My entire existence is measured.

Of course, there are the normal measurements you’d expect: my weight, my clothing size, inches for various parts of my body.

I also measure food, which you’d expect. I measure how many ounces of water I drink. I measure my steps as well as how much I sleep. I know the distances I walk. I can tell you within a few steps how far it is around my yard, to the corner of my street and back, up to the next stop sign and back, around the block, and around various configurations of my immediate neighborhood and beyond.

I also know what’s changed from where I started, right down to the fact that I now wear a full size smaller shoe.

I know, roughly, my average heartbeat. Add to that, my blood pressure.

Eat Less, Move More! Calories In, Calories Out!

With all these stats at my fingertips, you’d think I’d be able to predict when and how much weight I should lose in a given time period. That’s absolutely not true because my body — and likely your body, as well — doesn’t necessarily conform to the absolute simplicity of “calories in, calories out”.

That simple maxim is only true to a point. A certain percentage of my stats are misleading. My FitBit tells me I burned 500 calories before I even woke up, for instance — but that information is based on averages and not on my body, with its metabolic challenges and other issues. It doesn’t know how much metabolically active muscle I have; no, its numbers are based on my height, weight, age, and other profile information. It has no way of truly knowing without a doubt that I have burned 500 calories in my sleep.

The same holds true for exercise calories; a nice walk for 20 minutes shows as burning around 160 calories, but there’s no way of knowing if that’s actually accurate, which is why I refuse to eat my exercise calories. I work on the assumption that my body didn’t burn a single calorie, because the truth is, that number is also derived from averages.

I also have no idea how my body will truly use the breakfast I ate this morning. Will it all go for energy? Will my body’s metabolic mechanisms deprive my body of energy and instead send that to storage? I have no definite way of knowing this.

This is, without a doubt, the most frustrating thing about weight loss. For a large percentage of us, it’s just not as easy as “eat less, move more”, even though that’s good advice. Unfortunately, for many years, the diet industry has fed us eat less, move more and calories in should be less than calories out, and if we still fail to lose weight, we’ve been told we’re doing something wrong. Sure, there are folks who do it wrong, but weight management is a lot more complex than these simple platitudes.

I go through times like this; I had a big loss a couple of weeks ago, but not since then. There are things I have changed and that’s the likely reason why, but I also know that my losses are not all visible on the scale, and they never reflect a nice, clean graph with a line moving steadily downward.

Why do I stick it out? It’s as simple as those measurable things — the benefits I have received are immeasurable. I can’t begin to describe the elation I feel in simply holding my head up and walking without issues, and last night, I wore 2” wedges, which was beyond my ability when I bought them just last year. Those are simple things that I never would have given a thought to when I was young and didn’t have a weight issue; now, they’re non-scale victories that I treasure.

Those simple gifts keep growing as I keep going, and they are the reason I can look past the fallability of weight loss stats.