The Truth About Weight—What's weight got to do with it?

By Team Beachbody

It's not how much you weigh, but how you look and how you feel that matters.

"Female athletes often feel they need to look a certain way to be an athlete. It took me years to realize that I am an athlete no matter what I look like. My body weight is irrelevant. I weigh more than a lot of guys on my team. In fact, they tease me all the time about being so muscular, but the added muscle and strength I gain from weight training is crucial to my success as an adventure racer. I went from weighing 125 pounds (25% body fat) and wearing a size 10 to 145 pounds (13% body fat) and a size 6."
-Cathy Sassin, adventure racer,
2nd place 1998 Raid Gauloises

This quote is echoing the new outlook about beauty and fitness for American women. The chain-smoking waif look is being replaced by the sculpted, athletic look. Take a look at the most photographed woman on the planet, Anna Kournikova, and you see well-defined legs, abs, back and arms.

And it's not only athletes proudly sporting chiseled physiques, it's now more common for models on the cover of standard fashion rags to have v-shaped backs and a defined musculature. What the scale tells us is becoming far less important than our body fat readings and how our clothes fit. After all, how many women wouldn't want to look like Gabriella Reese or Marion Jones, women who weigh in excess of 150 pounds?

The first thing that we, the newer, fit class of Americans needs to do is to stop looking at standard measurements of what is healthy. Muscle weighs much more than fat; something the American Medical Association is slow to work into its outdated charts for health. For example, the National Institute of Health's body weight guidelines are based on the Body Mass Index (BMI). Health professionals developed the BMI to help find people at risk for obesity-related diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. But because this scale doesn't take into account that people have more muscle mass than ever before, many athletes and even regular exercisers may show up on these charts as overweight.

The other thing we need to stop doing is obsessing about how much we weigh. Losing weight should not be the goal. Losing fat and increasing muscle tone should be. If you gain the same weight in muscle that you lose in fat, you will be slimmer and look better. Many women struggle with this because when they start exercising, they don't lose weight. And, even though they feel better, they can't believe that the program is working. Think of it this way, a pound of muscle (think of a rock) takes up much less space than a pound of fat (think of a nerf ball); so a tape measure will more accurately reflect changes in body composition than a scale.

If you want a healthy mentality, the bottom line to motivation is shape and health. How do you look? How do you feel? As you age, you lose approximately a pound of lean muscle mass per year. For this reason, adding muscle actually counteracts aging. So wear those new-found muscles with pride, because they are going to keep you looking great longer than any diet or cosmetic surgery will be able to.