So it's January 1st. Or beach season coming up. Or you just heard about this BMI thing and aren't happy with the result. You do all the right things: you eat well, you hit the gym, you even tried a yoga class. 4 weeks later, you step on the scale and... nothing changed. Same exact number. What the hell happened? Did you waste all that energy?
Maybe. A lot of people train like crap and think eating well means eating cheeseburgers only once a day, but this isn't the story here. You made legitimate efforts, you sweat your ass off, what's up with that damn scale? Nothing. Nothing is up. It's simply a very incomplete way to measure your progress. Here's what you should monitor instead (or on top of it).
1- Hair quality. You know why princesses always have that long, lustrous shiny hair? Because hair is telling. Malnourished? Hair gets brittle and less shiny. Sick? Same. Since it takes a while to grow, long hair tells a very good story about your long term health (even pot shows up for a few months if you analyze hair samples). People know it without thinking about it: good hair looks nice and sexy. So if you change your habits and your hair looks better, you're going in the right direction! If it looks worse, something is off (stress, missing nutrients, overtraining), changes need to be made.
2 - Skin quality. Same as the hair, good skin tells you're running a tight ship. Good skin is a reliable marker of attractiveness across all cultures and sends the signal that you're free of disease. A bunch of issues can cause skin problems, chronic inflammation and auto-immune diseases being major culprits. Nutrient deficiencies can also come in play here (100% anecdote: girlfriend's skin improved a bunch once she started adding more fat in her diet). So same as hair, if your skin quality improves, keep it up, you're going in the right direction!
3 - Energy levels and focus. Half-asleep and hooked on caffeine and cheap sugar isn't a way to go through life. Since you started changing your habits, have you been more alert? More focused? Less sluggish in the mornings and afternoons? If so, again, keep it up.
4 - General well-being. Exercise is as least as good as antidepressants to treat depression, with the main after-effect being that you're sexier. More than the weight on the scale, how you feel day to day has a lot to do with your overall life quality. If your workouts make you happier, keep doing them.
5 - Body composition. Many ways to spin that one, but here's the general rule: you might lose fat and gain muscle, which is great health-wise, without anything changing on the scale. Remember that muscle weighs more than fat, so you could gain muscle, lose fat, weigh more on the scale, yet look thinner. The body is weird like that.
How to tell if you made progress? Check yourself in the mirror once in a while. Take before/after pics in underwear from the front, side and back. Check how your clothes fit (one more girlfriend anecdote: when she started moving more and eating healthier, she gained weight but her clothes became looser). Last one: measure your waist circumference. Fat around the belly (abdominal fat) is closely tied to pretty much every awful chronic disease out there. If your weight remains stable and you're losing belly fat, you're doing great!
6 - Libido. As far as the body is concerned, reproductive fitness is secondary to staying alive. If your body lacks nutrients, is overstressed, or isn't fit enough, your libido will take a hit. Libido went up? Something's working! A good naked dance session is also a great workout, so you enter a virtuous circle: working out leads to more working out.
7 - Sports performance. How are you doing in the gym? If the weights are going up, you're probably doing good. The human body tends to evolve in plateaus. You see it with growth spurts during childhood and adolescence, when learning new languages, when losing fat, when gaining muscle, and when getting stronger. Thing is, not everything happens at the same time. You might be getting stronger without losing fat... yet. Long term, being stronger and fitter is awesome for health and quality of life, so appreciate your gains!
8 - Digestion. One of the most popular subjects in medicine these days, and regular people definitely don't talk about it enough. When you hit the throne, things should be easy, painless, and quick (look at the Bristol chart for a more graphic description). Digestive issues are increasingly linked to auto-immune diseases, weight gain, and more. Since you changed your habits, do you digest food better, or worse?
Taken all together, these 8 signs show a much clearer portrait of your health than just the numbers on the scale. And guess what, healthy is sexy. We're wired by evolution to look for signs of health. Make yourself healthier, and the Tinder dates will follow.
Cheers!