In my 20-plus years of working as a personal trainer, new clients have often come to me with fitness goals that include ’losing weight’. During their initial session, I push them to articulate specifically what that means to them.

Every person’s answer is unique (although the terms ‘toned’ and ‘muscle definition’ come up a lot), but what they almost universally have in common is wanting to become leaner. In other words, their goal is to change their body composition by losing body fat and gaining lean muscle.

But leaner doesn’t necessarily mean lighter. This distinction is so important, and it’s why I refuse to use the term ‘weight loss’. Words matter much more than we often realise, and just because a phrase is common doesn’t make it accurate. When it comes to ‘weight loss’, it’s important that we get it right.

Weight isn’t just a metric, like max heart rate or respiratory rate. There are no morally loaded associations placed on a person’s average resting heart rate, for example. A lower resting heart rate doesn’t bear relevance to someone’s worth as a human being in our culture.

“For too many of us, that number on the scale becomes entangled with our perception of self-worth.”

Weight is different. What a person weighs is weaponised in our society, stigmatised, used to look down on another person, or to punch down on ourselves. For too many of us, that number on the scale becomes entangled with our perception of self-worth – and that can have damaging consequences. Even in 2026, that entanglement is still loudly reinforced, almost everywhere we look in our culture.

And because weight is different, so is using the term ‘weight loss’. 

Body composition

One of the things I work on with my clients is reframing their thinking around weight. We don’t talk about ‘weight loss’, as mentioned, and I specifically request that new clients stop using the scale for at least three months. Instead, before their first session, we do an InBody scan – a non-invasive body composition analysis that measures various components, such as body fat and muscle mass, using bioelectrical impedance to document their body composition. After three months, we do another scan.

The client who solidified my decision to eliminate ‘weight loss’ from my training lexicon came to me years ago. She was fixated on losing weight and the number on the scale, and it was hard to get her mind around not judging her progress that way. But she promised to try.

She followed the training programme I gave her to the letter. She overhauled her nutrition, and focused on intuitive eating instead of counting calories. She made sure she had enough protein and water daily, cut out added sugars, started getting at least seven hours of sleep each night, and learned ways to manage her stress levels. Over time, she got stronger and had more energy. She felt great, mentally and physically. In short, she was crushing it.

At the three-month mark, she gave in and weighed herself at home. When she arrived for her next session, she was in tears – completely defeated. Why? Because after working so hard, her weight hadn’t really budged. She was frustrated, angry and painfully disappointed.

I asked her if she’d like to do a new body composition scan. I had witnessed her progress, and I knew that her body weight wasn’t telling the full story. Her initial response was, “What’s the point?” But she eventually agreed, and together we looked at her initial and current body composition reports side by side.

And there it was: she had lost 1.4kg of fat and added about 1.8kg of muscle. The report also detailed the body fat loss and muscle gain in her arms, legs and torso. Later that day, she texted me to say she’d tried on a pair of jeans that hadn’t fit when she started training. Not only did they now fit, they were comfortably loose. In other words, she was much leaner, which was ultimately what she meant by ‘losing weight’. But because her weight hadn’t actually changed, she thought she’d failed.

Positive change

‘Losing weight’ is generally thrown around as a catch-all term that boils a complex subject down to a soundbite. Our bodies, goals and lives are far more layered than that. If someone comes to me for ‘weight loss’, it’s important that we unpack what the idea really means to that person. Once the layers are peeled back, it’s seldom – if ever – about simply seeing a smaller number on the scale.

Don’t get me wrong; body-change goals aren’t a negative thing, and if the body-neutrality movement has taught us anything, it’s that however we want to change – or not change – it’s our choice. If body composition change is your goal, my advice is to ditch your scale and stop basing your progress on bodyweight alone. Instead, settle into the understanding that body composition change is a long-term, ‘change the way you live’ thing, not a three-month ‘drop 5kg by summer’ tick-box exercise. 

The most important question is: what do you want to feel like in your body? Ultimately, that’s the goal that will serve you best.

This article first appeared on bicycling.com

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