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Where fitness and outdoors meet. In this space we chat all things hiking, exercise, wellness, adventure, motherhood, and metabolic health from a female perspective! Get ready to learn + be inspired to live your fullest, most adventurous life!
Body Recomp Vs Weight Loss: Which is right for you?
Hi, my name is Brady and I'm a long time fitness professional and midwest girl turned mountain living hiking addict. And combining my knowledge of fitness and passion for hiking, I've helped hundreds of women get lean and strong for the trails. Think of this as your one stop shop for both education and inspiration on all things female wellness, trail talk and adventure. Hiking, female metabolism, motherhood, nutrition, travel and fitness are all topics you'll hear discussed here. If you are outdoorsy and active, looking to level up your health, unlock your potential, and become inspired to live your most vibrant life, you're in the right place. You're listening to the fit for hiking podcast. What's up guys? Welcome to another episode of the Forever Hiking podcast. This is your host Brady as always. And today we're getting into a topic that I absolutely love to talk about because I just wish that ten years ago, when I was struggling with changing my body, with getting tone, getting lean, whatever you want to call it, that someone would have literally told me this exact message and I could have applied what I'm about to share today, because I spent a lot of my 20s trying to lose the same like 20 to £30 over and over again, and I would like lose some weight just to gain it back and lose it again, just to gain it back and then some. And ultimately at the end of the year, you know, the scale just kept creeping up. Like even with my weight loss stents, I wasn't actually sustaining that because I didn't know how to do it the right way, ultimately. So today I want to talk about body recomposition, body recomposition, if we're being technical versus simply weight loss, and which is the right one for you to focus on if you do have a goal of like getting a little bit leaner, getting more tone, seeing the scale come down, things like that. Okay, so let's get into it. And I just want to say, like, if you do not have a weight loss goal, you can absolutely skip this one and check out all of the other episodes that are more geared towards, um, strength, fitness, muscle gain, um, seeing actual, you know, strength gains on your hikes, prepping for hikes, things like that. We have plenty of episodes that can meet your needs. If weight loss and getting toned just isn't a goal for you right now, that is totally fine. Um, so okay, let's get into it. Most people look in the mirror and if they see they have like extra weight that they want to lose, they become a bit focused on the scale, right? It's all about like, oh my gosh, the scale hit a new high or I'm so unhappy in my body. I don't like how my clothes fit. I just need to lose weight. And they think that weight loss is really the only thing that matters in that moment. And I did this same exact thing for years. All I cared about was losing weight. Like, I just wanted to do all the fat burning workouts, all the diets. I literally even ordered like fat burning pills at one point. Like you guys, I did everything the wrong way. So I want you to be able to skip my mistakes and get to a place where you're happy with your body composition. It's effortless to remain lean and not like, fully effortless. When I say that, I mean you're not having to overthink it. You're not having to do these crazy things or burn yourself out. But like, you have the habits and mindset that make it easy to just do these things kind of on default without feeling like you're miserable or dieting constantly or hating your life. Okay, so let's talk about why body recommit is going to always trump weight loss for long term success and health as a woman. So what are we talking about here? Weight loss is when we're really just focusing on the reduction of total body weight. So this is not just fat. We are including in this fat muscle water glycogen. So this is a very scale driven metric. And when you're losing weight all you're focused on is weight loss. You will see equal parts like muscle and fat loss. So it's different than to say I'm focusing on fat loss. When you're focusing on just weight loss. And so we're going to talk about how to actually distinguish between the two. Body recomposition is more when you're focusing on losing fat while maintaining or even gaining muscle. So your weight on the scale might not even change. Like it might stay the same for a while or change very slowly. Okay, so that's something that you need to know. If you're getting into a phase of body recomposition, you don't want to be obsessing over the scale because you're going to feel like you're not making progress, right? That's not true. We'll talk about that a little bit more later, but you're not going to be really focusing on the scale nearly as much with body recomposition. Appearance, strength and measurements are going to be what you're going to want to focus on. And this is what we do with our clients. Like we yes, we check in with the scale, but we're not solely looking at the scale, because when we're focusing on recon, so much else is happening. And we're not just losing body weight, we're trying to maintain or gain muscle while losing fat to make it easier to actually be toned long term. Um, you also need to understand that if you want to get toned, just losing weight is not going to do the trick. You can't tone muscle that isn't there, and I wish that this is something that more people talked about, because every woman that I talked to says they want to get toned, but they don't understand that you can't be