Setting a Realistic Weight Loss Goal

No matter which low carb diet program you choose, one of the first things most dieters do is set a weight loss goal. Most of the time, this goal involves a number on the scale. Sometimes, that number is realistic, but most of the time it's not.


Weight charts are sometimes used by medical professionals to tell you exactly what you should weigh. Many dieters use them to help them make a weight loss goal. These numbers are supposed to take your height, gender and sometimes age under consideration. The general rule is that a 5-foot individual such as myself should weigh about 100 pounds. A man should weigh around 110. For every inch taller, you would add an additional 5 or 6 pounds. These charts were designed for life insurance companies, not dieters. Hence, the numbers reflect life expectancy for the average individual and sit on the low side of reality – especially since our food supply has changed drastically since then.

Measuring body mass index (BMI) is similar. BMI looks at your height and weight, and then it attempts to discern from those two measurements if you’re too heavy or healthy.

Scale Weight Doesn’t Consider Lean Body Mass

Neither of these two ways of measuring health considers your lean body mass (LBM). LBM consists of everything that is not fat, so it includes muscle, organs and body tissues such as your hair or skin. It even includes water, blood and other body fluids. When it comes to weight loss goals, what matters most is how much body fat you have. Since the scale doesn’t tell you how much of your weight is fat, weight is the least reliable measure of a healthy body composition.

There are weight loss scales that measure water, body fat percentage and weight, but they are not reliable when it comes to low carb dieting because severely restricting carbs keeps your glycogen depleted. Since several pounds of water were attached to your lost glycogen, maintaining depleted glycogen leaves you too dehydrated for these scales to be of any use. Dehydration gives you a wrong body fat percentage.

In my own case, the scale measures far too low – even when I’m not low carbing. I have more body fat then a tanita-like scale tells me I do. I’m in my late 50s and sedentary due to my health issues. Even though I’m large boned, it would still be highly unlikely that I’m carrying around 120 pounds of lean body mass, but that’s what those types of scales tell me.

Think Size Rather Than Pounds

The best way that I have found to set a weight loss goal is to think more in terms of size than weight in pounds. Size is a much better indicator of where you’re at, even though it is still not 100 percent reliable. You can actually be normal weight and carry too much body fat. That occurs more often among those who don’t eat adequate protein. For a low carber, arriving at goal weight with too large of a body fat percentage would be extremely rare. However, LBM will affect the final number on the scale by as much as 10 or even 20 pounds. There are valid reasons for that, but these reasons are often misunderstood.

Does Muscle Weigh More Than Fat?

One of the popular notions among the low carb crowd is that muscle weighs more than fat. In fact, many low carbers often use this fallacy to support weight loss stutters and stalls. If you aren’t losing weight on the scale as quickly as you think you should be, the common blame for that is you might be putting on muscle. The reason given is that muscle weighs more than fat.

If you take a pound of muscle tissue and place it on a scale, and then you take a pound of body fat and place it on another scale, both will weigh exactly the same amount. A pound of one thing is always equal to a pound of another.

What you’ll discover, is that muscle tissue is denser than fat. It will be smaller in volume. Body fat takes up more room than muscle tissue does, so as you lose weight following a low carb diet, you will fit into a smaller size when compared to the average individual that is at that same weight. For example, when I reached 160 pounds after following the old weight watchers’ exchange program, I fit into a size 14. When I reached 160 pounds after doing hHCG, I wore a size 12, so many people who find their last 10 pounds to be extremely difficult are actually at a healthy weight already. The number they wanted to see on the scale is unrealistic for them.

Truth About Gaining Lean Muscle Mass

Along with the belief that muscle and fat weigh the same is the belief that putting on muscle mass is relatively easy if you just exercise. For those new to weight-bearing exercises, that’s true. Sedentary beginners do tend to put on more muscle mass initially than those who have been exercising for awhile. Beginners can put on muscle weight at the same time they are losing body fat. They will also lose more body fat anyways because they have so much of it. When that happens, less weight will be lost on the scale because the body is either adding to its muscle reserves, or it is using less of what you already have to repair other damaged body tissues.

If you are very overweight or obese, you will have more muscle and connective tissue to support that muscle because during weight gain, some proportion is lean body mass. You don’t just gain fat because it takes more strength to haul around your fat stores. That’s why many medical authorities believe some LBM loss is acceptable in obese individuals because the muscle mass was in excess of what is needed for an average person of healthy weight.

If you are not new to exercise, then you won’t gain LBM while dieting. That takes a specific weight gain regimen. What you’re doing instead is convincing the body that it needs to hang on to your current level of muscle mass because you need it. That’s also what’s happening when you cross the threshold between beginner and average exerciser. More body fat losses than lean tissue can result in those who exercise. The body won’t get rid of what it believes it needs. It will choose to adapt another way. What you’re left with is a higher number on the scale, but a smaller size.

Realistic Weight Loss Goals

So what’s realistic? The size you choose to stop at has got to be a size that you can maintain without a struggle. That’s the number one lesson I’ve learned about myself over the past year. If you have to spend the rest of your life hungry to maintain a smaller size, it probably isn’t going to happen. If you’ve been overweight or obese for any length of time, the body is hardwired to return to that level; it will fight against you to get back there.

For me, I thought a size 7 would be a good number. About 125 to 135 pounds is the goal I set for myself. That’s quite a bit higher than what weight charts tells me I should weigh. I’m not a young chicken, and with 160 pounds placing me at size 12, size 7 initially appeared to be realistic. I’m not so sure that’s true anymore.

When I first started reacting to the hidden corn in my diet, half the weight I’d lost while doing hHCG last year came back fairly quickly. Since then, the next-to-impossible reality of finding all of the hidden sources of corn in my current diet and replacing them with safer options has undone the rest of it. Today, I’m a size 14 again. It’s like hHCG never happened for me.

Granted, some of that weight gain has occurred because I can no longer use sugar substitutes. Some of it has come because a strict meat and vegetable diet such as Atkins’ recommends results in excessive vertigo. That means I’ll have to find another way, but at the moment, I have no clue what that other way will be.

A couple of years ago, I started another blog to separate low carb from my moderate carb research and experiments. It’s called Life After Low Carb, but I’ve been too sick since then to keep up with it. At that time, I didn’t know that dairy products made from cow’s cream and corn are major issues for me.

Now that I do, I have reclaimed a small portion of my health. It’s a catch-22 situation, though, but one I’ve come to accept – at least temporarily – until I figure out where to go next. That journey will not be recorded here. I want to keep this blog tightly focused on low carb dieting because I know that for most individuals, with only a few tweaks, it works well. Plus, the goal of this blog is to help as many folks as I can reach a healthy weight by following some type of a low carb diet.

Moderate carbs doesn’t fit into that mold, but for me, that’s a realistic weight loss goal.