Lean While Obese; Flabby While Underweight

Remember that time I was shredded while obese on the BMI? Or those many other times when I was relatively lean while morbidly obese on the BMI?

Societal fixation on scale pisses me off. Americans lose an average of one pound of lean tissue per year after 25 years old or so. This IS physical capability. If, at 50 years old, you weigh about what you did at 25, you’re f***ed. You’re 50lbs fatter and less than half the athlete you were. Simple tasks like tying your shoes or going up a flight of stairs have become noticeably more difficult; and losing weight won't do a damn thing to improve that. It's not age, genius. It's that you threw away all of your muscle, tendons, ligaments, bone density, and connective tissue. Unless, of course, you’ve been training with weight lifting for the past 25 years. Then you’re ok. And you’re probably at a level of physical conditioning which could beat the crap out of your 25-year-old self.

The average American needs to gain about 40lbs to have a fighting chance at weight loss. You can't get LEANer by NOT building LEAN tissue, especially when you've already lost 20-60lbs of LEAN tissue. Studies on weight loss are very clear that more than half of the tissue people lose when they're losing weight is lean tissue. You can't get LEANer by getting less LEAN. You can't get leaner by losing weight alone.

Forget scale, please. Weight loss is associated with shortened lifespan; and repeated weight loss and gain and loss and gain destroys people's health, making them incredibly weak and incredibly fat, even if they're light: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/75/5/840/4689397​. How much do you deadlift? How fast can you sprint? If you want to fixate on a meaningful body composition indicator, what’s your waist measurement? According to the American College of Sports Medicine, an adult male has no business having a waist over 31.5 inches; and an adult female has no business having a waist over 27.5 inches. I don’t know about all that; but I do know that I’ve had a 27 inch waist at 225lbs. I have peers who clock in sub-32 inch waistlines while over 250.

How and where you carry what type of weight matters. And the scale cannot give us that measurement. If you aren't diligently working to maintain or build lean tissue, you are getting fatter. There are a lot of people who are heavy but super lean. There are even more who are skinny-looking but super flabby. If you have no lean tissue while flabby, it is a difficult road; but the answer isn't weight loss. The answer is strength gain. Once you have some lean tissue and physical capability rebuilt, you can risk losing some while you burn the fat. You can't risk what you don't have to lose what will only grow as you get weaker.