afraid of muscle, you can't lift like you're allergic to weights, or like the second that you touch something above a £10 weight, you're going to hook up. That's just not the reality. But you do need to lift and do the things that will support proper muscle maintenance or gain. If you want to look toned, okay, just losing weight. I've talked to so many women now who have gone through big weight loss journeys, and they're not happy with their body composition because they only were focusing on weight loss. Okay, so that's why we're talking about this today. I want you to be happy with your overall transformation and actually be like, wow, I'm stronger. My metabolism is thriving. I'm toned, I'm lean. Like I look athletic. I look like I lift weights, right? We don't want to just look at the scale and be like, well, I'm smaller, but I'm not happy with my body composition at the end of the day. Okay. So the scale is just not going to be able to tell the whole story when we're looking at this form of progress. So why has weight loss become a default goal for so many women? Honestly, so much of this we can pin back on diet culture BMI. And it's just like a simple metric of like, okay, yep, I gained weight. Obviously things aren't going well with my health or I'm not working out. I'm not eating well, losing weight. Okay. Yeah. I'm like moving in the right direction. Yes, it's simple, but it doesn't tell the whole story, especially if we want to look at long term success. The scale is like a quick feedback loop, right? But it's not always going to show you the progress that you are making in so many other areas. So that's why I'm not a huge advocate of like just obsessing over the scale or BMI like BMI is. You can have someone who's extremely muscular and extremely fit, and they can be considered obese or overweight on the BMI scale. It's just it's not helpful. And as we are kind of trending more towards diet culture again, unfortunately in 2026, like I can't believe I'm saying it, but we are there again on social media. We need to have this conversation because. This fixation with just seeing the scale come down and being as skinny as humanly possible, having model legs, all these things I've been seeing of like women literally trying to atrophy their muscles. This is so detrimental to our longevity. So many different health metrics. Like literally, our brain thrives off of lifting weights. Bone density, metabolic health, actually looking toned. All of these things are not going to be optimized if you are not putting some strain on your muscles and trying to maintain muscle mass. Okay. So this is where the scale only and weight only approach goes wrong is that you're experiencing lots of muscle loss. And this is already happening to women big time after the age of 30. Unless you are actively trying to maintain your muscle. And this doesn't happen by accident. Okay, this doesn't happen from body weight or Pilates or walking like you need to be actually stressing your muscles out. Working in like a 6 to 8 rep range in something that is heavy. Like by the last rep you were like, oh my gosh, I cannot do another one. And that's where I think so many women go wrong as they hear strength training. And they are like, well, I do body weight, I do Pilates, like that's enough. And to a certain extent that that can be helpful, but it's not really enough. If we're looking at muscle maintenance while losing weight and bone density over time. Okay. Metabolic slowdown is a big one, too. If we are only focusing on losing weight as fast as humanly possible, your chances of rebounding that are high. If you ever watched the show The Biggest Loser. This is so fascinating to me because most of those contestants. Gained back all of their weight, if not more than that. More than what they lost. Okay. And these are people who had, you know, supposedly some of the best trainers in the world. They had the perfect environment to do this in. But what they weren't taught was how to actually focus on body recon. They were just trying to get them to lose as much weight as humanly possible by their next weigh in, by like, starving them, trying to have them do like two workouts a day, mostly cardio. They weren't focusing on muscle maintenance. They weren't focusing on metabolic health. And it ended up shooting them in the foot later on. And they gained the weight back. They didn't have the proper habits, the proper mindset and a healthy metabolism. A lot of them metabolically, were in a horrible place after the show. Okay, so please, please, please, if you have a lot of weight to lose, don't just focus on losing weight. Don't just focus on the scale. Because if you want to actually be successful with this long term and not just lose a bunch of weight to gain it back again, you really need to also care about your metabolic health. And a lot of that comes from how you are going about fat loss. Okay. Burnout and rebound is another one when we're just focusing on the scale and doing it as fast as possible. A lot of people gain it back or just burn out. Um, and just being fixated with the scale can create such a negative relationship with your body, with what you eat, with exercise, burn calories, versus if you're focusing on how your clothes fit measurements, other health metrics like that is where you want to be focusing on performance strength. When I shifted that one thing, I was able to enjoy my workouts so much more. I was able to not fixate on calories in or the calories I was burning, and all of my other areas of life improved because I wasn't just being obsessive about being skinny. I actually had hobbies and my body was supporting me for those things. Okay, so what makes Body Re comp different and a little bit harder? It requires strength training. Let's be real. You can lose