BONUS POST: Answer this correctly. Win something awesome.

Aloha. Michelle here.

So, I'm not going to bore the snot out of you with another rant about scale weight. I want YOU, lovely Fat Burning Babes of the Universe and Beyond, to tell ME what's wrong and right with the email Skye just forwarded to me with steam coming out of her ears.

➩Please put your thoughts in the comments below.

The first correct answer will win something. I haven't thought of what it is yet but I need my faith in you restored.  I will make it worth your while. Please don't let our work here be in vain. PLEASE someone help us!

I wish it was a joke, dog.

There is a part of me that thinks we're being Punk'd with this email.

Here's the email:

Good morning,

I have been following the diet for 3 weeks and lost weight originally but nothing for the last 2 weeks.  So……I read what you wrote about adding protein.

Is it ok to use whey protein?  Is it inflammatory? 

I feel really good and am still losing inches but the scale won’t budge!!!!

I read your section on weight stalling and being over 40  and wondered how effective adding protein would be.    Yes, I love losing fat....but weight would be good too!

Please respond about the protein....

HELP

---

<Hulk frustrated! Hulk smash!>

Ladies, post how you would respond in the comments below. I am going to think of a really good prize for the most helpful, well-informed answer. Maybe a free, 30 min phone consultation?

Hope you all are having an amazing weekend. Happy Mother's day to all the awesome moms out there!


Yours in resilience, strength and sticks of butter!
Much aloha,
Michelle

P.S. Follow us on Instagram: @No_Fail_Fat_Burning and @MichelleBurleson

How much of your body is really fat? | Sneak Peek Fat Loss Challenge Update

Aloha, Fat Burning Babes! It's Michelle here.

Real quick, check back tomorrow for a  Day 16 Kick Fat in the Ass Challenge update. Some interesting stuff going on with our participants. But, only for you,  here's a sneak peek of Kim K. who's down 13lbs and 25.1 inches as of this week:

Kim K says No Fail Fat Burning is "...the easiest plan to follow ever."

Congrats, Kim! Onto the show...

I know you're tired of me railing against the evil, awful, anti-Christ of a woman's sanity:

Scale weight.

If you want to understand why scale weight is as about as useful as tits on a fish, read this post. But sometimes the scale is all we have. No worries. We can hack that for a true fat loss number --- opposed to total weight of everything in your body.

 

Why small bodyfat % losses are huge

Shout out to our Fat Burnin' Babes overseas who click their way here, but most of you reading this are American. We like things BIG:

• Big Macs
• Big Boobs
• All about that bass
• Big drops in scale numbers.

For a lot of women who still don't get it, saying you lost five (5) scale pounds this week somehow sounds better psychologically than saying you lost 0.5% bodyfat.

Half a percent of bodyfat versus five total scale pounds. Remember that scale pounds are TOTAL weight of muscle, water, blood, bones, organs, tissue, skin, and then fat. Fat is only one of eight things measured in scale weight.

So, when your scale weight drops when you have a lot of fat to lose that's initially a good sign. But I also have plenty of clients whose scale weight stays the same yet they're rocking curves and shape in all the right places. All while losing inches, firming up and dropping percentages of bodyfat.

Why? Because of smart nutrient timing and sculpting themselves with that precious, oh-so-hard-to-earn lean muscle which weighs more than fat.  So, sometimes after an initial water weight loss and some fat, the scale number goes down then stays at a certain number. Yet you keep dropping pant sizes because of muscle gain and pure fat burn. I've experienced my scale weight increasing while my bodyfat decreases. In fact, two weeks ago a measurement showed my bodyfat dropped 1.5% while my scale weight increased a couple pounds. That's a great thing!

 

How do I know what my bodyfat weighs in pounds?

Let's say a woman (Fannie) weighs 157 lbs and is 40% bodyfat. 
To know how much of her is pure fat in pounds, we must first determine her lean body mass which is everything else in/on her body BUT fat.

It looks like this:

157lbs (body weight) - (157lbs x 40%bodyfat) = Her lean body mass is 94.2lbs.

This means Fannie is carrying 62.8lbs of pure fat. She wants to lessen this number and not the 94.2lbs lean mass number. If the lean mass number (94.2lbs) drops, it would probably mean Fannie's muscle wasting from bad nutrition, starvation dieting, calorie restriction, and chronic endurance cardio habits. You don't have to diet like that anymore, Fannie! Stop!

How do I know if I'm losing fat or muscle when I step on the scale?

