Muscle vs. Fat

When I first started loseing weight I would often say "I want to lose weight" not "I want to lose body fat". There is a difference. If you want to lose weight you are looking to decrease the mass of your body. When you want to lose fat you are looking to decrease the body fat in your body and keep muscle.

I often hear girls complaning that they have not seen the number on the scale go down. I have often had this complaint. You need to realize that a pound is a pound regardless if it is muscle or fat, however, the difference is muscle takes up less space in your body than fat.

Take for example both of these pictures of me. I weight the same weight in both pictures, however, to myself I feel I look like I weigh less in the picture on the right than I do in the picture on the left. I think the difference is I have 5% less body fat that I do on the left. Still the same scale weight but my body fat has decreased.

I think it's not as important to look at the scale but to also look at your body fat and see the changes there too because that is going to make the biggest difference.