weight, you can lose a ton of weight and not ever step foot in a gym and not ever incorporate any sort of exercise. People do it all the time. You can lose weight eating all fast food if you are in a calorie deficit, relative to what your body needs to maintain weight. Okay, people do this often, but they're losing muscle bone density. And their metabolism. Metabolism is going to adapt accordingly. Right. So yes, it is harder to lose weight and focus on recomposition because you're actually having to not only focus on your intake, but you're also needing to strength train. You're also needing to get adequate protein. It's going to take longer. It's not going to show you such immediate and gratifying results on the scale, the same way that just weight loss will. It's also more of a consistency gain versus intensity. And as human beings, we love intensity. We love like, you know, the 75 ha, the P90x, the like. I'm going so hard for a short amount of time and I got these crazy results. But then talk to me in a year because the people who pursue crazy fast results through intensity are not consistent long term, because it's not sustainable and they gain the weight back. Okay, so yes, it's harder. I'm not going to lie to you. Body recon versus just losing weight is harder. But you know what else is hard? Is doing all this stuff and then being stuck at the same weight again or even higher a year later because trust me, I did it. I would take all these extremes. I would lose like 5 to £10 or whatever, sometimes more. And then in a few months I would have gained it all back because the things that I was doing were not sustainable. I wasn't supporting my metabolism, I just wasn't going about it the right way. Okay. So it's really important to look at those factors. Progress will be slower, but it's going to be more sustainable. And you might not see the scale changes that you want to see, but you're going to notice the visual changes. Okay. So you got to hold on to that. You've got to focus on your progress photos, your measurements, how clothes are fitting. So who should focus solely on weight loss. Okay. Now that we've kind of distinguished between the two, if you have a very, very, very high body fat percentage and you cannot physically lift weights, then yes, focus on some weight loss through your diet first and then you promptly do need to start lifting weights. Okay. If you have like medical issues where you cannot exercise because of being so overweight, that's really the only time I would say that someone should only focus on weight loss to get to that point of being able to then start doing these things and your joints feeling okay and not being a health risk. Okay. Other than that, pretty much everybody else should be focusing on body recomposition. If you want success long term to actually have muscle tone, to have a thriving metabolism after you're done with this, all of that, okay, that we've already talked about. So everyone else you need to focus on body re comp. I'm sorry. It will be harder. It will take longer. But this is going to give you the results that you actually want. And it's not going to just be a quick fix. I tell people all the time on our like discovery calls for metabolic coaching. I'll say if you want a quick fix like we are not it, we do not do quick fixes. We're not going to make you lose £20 in a month because we're starving you, dehydrating you and having you do two workouts a day. So if that's what you're looking for, we're not it. But what we are going to do is actually set you up for success once you're done in our program. Because if you can't maintain what we've achieved, what is the point? Right? Okay. So let's talk again about the scale and why it is a bit misleading as a social progress metric. Especially as women, we have a lot more to consider as far as what's going to affect the scale. So things like hormones where we're at in our monthly cycle. So once you start heading into your luteal phase into menstruation, you can retain a lot of extra bloat and water and inflammation. Okay. So that can be even up to £10. So that's why a lot of times you do feel so bloated and not great in your clothes, not great in your body leading up to your period. That is factual. You're going to retain some water. Muscle gain can also cause spikes on the scale, especially when you first start lifting and it can mess with your head. Just general water retention and bloating. Like if you are not drinking enough water or dehydrated, having too much sodium, having a ton of carbs the night before, eating out, things like that, you probably will notice a spike on the scale. That's water weight. That's not actual, just pounds of fat. Okay, so that's why the scale is not great when you weigh yourself in the morning versus at night. Sometimes you can gain like £4 in a day and know you're not just gaining £4 of fat based on what you ate. That is kind of just a culmination of yes, like the what you ate throughout the day. So your sodium and your carbon take things like that. Even sleep can affect the scale. Your stress can affect the scale. Okay, so don't let that freak you out. Better progress metrics are going to be are you actually improving in your workouts? No, I'm not talking about calories burned. You're talking about what you are lifting in the gym. How are you feeling in the gym? Are you feeling energized? Are you feeling good at least most of the time? Progress photos. You got to be taking progress photos if you're not already. Measurements. Oh my goodness. If you're not doing measurement, please start doing that like once a month. If you are on a body comp journey, this is going to be the Goat when it comes to actually seeing body comp progress and not just looking at the scale. How close or fitting. If you have like a pair of pants