Ever feel like your bathroom scale holds too much power over your health and fitness journey? Join us, Kevin and Bekah, as we unravel why it's time to shift the spotlight onto body composition, and not just the number that flashes up in the morning. Today's episode is a heart-to-heart about our own weight management battles and the revelations that have led us to celebrate the unsung heroes of health—muscle mass and nutrition. Join us as we dissect why strength training and a properly balanced diet are essential allies in your fight against health's arch-nemesis, visceral fat. Get ready to be inspired by the emotional and physical changes that come with focusing on what truly matters.
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Access our Free health assessment HERE
Ever feel like your bathroom scale holds too much power over your health and fitness journey? Join us, Kevin and Bekah, as we unravel why it's time to shift the spotlight onto body composition, and not just the number that flashes up in the morning. Today's episode is a heart-to-heart about our own weight management battles and the revelations that have led us to celebrate the unsung heroes of health—muscle mass and nutrition. Join us as we dissect why strength training and a properly balanced diet are essential allies in your fight against health's arch-nemesis, visceral fat. Get ready to be inspired by the emotional and physical changes that come with focusing on what truly matters.
Subscribe and tell a friend!
Get my new book "The Seven Disciplines of Uncommon Freedom" on Amazon!
Visit bekandkev.com today to sign up for our email newsletter.
Access our Free health assessment HERE
Hey friends, welcome to the Uncommon Freedom Show. I'm Kevin.
Speaker 2:And I'm Becca, and we're your hosts, here to help you reach your potential and maximize your impact in every area that matters. Let's get started.
Speaker 3:All right, everyone, welcome to the Uncommon Freedom Show. Back in the saddle with my love to the wife Becca, still in Puerto Pena Escobar. We move locations because it's a little chilly outside today.
Speaker 2:Nothing like traveling to Mexico and having it be better weather at home. That's okay. We're in a quiet place where we've gotten a lot of work done and if you have ever heard us talk about our quarterly retreats, this is our Q1 retreat and we have been highly productive, both some quality time together and just really looking over our quarter and what we've got going on to move the dial forward in business and family and in our personal relationships.
Speaker 3:Yes, and sadly planning a memorial service for a close friend we lost about two weeks ago.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:So that's been heavy on our heart while we're here, but grateful for the opportunity to at least have some peace and quiet to process the emotions. So today we're going to talk about getting rid of the scale. Now, we don't really mean completely get rid of the scale. If you've ever tried to lose weight, Obviously what we tend to focus most on is losing weight, seeing that number go down on the scale. Beck and I have both been there. I lost 45 pounds over 12 years ago. Almost 13 years ago you lost 35 pounds and if and the reason we're going to share this is because we've learned a lot over the last probably five or six years really on just the importance of shifting your mind from scale weight to really your body composition. Right.
Speaker 2:Exactly. And the other thing that we do a lot with coaching your clients is because it's about habit creation and habit maintenance. We also talk a lot about non scale victories. So the reason we use a scale obviously is for measurement. You know, we know that to improve something we have to track it and measure it. So I would say people have two types of relationship with a scale. Either they avoid it all together because they are afraid of the number, they find it's evil and they're unwilling to kind of look at current reality. Or I've had clients where they step on it five times a day. Maybe that's a female thing and that's not a healthy relationship with a scale either. So it's a measurement tool, whether it's daily or weekly. It's a good way to assess our current reality and to measure our progress. But we don't want to be attached to it. But what we're really talking about is not just total weight but really body composition.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the thing about the scale is it's a lagging indicator. So your scale weight today is an indicator of previous behavior. But a lot of times what we tend to do is we associate this morning's weight with yesterday's behavior, and that's not always the case, right, and we don't even there's not necessarily a formula to today's weight. It's kind of a representation of the past week's behavior, not necessarily the last day's behavior, and there's a lot of different factors. Obviously, for women, the time of the month plays into it significantly, but it's easy to just focus on it and let that kind of be the guide to whether or not we're having a good day or bad day.
Speaker 3:Is what did the scale say? So what we learned really is that one of the better indicators of health isn't necessarily the scale, because you can go look at two men who are five feet 11 inches tall and the weight 200 pounds, and one of them, well, I weigh more than 200 pounds, but my body fat is typically between 11 and, on a bad day, 14%. But you can also have a man who's five, 11, 200 pounds and he could be 30% body fat. So scale this is the analogy I use is that knowing your scale weight is kind of like knowing how much money you have in the bank. Knowing your body composition is knowing your true net worth. So how much money you have in the bank. You could have someone who has three million dollars in the bank, but if they have five million dollars of debt, their net worth is a negative two million. The flip side is someone might only have five hundred thousand dollars in the bank. If they have no debt, their net worth is actually five hundred thousand dollars. So this is the power of understanding.