Let's say our bestie sister-from-another-mister Fannie wants to use the No Fail Fat Burning for Women method to go from 40% bodyfat to 20% bodyfat... which, by the way, is completely safe, practical, achievable, and sustainable with the protocol.

If she can't consistently get a quality bodyfat test, we can determine how much she should  weigh on the scale to reach the desired 20% bodyfat while ensuring she's not also losing muscle. We want to preserve that precious muscle at all costs.

So if Fannie's total body weight is 157lbs, and her lean body mass is 94.2lbs, determining her ideal scale weight goal to achieve 20% bodyfat would be:

94.2lbs lean body mass  ÷ (1 - 0.20 bodyfat) = 117.75lbs

Fannie would ideally weigh about 118lbs to hit 20% bodyfat without wasting muscle. This means she must lose about 39 lbs of FAT if her total body weight -- including fat -- is currently 157lbs.

Make sense?

Be sure to check back tomorrow for a Kick Fat in the Ass Spring 2015 Challenge update! You can also follow No Fail Fat Burning on Instagram @No_Fail_Fat_Burning and Facebook!

Remember: you're not a damsel in distress. You're the hero of your story.

Yours in resilience, strength and sticks of butter,
Michelle

Q&A: Best Times to Measure Body Fat, Addicted to the Scale

Hey ladies! Michelle here. Hope you had an amazing weekend. Got in a killer heavy lift, surfed a little, ate a lot and rocked the hell out of a carb re-feed! We have lots to cover so let's get to it.

When to Measure Body Fat

Progress pictures: Take them every time you do body fat and measurements. It's fun to see the progress you make. I have a collection showing almost two years of transformation. I recently started getting kinda down on my progress then I went back and looked at how far I've come. So glad I have those shots on the less-than-motivated days. Take them first thing in the morning after visiting the loo but before having any liquids or showering.

When to weigh and take body fat measurements: Scale weight screws with women. I would destroy them all if I could. We need to understand that scale weight and BMI aren't the holy grail of health or fitness. Just to be clear, the number you're getting on your scale is a total of these:

Same scale weight. Different body fat percentage.

• bones
• organs (including the biggest, your skin)
• blood
• muscle
• fat
• water
• poop
• pee
• 🔥inflammation🔥

When a lot of women go on "weight loss" diets they're compromising all of the above, especially muscle. That's why I  stress focusing on fat loss (if you have extra body fat to lose) while PRESERVING and, hopefully,  gaining muscle.

Even if your scale number goes down you can still be "skinny fat." If you're skinny fat, you may have a low scale number but you also look soft, shapeless, have little muscle and still too much fat! For women this is normally a result of the BS diet industry stressing caloric restriction, an obsession with scale numbers aka "weight," low intensity/high repetition weights and constant cardio. You actually want to pack muscle weight ON for tightness, shape and healthier bone density. What you should be focusing on is your body fat percentage. Muscle is so hard to earn for us ladies. Why eat away at it with weight loss gimmicks and crash diets? 
I digress. My body composition tracking recommendation is to take your body fat and measurement (and scale weight if you need it to enter into a body fat measuring device) and pics once a month, two days after your period, first thing in the morning before eating, drinking, showering and (hopefully) after emptying your bowels. This allows for all period bloat to dissipate (if you're still at an age where you're getting your period.)

That may be hard for some of you scale addicts and if it is, it's time to consider the monthly measurement route. The scale can really screw with you psychologically and it's just not telling you the whole story on your muscle gain and fat loss. Also, you really see significant changes going month-to-month that you won't see with such small weekly data.

We recently got an email from a woman who began her ten day carb depletion and -- against everything we cautioned in the book -- she weighed herself every day for the first four days of the protocol. The first two days she saw significant weight loss. Then nothing on the third, a tiny gain on the fourth... and then she quit because "it obviously wasn't working" for her. Unbelievable!

One, this shows she didn't understand or bother to read the tenets of fat loss we explain in the book. Two, there are going to be days when the scale goes up -- your cycle, time of day, muscle soreness, tissue gain, liquid intake, etc all impact that sum total scale number. To quit after only four days of data?! What a disservice she did to herself. Makes me sad. Did it take four days for her to get her body into an unhealthy state?

Look at this U.S. GDP graph spanning from 1890 - 2010:

 

What we see is that although there were times of negative growth and no growth whatsoever, the overall big picture trend is positive.  This is no different than your journey towards health and your ideal body composition. Don't forget it. And don't you ever f-ing quit.

PS! We've also got a new Facebook page to keep the conversation going there! Show us some like!