that you don't fit in anymore or it's really tight, like you kind of using that as a benchmark. Energy recovery, mood, all these things. And then health metrics like your agency number and blood pressure. Okay. So we don't want to just rely on the scale because it's not going to be the most consistent progress metric. And it can be absolutely misleading and kind of send people into these like mental spirals. I've definitely been there and I'm sure you have too. Okay, so common myths and mistakes is like, oh, the scale isn't dropping, so I'm failing or nothing's working or you can't build muscle in a deficit, like you can't focus on fat loss and still have good muscle retention, or even build muscle under eating protein is a huge mistake that I see, and it's really easy to do when you're in a deficit if you are not very, very proactive with getting enough protein, and this will make a big difference. If you don't want to lose your muscle tone as you are trying to lose weight, doing too much cardio, not enough resistance training, this one is definitely a classic mistake and expecting to be fast. We need to be patient with this process, and this is where just focusing on the outcome is going to drive you crazy. You got to focus on the daily task, the daily like habits, and just commit to those instead of just obsessing over the outcome and seeing the scale moving, you know, at whatever basis you think it needs to be moving. So final takeaways. Yes, there are some times where you might want to solely focus on weight loss, but unless you have a lot a lot of weight to lose and you really can't physically put yourself in a place to go to the gym and lift weights, you're going to want to focus on body recomposition for long term physique change. Short term outcomes is more going to be just weight loss. Okay, so you really need to align your goal with your lifestyle. If what you're doing on a day to day basis is not supporting body comp, you can't really expect those results. And a lot of women come into our program just not really super aware of what they're doing. And so they are under eating, under fueling, not doing enough strength training, not eating nearly enough protein and wondering why they're not happy with their body comp. Okay. So a lot of this just comes from bringing some awareness, having someone from the outside actually audit your lifestyle and see where you need to adjust, and then having a really proper structure that will get you the results, because there's nothing more frustrating than just putting this time and energy in and then spinning your wheels and not really seeing the progress. Right. I did it for years. It sucks. So that is why I built Mountain Metabolic Coaching to help women skip the overwhelm, skip all the mistakes, and just cut right down to it and get the results. We just wrapped up our 30 day January challenge and you guys, it was actually shocking to see these results. And we focused on body comp. So many women saw massive dips in the scale but also lost. Insane inches in a month. Okay, progress photos like you wouldn't believe. And they're also maintaining their muscle, eating more than before. Having all of these healthy habits and things in place to continue this process so that it's not just a one and done like fast ditch effort type of thing. Okay, so this is what is possible when you have the right structure in place, you have community, you have accountability, and you have a plan that will actually get you where you want to be without it feeling miserable or unattainable in your lifestyle. That's half the struggle is just having something that actually fits you where you are. That way you can be consistent. Okay, so if this is something that is like hitting home for you and you're like, I know I need to do this the right way, but I've been dragging my feet because of all these limiting beliefs I have. I'm scared to commit to something. I'm scared to invest in myself. I've been telling myself I don't have the money or I don't have the time. I just want to challenge you that. Like it's usually the thing that you're avoiding that will get you where you want to be and actually help you push through where you're stuck and where you have been stuck for maybe years. Okay, so if this is resonating with you, we are going to be doing another coaching group focusing on body recon specifically starting mid-February. Okay, so coming up in a few weeks, if this is something that you're like, yes, I'm tired of waiting. I'm tired of my own excuses and getting in my own way. Then like, let's do this. You need to apply ASAP because we do have a waitlist on this. So you can check the link in our show notes for our application form. Or you can just send us a message on Instagram, either my personal ponytail underscore on a trail, or our fit underscore for hiking Instagram page and just say, hey, I'm interested in body re comp coaching, okay? And we'll get you all the necessary steps to see if it's a good fit and get you rolling. Um, thank you so much for tuning in today, you guys. I hope that this has been a helpful explanation of body recon forces, weight loss, and understanding how to get started to do this on your own. All right. Thanks so much for tuning in. And I will chat with you in the next episode. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the fit for hiking podcast. As always, I hope it leaves you feeling inspired and informed on how to take your health and adventure into your own hands. For more content like this, be sure to follow along with my daily posts at Ponytail Underscore. On a trail that's ponytail underscore on a trail. You can also stay up to date on my new episodes being released at Fit Underscore for hiking, and find more free resources at ponytail on Etrailer.com. Happy and Healthy Trails.