“Seven signs you’re about to lose weight.”
You’re hungrier than usual. You’re tired. You’re going to the bathroom more. The scales have suddenly jumped up. You’re holding water. Apparently, your body is gearing up for a big fat-loss “whoosh” and if you can just hang in there for another few days, the magic is about to happen.
I understand why we want to believe it.
When you’ve been putting in the work, training consistently, being more conscious of what you’re eating and generally doing all the things you think you should be doing, it can be incredibly frustrating when the scales don’t immediately reflect that effort. In those moments, we desperately want someone to tell us, “Don’t worry, it’s working. You’re just about to have a breakthrough.”
But after years of coaching women through fat loss, I think we need to get better at separating what sounds reassuring from what is actually useful.
So, let’s talk fact versus fiction.
Hunger can absolutely increase when you’re eating in a calorie deficit. You’re asking your body to operate on less energy than you’re expending, so experiencing some hunger at different points in the day isn’t necessarily a problem.
But hunger isn’t proof that your metabolism has suddenly “fired up”, and it certainly isn’t a reliable predictor that the scales are about to drop.
This is an important distinction because the last thing I want women believing is that the hungrier they are, the better their diet must be working. There is still far too much celebration of suffering in the fitness industry, as though white-knuckling your way through a diet is evidence that you’re doing it properly.
If you’re constantly ravenous, thinking about food all day and using every ounce of willpower not to raid the pantry at night, I don’t look at that and think, Great, the plan is working.
I look at it as information.
Perhaps the calorie deficit is too aggressive. Maybe we need to look at protein, fibre and overall food volume. Maybe you’re sleeping terribly, your training demands have increased or your current nutrition simply doesn’t match what you’re asking your body to do.
More suffering does not equal more fat loss.
This one sounds wonderfully scientific, but feeling exhausted isn’t some magical stage your body needs to pass through before it starts burning body fat.
Our bodies are constantly using different fuel sources depending on what we’re doing, what we’ve eaten and the demands we’re placing on them. If you’re consistently exhausted during a fat-loss phase, I’d be much more interested in whether you’re eating enough, recovering properly, sleeping well and creating a deficit that is actually sustainable.
Because when I’m helping someone lose body fat, my goal isn’t simply, “Can we make the number on the scales smaller?”
I want to know whether we can do that while keeping you functioning like a normal human being.
Can you train well? Can you work and concentrate? Can you parent without feeling like you’re running on fumes? Can you go out for dinner occasionally? Can you enjoy your weekends? Can you continue doing this for long enough to actually see the result?
That last question matters enormously because a strategy that technically creates fat loss but is so restrictive that you abandon it three weeks later isn’t particularly useful.
This is where things become a little more nuanced because your bathroom scales aren’t measuring body fat. They’re measuring your total body mass, which includes fat tissue, lean tissue, water, glycogen, food sitting in your digestive system and everything else that happens to be inside your body when you step onto them.
That means you can absolutely be progressing while the scales temporarily appear to be doing nothing.
Hard training can influence fluid balance. Eating more carbohydrates replenishes glycogen, which is stored alongside water. A salty restaurant meal can affect your weight. Your menstrual cycle can affect it. Having more food sitting in your digestive system can affect it.
This is why three days of the scales doing something weird tells me almost nothing.
I would much rather look at trends over time than try to explain every individual weigh-in, because bodies are noisy and fat loss rarely presents itself as a perfectly neat downward line.
Could your weight sit around the same number for a while and then suddenly drop? Absolutely. Anyone who has tracked their weight consistently has probably experienced it.
What we can’t do is turn every increase in body weight into a story about your body secretly preparing to release a heap of water and reveal all the fat you’ve lost underneath.
There isn’t a reliable physiological countdown where the scales jump up on Tuesday and we know a big drop is coming by Friday.
Sometimes your weight increases because you’re retaining more fluid. Sometimes you’ve eaten more food. Sometimes you haven’t been to the toilet. Sometimes your cycle is involved. Sometimes you had a really hard training session. Sometimes it’s simply normal biological variation.
We don’t need to create a story around every number.
And I actually think learning not to emotionally react to every weigh-in is an incredibly important skill if you’re going to use the scales as one of your measures of progress.
This is particularly relevant for women who strength train because my goal is never simply to make someone as light as possible.
If we’re intentionally pursuing fat loss, I want to retain as much muscle and strength as possible while reducing body fat. This is why I care about resistance training, protein intake and training performance alongside what someone weighs.
