback. The question is, are you paying attention to that feedback? Because it's easy to think nothing is happening because the scale is fluctuating that day. But then you pull up photos from eight weeks ago and suddenly you see a completely different woman.

5:44The fitness industry taught women to glorify weight loss as it's the only thing worth celebrating. You're in a calorie deficit and you're motivated. You're checking the scale every day and it feels exciting because there's this constant validation that you're making progress. But a calorie deficit is only one piece of your transformation puzzle. There is absolutely a time and a place for fat loss. I coach women through deficits all of the time. But if we romanticize that part of the journey, we are doing ourselves a huge disservice because eventually that phase ends. It has to. You're not supposed to live your life in a deficit.

6:18What you should be doing is trying to build a body that you can maintain year after year. And maintaining that body isn't about eating less. It's about mastering the mundane, the boring basics, you know, lifting consistently, eating enough protein, walking, recovering, showing up even when there isn't a vacation, a wedding, a weight loss goal on the calendar. And that may not sound exciting, but that's exactly what creates an incredible transformation. And more importantly, that's what's going to help you maintain that. And I think it's dangerous if we think we could only be committed and motivated if weight loss is the goal.

6:52And it's also dangerous when the only time fitness feels exciting is when we're seeing the scale go down. And this used to be my mindset. I used to think that that was the true measure of success. But the biggest transformations I've ever experienced personally and have seen with my clients did not happen in a deficit. It happened while we were building. You can see it with Lila, Gina, and Adrian. Every one of them leaned into getting stronger and trusting the process, taking it phase by phase. There were times in their journeys where the scale more or less stayed the same, but their bodies were still transforming.

7:26Their clothes were fitting better. They started to see more definition in their muscles. This is why it's important to focus on more than just scale weight. So if you are on a body transformation journey, take photos, track your strength in the gym, pay attention to how your energy is, what your mood is like. Is your digestion better? Are your clothes fitting differently? Because it's really easy to convince yourself that nothing is happening when you only look at the scale. But then you might pull up a picture from eight weeks ago and realize your body's been changing the entire time. And that's what I mean when I say we have to trust the process.

7:58This is also why getting stronger is one of the most powerful goals that you can have. The scale can fluctuate for hundreds of different reasons, but your strength doesn't lie. Every rep that you can do, every pound that you can add to the bar, every workout that you show up for and feel stronger with, you are sending a signal to your body to become stronger, more capable, and more resilient. And eventually your body is going to reflect that. It's time to let go of the idea that the only thing that's the measure of success on a fitness journey is weighing less. There are so many other things that are going to tell you that you are transforming your body.

8:31We want to lean into those. We also want to embrace other phases. You know, fat loss is one piece of the puzzle, like I mentioned, but we have to embrace the other pieces of the puzzle, especially when it comes to building so that when you do go into fat loss, you have something there to reveal. You don't want to rush through or skip the very phases that are going to transform your body and teach you how to maintain it for the years to come. It is scary to eat more after years of teaching yourself to do the opposite, but I think it's a whole lot scarier to be standing in the exact same place 10 years from now, still chasing fat loss with that same yo-yo dieting approach and potentially losing muscle in the process.

9:08What's even scarier is reaching your later years of life without enough muscle to help you do the things that you love, to take care of the people that you love and to take care of yourself. It is hard to commit to the journey, to be patient, but the alternative is harder. And I promise that the challenge will be well worth it. And if you talk to any of the clients I mentioned today, they would all say the same. I genuinely hope this video inspired you to take a look at your fitness journey from a different lens. After 40, it's not about getting smaller. It's about becoming stronger. The cherry on top to that is that when you build your strongest body, you're going to have the aesthetics that you want come with it.

9:45Thank you so much for being here. As always, if you need help with your fitness goals, you can always find ways to work with me in the description. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I genuinely hope you found it helpful. If you did, it would mean so much if you left a rating or a review. If you have show ideas, please DM me on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. And until next week, keep getting stronger and I'll see you in the next episode.