Three “Types” of Weight Loss

In this blog post I want to go over the three different “types” of weight that you can lose when starting on a weight loss journey. Understanding these can make the process much quicker, healthier and long-lasting. So, what do I mean by “types” of weight loss. What I am referring to is what specifically your body is losing to achieve the overall weight loss. Just because you are losing weight doesn’t mean that you are necessarily losing body fat. The three components that can generally be manipulated to lead to weight loss are fat, muscle and water. Lert’s talk about each.

The easiest and quickest way to lose weight is to lose water. Water can be shed relatively easily by “sweating it out”. Weight controlled athletes often do this to manipulate their weight quickly before a composition (think of boxers and wrestlers). You can simply sit in a sauna for an hour, sweat like crazy and then when you step back on the scale you may be 5 or even 10 pounds lighter. I’m not going to spend too much more time on this topic specifically because obviously this is not what people want to do when they are looking to lose weight long term. For the sake of being pedantic, however, this is one way to simply lose weight.

You can also lose muscle which will lead to overall weight loss. Oftentimes when someone tries to lose weight they end up losing a significant amount of muscle tissue. Muscle is much heavier than fat, so losing muscle looks great on the scale. Again, I understand that this is not what people want when they attempt to lose weight. Unfortunately, a lot of gimmick diets that eliminate certain foods (fats or carbs) or have extremely low calories can lead to significant muscle loss. There has also been some evidence that the newer GLP-1 drugs can lead to muscle loss. To be clear, when you are losing weight you will always lose a little bit of muscle. If you are 50 pounds lighter, for instance, you will no longer require the leg muscles needed to carry that extra weight. The aim should always be to limit this muscle loss. Eating clean and balanced meals and avoiding gimmicks that interfere with getting good nutrition is essential to this process.

The third way to lose weight is to lose body fat. This IS obviously what people want when they start the process of losing weight. Unfortunately, fat loss is often conflated with weight loss. If losing fat is the goal then you will need a plan specific for fat loss (not just weight loss). In our Cincinnati and Northern Ky weight loss centers this is specifically what we help our clients with. Long term fat loss requires a plan that the client is in agreement with and doesn’t lead to intense hunger of drastically cutting whole food categories out. It also requires diligent monitoring of body composition numbers to verify that the weight that is lost correlates with a reduction in overall body fat.