SS 163 – Can The Scale Help You Lose Fat?

As a continuation of their “fat loss” theme for January, Grant and Heavey talk about using the scale as a metric to check your progress for your fat loss goal. Is it effective? They also dive into more effective ways to measure body composition. Finally, find out what the duo is drinking and why they say this relatively new single malt whisky from Islay is worth a try.

This episode is sponsored by Health IQ, a life insurance company that give the best rates for the health conscious. To check if you qualify, check out their website.

 

[02:44] Sweatcoin: Sweat Up and Earn

 

Although Heavey sees a long term future for cryptocurrency, he feels people are artificially driving up the price. Sure, many people are pretty familiar with bitcoin. But have you heard about Sweatcoin?

 

It’s actually the number one fitness app in the App Store. With Sweatcoin, you can earn coin in “digital currency” by performing physical activity. The more steps you take, the more Sweatcoin you earn which can be exchnaged for different, actual things of real value like a Fitbit.

 

Other offers include $1,000 payphone cash for 20,000 Sweatcoins. Here’s how it works. You get one Sweatcoin for every thousand outdoor steps. This is like 200,000 steps. The catch is that you have different tiers to cap out how many steps you can get per day.

 

If you want to unlock higher tiers so you can earn more a day, they charge you more each month to be in that tier, which is paid in Sweatcoin. So to earn 3,000 a day, you’d have to pay 5 Sweatcoins a month to be able to have that higher level. You’d never have to pay any dollars and this is what’s confusing. Some people are concerned that by giving them access to your GPS, they’re going to use it to sell your data so other people can leverage that into other marketing opportunities. Interestingly, this has a motivational component tying in technology to keep people on their resolution and their goals, rather than just basic tracking.

 

[09:22] Do You Own a Scale?

 

Heavey explains that one part of being motivated is seeing progress. Track your progress and pick some variable or metric you can check and notice that whatever you’re doing is having a real effect on your metric. For a lot of people, one metric is standing on the scale. However, it’s not really an ideal tool although it’s the most commonly used.

 

Again, it’s not a perfect measure because it only measures weight. Some people are looking to lose fat, not weight. Grant adds how this can also be demotivating when you see the number creeping up.

 

Weighing yourself daily isn’t useful for measuring changes in your body composition. From day to day, your body compositions changes. It doesn’t really account for fluctuations on the scale. However, there are a few factors that does this.

 

[11:40] Factors That Change Your Body Composition Everyday

 

There are four main things that affect your weight day to day.These are pee, poo, glycogen storage, and blood volume.

 

By blood volume, it means water retention. When you take in excess sodium, that increases water retention, otherwise called blood volume.

 

Heavey cites out this scientific study suggesting that from person to person, poo variation can be up to three pounds or a little over it. For a tiny female that doesn’t eat any fiber, her poop is at maybe half a pound. If you’re a big dude that crushes broccoli, your poop may weigh 3.5 pounds. So if you’re measuring yourself each day and you’re not controlling for poo, then 3.5 pounds is an enormous swing in the scale. It could totally motivate or demotivate you based on what you see.

 

Therefore, one of the best things to factor these things out is to weigh yourself every morning when you wake up, right after you’ve evacuated all fluids and solids.

 

[14:15] How Much Do You Pee Everyday?

 

Pee can vary as much as 5.7 pounds from person to person. If you control for pee and poo by doing this morning measurement, then you factor out a lot of the variations – except for the changes due to glycogen or blood volume.

 

So for instance, you might eat a lower carb diet for a few days and then consume one day of higher carbs, this is going to affect your body weight. This contributes to the biggest fluctuations we see from day to day when we control for everything else.

 

If we picked a fixed time and evacuate our body beforehand, Heavey suggests that this would be our best shot at getting valuable body composition type measurements out of the scale.

 

[15:52] The More You Weigh Yourself, The Less You Watch TV

 

Another cool study Heavey found is that over a six-month period, they had these individuals weigh themselves daily compared to a control group that didn’t weight themselves at all.

 

The weighing group lost 13 more pounds over the course of six months. So although the act of weighing themselves didn’t make them lose weight, they found that the people who weighed themselves everyday were more likely to eat less and less likely to watch television.  

 

[17:08] To Weigh or Not to Weigh

 

Interestingly enough, they had another group that weighed themselves five times a week and they didn’t lose as much weight as the group that weighed themselves everyday. Hence, the two-day difference was statistically significant. Some research has shown that just the fact of weighing yourself motivates people to lose weight. It’s a real change you’re able to measure.

 

The big caveat here is that some people don’t do well weighing themselves. It can trigger certain people to form bad habits like disordered eating. It’s the dark side of weighing yourself – bulimia.

 

Hence it’s important to know yourself if you’re going to decide to weigh yourself on any regular basis. If you think it’s going to lead to a dark place, then it’s probably not something you want to do.

