One of the things that a lot of people it seems are confused about, is weight loss vs fat loss. How are they different? Should you be aiming for one or the other? Is the approach the same or different? When people talk about weight loss, do they even really mean weight loss…?
What is weight loss?
Pretty simple really. In fact you’re sitting here, reading this, wondering why the heck I even bothered to spend this time writing the answer to this question… Weight loss is exactly that; you stand on the scales and you way an amount. The next time you get on, if the number is smaller, you weigh less than you did before.
And the health and fitness industry keeps telling us how important it is to be the “correct” body weight. A “healthy” body weight they say is important for preventing chronic metabolic conditions like type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Doctors will use weight in their calculations of BMI (a measure of your body weight relative to your height, which theoretically gives an idea of whether your weight is “in proportion” to your frame) to let you know whether you need to nip down to Slimming World so you can avoid their little blood pressure sweeties…but it might not actually be as simple. And in fact, we’ve heard time and time again, how BMI maybe isn’t that good a predictor of disease and poor health. Why? Because body weight doesn’t predict body fat percentage.
What is fat loss?
Fat loss, again, is self-explanatory. It’s losing fat from your body. Fat loss refers to body composition. Our bodies are made up of all sorts of things, but let’s simplify that into bones, muscles, fat and then everything else – all your other organs like skin, brain,. heart, blood vessels bla bla bla. Now in actual fact, the reason the health and fitness industry keeps telling us we need to monitor our weight and pay such close attention to it (aside from the “skinny is beautiful” narrative I thought we’d left in the nineties but it appears we still haven’t…) is because that’s a really easy thing to measure. What they actually MEAN, is that monitoring your body composition and maintaining a healthy level of visceral (the fat surrounding your organs) and subcutaneous fat (the stuff that gathers under your skin that you see in the mirror covering your abs).
Which is better?
Tough question. And like all good coaches in any profession will say…it depends!
You might be trying to hit a certain weight to perform in sport (think the weight classes in MMA or ju jitsu). But more commonly, you’re probably interested in weight loss because you want to improve your health and feel a bit more confident in your own skin – you want to change the aesthetic. In the first example, total body weight is where it’s at. In the last example, you’re looking at fat loss.
And really, that’s what I’m getting at: People use the terms weight loss and fat loss interchangeably. But it’s because we don’t have easy ways to measure body fat. Those fancy biometric scales people tell you are amazing and accurate for measuring body fat, aren’t all they cracked up to be, and often produce wildly inaccurate and inconsistent results, depending on how much water you drink and which direction the wind is blowing… In fact, the only real accurate way of measuring body fat is using skin fold measurements of skin callipers. It’s time consuming, technique sensitive and you need a well-trained individual to carry it out for you. The health and fitness industry therefore will often talk about weight loss because it’s simply easier to measure.
But if you’re looking at health metrics, then body FAT is the important one. And actually, your body WEIGHT has much less to do with your health and is simply one, pretty poor way of measuring fat loss when used in isolation.
So now you know the difference…
In my next article, I’ll help you understand how you can maximise your chances of fat loss vs weight loss and how you can keep track of it, without using skin callipers and instead using all the tools you normally have available at home.