Speaker 3:Learning about body composition, and two key components are your body fat percentage, but then also learning to track either your lean body mass or your skeletal muscle mass. Skeletal muscle mass is a lower number. It is just your skeletal muscle. Lean body mass is basically your body weight minus your fat. It's everything else Right. How has that helped you?
Speaker 2:It's been really helpful, especially because once you get to a place where your body fat is at a healthy weight, then if you're interested in building muscle, which I would encourage everyone to do, especially females, because as we age, we lose muscle and, depending on your protein consumption, your muscle could be atrophy because you don't even have enough to sustain the current muscle that you have, which is one of the reasons that we use a couple of different tools.
Speaker 2:But the other part is just depending on what you want to look like. Some people build muscle and strength train because they want to look a certain way, Some people do it for just overall health and some people, like myself, do it for both. The other thing is just to dispel the myth that muscle does not weigh more than fat. A pound of muscle is the same as a pound of fat, but it looks different. It's much more compact, it burns calories much higher and for most of us we enjoy the look of muscle more than we enjoy the look of fat. And there's just health benefits, of course, especially around the middle and where we carry a lot of adipose tissue around our organs, there's a lot of danger with having high fat in that area and many body measurement or body composition measurement tools, like we use the in body will measure. What is that?
Speaker 3:adipose.
Speaker 2:Yes, but it's the term on our in body called, or basically the adipose tissue area. There's a whole you don't know either.
Speaker 3:I know visceral fat, visceral fat.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thank you. Visceral fat, so it's also gives you many of the body fat machines give you, gives you that measurement as well, so you can see improvement in that area, which benefits pretty much every individual. And the other thing for us is to be able to see that through clients that we're working with who need and want to lose body fat can protect their lean muscle so it stays pretty similar while they're on their weight loss journey, because we coach a plan that is packed with nutrients. The macro nutrients are accounted for and it's high protein, low glycemic, so it's accounting for the fact that your body needs a strong source of protein to protect muscle, even while losing body fat.
Speaker 2:One of the things that we see in medical weight loss clients that we work with and people who are using these new shots that are on the market is they're less hungry, so they're either eating less quality food or they're just eating less food in general, and some of the research out there shows right now that potentially up to 50% of the weight they're losing is actually muscle, which is very dangerous because I think it's after the age of 30 that we naturally start to lose muscle, unless we are in taking a strong amount of protein based on what your body needs. We would recommend using essential amino acids as another tool, because it helps with protein, muscle protein synthesis and recovery, which we both take and recommend to all of our clients at this point, and then, whether you're doing active resistance or strength training, Uncommon freedom is a game changer, not only for the focused leader, but also for the rudderless sojourner seeking direction.
Speaker 4:When Kevin talks, I listen, I lean in and always leave a better man. As the wisdom of Proverbs 313 states, happy is the man who finds wisdom and the man who gains understanding. I want to warn you in advance to prepare your spirit for a heart and mind shift as you read this book. I've learned that conviction comes when the heart is open to change. As I read this book, I was moved on several occasions to evaluate my personal life and make course corrections. This isn't just a book. It's a manual for creating godly leaders who we desperately need today and especially as our children walk the earth in, whatever it looks like 10, 20, 30 years from now. Who knows that? We need leaders who embody these things? Because not only do we need people who are healthy and wealthy and have the right heart, but we need people who know where the spirit of the Lord is. There is freedom.
Speaker 3:The thing to keep in mind is, when you lose weight, your metabolism the amount of calories your body naturally burns is going to go down. So if you have someone who weighs 300 pounds even though they're not healthy at 300 pounds there the number of calories that they're burning at 300 is significantly more than the number of calories that they're gonna burn at a healthy weight of maybe 200 pounds. But also understand that when you add muscle mass, you're going to increase your metabolism. So it's one of those things that you can do to like if you enjoy eating. The bottom line is add some muscle. We still encourage people to eat healthy, but it's also nice build that you enjoy life and enjoy some things that have a little more of a buffer Exactly more of a buffer and if you lose weight and you don't add muscle, your metabolism is going to go down, could go down pretty substantially, depending on how much weight you lose. So understand the importance of increasing your muscle mass over time.
Speaker 3:There's a lot of research out there that just really ties in that muscle is linked to health and longevity, even brain health as far as avoiding Alzheimer's and other things like that that adding muscle to your diet is very good. And think about some of the older people Muscle to your diet, you mean muscle, I'm sorry. Well, yeah, muscle in the form of protein. Right, meat is muscle. But adding muscle to your body and protein to your diet is a good thing. When you think about some of the older people that we know, you know a lot of times, even if they're active, they can look a little bit emaciated and they don't look healthy, and so adding that muscle to your body is really, really important.
Speaker 3:So that's your age well, yeah, and so what we're not saying is forget about the scale completely, but have that mindset. It's like if you're thinking about finances, do you pay attention to what you have in the bank account? Yes, but you also weren't to pay attention to what are my outstanding liabilities, what's the debt that I have? So good, and so you make that shift. Okay, this is what I weigh, because the reality is I today weigh about what I did when I lost my 45 pounds.