 

[19:18] Orthorexia and Other Psychological Effects

 

There’s also this notion of orthorexia. This occurs when people adhere to a diet and becomes scared of other foods. People with a much greater risk for the psychological effects from weighing themselves are younger females.

 

On the flip side, overweight individuals interested in losing weight are in the lower end of the risk spectrum for these psychological effects. Heavey thinks that it’s probably okay to use the scale as an instrument for the very people that need fat loss the most.

 

[20:55] Better Metrics for Measuring Body Composition Progress

 

There are actually other better measurements than just using the scale. Heavey reiterates that the scale is not perfect. It doesn’t tell you if you’re gaining muscle. It just tells you how your body weight is changing, which is a combination of water and fat and muscle.

 

What you can do is to take pictures. This allows you to see changes if you took before and after pictures.. You don’t really see that much change if you just look at yourself in the mirror everyday.

 

Weight circumference is another very good metric. The bottom line is to find something that works for you that is attached to your goal. For most of Heavey’s clients with body composition goals, it’s usually body weight pictures and weight circumference.

 

[22:11] More Advanced Scales for Body Fat Measurements: Are They Effective?

 

Grant was wondering if these new scales out there with electrode pads are worth it, but Heavey negates this saying that most of them are pretty inaccurate. What he has at his gym though is a fancier, body electric impedance measurement that uses more frequencies. There are handles to hold onto and a scale to stand on. But it wasn’t perfect either. Heavey admits it’s still not the best method for measuring for body composition.

 

The gold standard for body composition is the DEXA scan. However, it can be too expensive to have so not everybody has it available to them.

 

Heavey thinks people get obsessed over body fat percentage when at the end of the day, it’s just a number. What you really want is to get compliments for looking good. Not the 9% body fat.

 

[24:30] Whisky Time: Kilchoman Distillery Single Malt Whisky

 

For today’s episode, Grant and Heavey are having Kilchoman Single Malt Whisky, a bottling from Islay. Grant finds it’s an interesting distillery having only had it once in his life. Alcohol content is at 46%. True enough, Heavey describes the alcohol as a little forward. So it could be better with a couple drops of water. It’s not a super Heavey peat compared to the other ones they’ve had from Islay.

 

Two interesting things to talk about here. First, it’s a relatively new distillery, which opened in 2005.

When it opened, it was the first new distillery in Islay in 125 years. That in itself, is unique. In fact, they have a 12-year bottling that’s not been released yet.

 

Their products are mainly four- and five year-old whisky. Based on the taste, it doesn’t taste new as Heavey would describe it. Grant adds that it’s a little lighter-bodied and not quite as peaty as other Islay bottlings like Ardbeg and Laphroaig.

 

One of the things this makes it especially interesting for Grant is that, unlike most distilleries in Islay, Kilchoman is actually growing and malting its own barley, distilling it, maturing it, and bottling it all in the Islay area.

 

[28:29] A Quick Refresher Course on Whiskey

 

Grant explains that a single malt is explicitly and only malted barley. A few weeks ago where they talked about an Irish whiskey, it was both malted and unmalted barley.

 

There are other grains they make whiskeys out of that are not malt and are not considered a grain. One great example is bourbon, which has to be at least 50% corn.

 

So when you see scotch that says grain, it’s almost always wheat.

 

[29:15] A Lighter Color

 

Heavey then goes on to describe the whisky’s color as extremely light compared to other scotches. Two reasons – one, because it’s so young, it doesn’t have the time and the flavor. So when a scotch comes out of the still, it’s clear. It looks like vodka with no color to it at all.

 

There are two ways to add color to scotch. One is by letting it sit in barrels for longer time. Or second, you add color to it. Scotch is allowed to add caramel coloring to it.

 

On their website though, Kichoman claims to have natural color. This being said, a vast majority of single malts will not add color since that’s the whole idea.

 

[30:20] Why You Need to Get Excited About Kilchoman

 

People are excited about this whisky because although it’s young, the flavor is great as well as the nose. All around, it’s a wonderful bottling and they’re getting great reviews.

 

Part of the reason for its favorable reviews is the bottle’s uniqueness. It comes from Islay but it’s got this light fruit flavor and not so heavy on the brine, salt, and the sea. You get more like apples and just a hint of charcoal. It’s a unique cool bottle that still got a little oiliness, and a mouth feel of an Islay without being so heavy and overbearing.

 

Moreover, they’re new but they’re not trying to be modern. They still have malten floors where they’re malting it on a big open floor and not some sort of commercial setup.

 

It’s a cool distillery which offers a great product at an affordable price. It’s worth a try for something different!

 

 

Links:

www.healthiq.com/scotch

Sweatcoin

Kilchoman Distillery