Realizing you aren't where you think you are...

I had a true confession by a client yesterday. She said that weighing her in last week was one of the best things we have done recently... and not because she saw some super low number. She was motivated by the number because it wasn't where she thought she should be.

To give you a quick background on this particular doc, she met with me last fall and spring semester and got down to 132lbs for a vacation trip she was taking. She was very pleased with how she looked, felt, and how her clothes fit. Between my transition to a full-time job from full-time grad student she worked with another trainer this past summer. She also got into a rut of poor eating habits and a skewed view of her actual weight, mostly from never weighing in.

I wanted her at a certain weight that I know is possible since it is just three pounds less than the previous weight we got her to in the spring. She was squeemish about weighing in. The entire previous month she had gone on trips on weekends and would come to me Monday morning with so-so nutrition stories so I pushed for it and got her on the scale. She was 8 pounds heavier than she had perceived herself to weigh.

At first there was disbelief.
"Is that scale right?" Yes, I calibrated it this summer.

"I don't feel like (insert weight here)." But then came true motivation: Knowing exactly where you are so you can properly go to where you wish to go. She told me after that weekend that she was very strict with her diet and cardio and even thoughing weighing in for her "sucked," as she put it, it was a true marker of exactly where she is.

Now, I am also not for obsessive scale stalking, because weight it just a number in a lot of cases. I would never recommend some one to weigh in more than one every two weeks. You need to stay focused, eat right, be held accountable, and train hard. Everything else will fall into place and you will be knocked out of any rut that you might have fallen into.