Speaker 3:The difference is I put on a significant amount of muscle and you look hot. I do look much more, much more manly. I mean, it's pretty amazing when I look at pictures of myself today, even just a few years ago, because over the last few years is when we've really velled up my strength training and my protein intake, and really probably the last two or three years when I've seen a significant gain. But if I go back 12, 13 years ago, I think I got down to about eight or nine percent. At one point I got all the way down to 172 pounds, which is just mind blowing for me. But I was emaciated. I mean I was extremely lean, but not really in a healthy way. At that point, I mean I guess I was healthy, but my metabolism was less so healthy but not as strong.
Speaker 3:Exactly, exactly, yeah.
Speaker 2:And then for me, as a female again I'm my metabolism works much slower than a man's. So how can I control my energy burn? You know I have I take thyroid medication. So for many of the females out there, you know they deal with thyroid issues like I do. And how do I control my calorie burn?
Speaker 2:I used to run a lot. I would run and run and run and you kept telling me you know more strength training. And I was a little resistant because I like to sweat, I like to count the calories. That makes me feel like I'm accomplishing things when I'm burning 5, 600 calories instead of 150 calories, but also understanding that our bodies acclimate to what we do the most often. So with all of those years of running, I wasn't probably burning calories nearly as efficiently with just having a lot of cardio in my strength, in my program, and now I've added in multiple days of strength training.
Speaker 2:And the other thing is I make it a goal to get about 140 grams of protein a day, which is a huge stretch for me, because I just don't eat large amounts of food, even though I eat often, and so that's one of the reasons I use our whey protein. It's got 24 grams of protein per scoop. So by having two scoops a day, I'm already, like, so much closer to my threshold without having to consume something that my stomach just doesn't have space for. So that's a tool that I would put into your toolbox, especially if you're a female. You don't have as big of an appetite as many of the men out there. And then, really understanding the power of strength training, I still do cardio because I enjoy it. I believe it's good for my heart health, but I've really traded out how much I do, and I just turned 47 and now I'm maintaining a body fat of about 16%, which is not easy.
Speaker 2:But now that my habits are so dialed in, it's getting easier over time. And the more I focus on my protein, the less I have to focus on what I shouldn't be eating, because I'm just not as hungry for other things. So part of my goal is do I have that in my body before I choose other things? That might be less ideal, and until that's accomplished, it's a way to have it stacked for myself, something that serves me in the long run. So measuring body composition we do it weekly because it's at our house. If you don't have access to it, that's simply, then. Doing it probably once a month is helpful, or at the very least once a quarter, but monthly. You should see difference in your numbers, and a good in body machine will allow you to input your phone number so that then you can track your results from each time that you measure yourself.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and using a consistent measuring tool. I mean, even if you have one of those home scales, it measures the trend that it measures will probably be accurate. Is it an accurate representation of your true body fat? Probably not.
Speaker 3:And there's there's some methods, our home scale and our, and so the the paradigm shift we just want to encourage all of you to think about is that, especially if you're trying to lose weight, if you're trying to get healthier, if you just focus on the weight, especially if you're exercising while trying to lose weight, that's not the full picture. So this is why having accurate data, having a body fat test done while you're going through weight loss process and while you're exercising, is really important. You might be losing weight at a slower rate, but if you were maintaining or increasing your muscle mass while you're losing body fat, there's two ways to see your body fat change. You can lose body fat, you can add muscle mass, or you can do both of those at the same time. Right, and so if you're doing a plan where you used to losing maybe two pounds a week and you're only losing one, you're probably not going to put on one pound of muscle per week. That's pretty significant.
Speaker 2:It takes time and most people they think it's going much faster.
Speaker 3:Right, but the percentage of change can be much more significant than if all you're doing is losing body weight. And the other thing for people to understand is, if you're losing weight and you're also losing muscle, your body fat percentage is actually potentially going to increase, which is the opposite of what you want to do. So putting on muscle is kind of like passive income. So you hear about. What you really want is you want a way to earn income while you're sleeping, where you don't have to be involved in it, and when you add muscle to your skeletal frame, your burning more calories without any effort. So that's what we're just trying to help you all have that perspective shift on. Let us know what takeaways you have in the comments and please remember to like, share, subscribe, as we continue to help all of you thrive in every area of your life.
Speaker 2:We would love your feedback. So give us a rating on whatever podcast platform you're listening to us on. We'd love a five star, thanks.
Speaker 3:All right Be healthy friends.
Speaker 2:Take care.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the Uncommon Freedom Show. We believe freedom isn't man's invention. It was created by God. If you are enjoying the show, please give us a five star review on the platform or listening to us on it. Then subscribe and share with friends and family that you think will enjoy the show. You can connect with us at beckandkevcom for more resources to learn biblical principles, essential disciplines and the winning habits that help once average people lead the life they want instead of accepting the life they were given.