It’s also why body weight should rarely be the only piece of information we’re collecting.
If your waist measurement is coming down, your clothes are fitting differently, you’re visibly changing in photos and you’re maintaining or even improving your strength, I’m not going to throw the entire plan in the bin because the scales didn’t give you the dopamine hit you wanted this week.
The scale is a useful data point. It is not the entire story.
This might be the biggest one because this is where I see people completely derail themselves.
We’re trying to make decisions about a process that takes months using seven days of information.
The scales don’t move quickly enough, so food gets reduced again. Another cardio session gets added. Carbohydrates disappear. Dinner gets skipped. A completely new training program starts on Monday. Someone decides their metabolism is broken, or they become so frustrated that they give up altogether.
When, in reality, we may simply need more data.
If I’ve got several weeks of genuine consistency and I’m seeing absolutely no movement across weight trends, measurements, photos or body composition, then great. Now we’ve learnt something useful and we can make an informed adjustment.
But seven imperfect days aren’t a plateau.
That’s just life.
This is the part that isn’t particularly sexy, which is probably why you don’t see as many viral Instagram posts about it.
Rather than searching for secret biological clues that fat loss is happening, I want you to look at your behaviours.
One of the most useful ways to think about progress is through leading indicators and lagging indicators.
Your leading indicators are the things you’re doing today that increase the likelihood of getting the outcome you want later. Are you training consistently two, three or four times each week? Are you progressively challenging yourself rather than simply going through the motions? Are you eating enough protein? Are you generally following the nutrition approach you’ve set for yourself? Are you moving regularly, sleeping reasonably well and giving your body some opportunity to recover?
I’d also look at the full seven days of your week. Are you becoming more consistent Monday through Sunday rather than being incredibly “good” Monday to Thursday and then throwing the entire thing out the window every weekend?
And perhaps the most important question of all: Can you actually keep doing this?
Then we have the lagging indicators. These are your average body weight, waist measurement, progress photos, the way your clothes fit and changes in body composition. They’re ultimately the things many people want to see change, but they don’t always provide immediate feedback.
This is where I think so many women get stuck.
We stare at the lagging indicator and completely ignore the leading indicators.
You’ve trained three times this week. You’ve eaten well. You’ve hit your protein target. You’ve gone out for dinner, enjoyed yourself and managed not to turn one meal into an entire weekend of overeating. You’re getting stronger and your clothes are starting to fit differently.
But the scales haven’t moved for six days, so suddenly the conclusion is, “It’s not working.”
This is the moment I want you to zoom out.
Throughout my own fat-loss journey, particularly when I notice myself becoming impatient, I’ve kept coming back to one question:
Where do I want to be one year from now?
Not next Friday. Not at the end of a six-week challenge. Not before one particular event or holiday.
A year from now.
How do I want to feel in my body? How strong do I want to be? How do I want to look after myself? What kind of relationship do I want to have with food? How do I want to show up socially? What role do I want training to play in my life?
That lens changes the strategy completely.
Because when you’re thinking about the next twelve months rather than the next twelve days, you don’t need the most aggressive strategy available. You need the strategy you can repeat.
You need something that allows you to train consistently without destroying yourself, eat in a way that supports your goals without making food the centre of your universe, enjoy your life and continue showing up long after the initial burst of motivation has disappeared.
Unfortunately, that’s probably one of the least marketable truths about fat loss.
The fitness industry is very good at selling urgency. It sells breakthroughs, hacks, six-week transformations and secret signs that something exciting is about to happen. It is much harder to market the reality that meaningful, sustainable change is often quite boring. It’s months of doing mostly the same things, imperfectly but consistently, while allowing enough time for those behaviours to compound.
So instead of asking yourself whether you’re hungry enough, tired enough or retaining enough water to prove that fat loss is happening, ask a better question:
Am I consistently doing the things that someone who achieves my goal would be doing?
If the answer is yes, don’t be so quick to interfere.
You might not be waiting for the plan to start working.
You might already be on your way — you just need to keep going long enough for the results to catch up with the work.
Ange Drake is a personal trainer, women’s empowerment coach and fitness blogger in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. She is the director of one of the few womens’ only strength training gyms in Melbourne, 23W. Ange helps women to learn how to use strength based training, nutritional strategies and a positive mindset to transform their bodies, relationship with food and mind.
