When you're losing weight should you be
measuring your waist circumference?
Hi I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com. And this is
Chris Masterjohn Lite, where the name of the game is
"Details? Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!"
And today we're going to
talk about when you should and shouldn't
measure your waist circumference.
In past episodes I have recommended measuring
your waist circumference along with your
body weight during times of weight loss
or muscle gain to use as a proxy for
your body fat. The logic is you have a
certain amount of fat that you're losing
or gaining, a portion
of that and a fairly consistent portion of
that is going to be abdominal fat, that
abdominal fat when you gain it or lose
it is going to impact your waist circumference.
The thing I like about waist circumference
is that it's super easy to measure.
With that said there are
some drawbacks to using waist
circumference that I have not covered in
past episodes and I'd like to lay them
out here. So waist circumference is not
only going to be impacted by your
abdominal fat level, but it also be
impacted by the amount of undigested
food in your stomach, or in your gut
overall. The amount of undigested food is
going to be impacted by the time since
your last meal. It's also going to be
impacted by the transit time, how quickly
or slowly food is going through your gut,
and it's also going to be impacted by
the amount of bulk in your diet,
which is going to be principally
influenced by the amount of fiber in
your diet. On top of all of this water
retention from other sources including
inflammation can impact your waist
circumference and this can be
particularly important for women because
many women have fluctuations in water
retention that are impacted by their
hormones and may be impacted for example
by their menstrual cycle, retaining more
water during ovulation and retaining
less water during other times of the
month for example. So how does this play
out practically?
Well for everyone all the time it's important
to make sure that we're measuring our
waist circumference, if we're measuring it,
at a consistent time since our last meal.
So the way that I take care of this
is I eat in the evening at a consistent
time and I measure my waist
circumference before I eat in the
morning at a consistent time.
It's important to keep in mind that if you
transition to a higher fiber diet for
the purpose of losing weight, or for any
other reason, that this can increase your
waist circumference. So don't be
surprised if you try to eat lower
calorie foods and in doing so you eat
higher fiber foods, which tend to be
lower in calories, don't be surprised that
that increases your waist
circumference and if it does you're
going to have to ignore the initial
increase in waist circumference then
make sure that you eat consistently
after that transition and look at the
decline in waist circumference after
you've made that transition. Another case
where this can be important is that your
transit time will slow when you're
cutting your calories simply because
cutting your calories no matter whether
it's from fasting or eating a lower
calorie diet or whatever, eating fewer
calories will slow your transit time and
that will increase the amount of time
that food spends in your gut and thereby
increase your waist circumference. Again
I think this should be a fairly
consistent decline that will reach a
plateau and you should after you've
reached that plateau be able to see the
decline in your waist circumference.
But it's important not to be surprised if
you observe an initial increase in your
waist circumference
during the time when you have first
cut your calories. For women, if hormonal
factors are influencing water retention
in a way that's impacting your waist
circumference you may find that your
waist circumference doesn't,
especially over the short-term, for example
a few weeks or a month, that your waist
circumference does not meaningfully
reflect your weight loss. If your scale
weight is trending down over the long
term and your waist circumference is
behaving erratically or behaving
illogically, waist circumference may not
be valuable at all in those cases and
the best thing to do to ensure that your
weight loss is fat loss is simply to
follow the recommendations I've made
before for hitting your protein targets
and making sure that you're including
resistance exercise and in those cases,
ignoring the waist circumference data.
I think it's also safe to assume that if
you're experiencing bloating and other
digestive issues then you can make a
very good guess that your waist
circumference is going to be impacted by
those digestive issues. So overall what I
would say is if you are not experiencing
bloating and other digestive issues,
if you do see waist circumference declining
in a logical way according to the
amount of weight you're losing and
according to the amount of weight loss
you appear to be experiencing when you
look in the mirror, then I think that
waist circumference is a good addition
to your measurements simply because of
how easy it is and because it adds more
information than simply looking at scale weight.
But if you are experiencing
digestive issues or if waist
circumference is not acting in a logical
way, linearly declining with your weight
loss then waist circumference is
probably not a useful metric to include.
So I would simply test whether it does
or does not appear to add useful
information and if it appears to add
useful information include it. If it doesn't
get rid of it.
The audio of this
episode was enhanced and post-processed
by Bob Davodian of Taurean Mixing.
You can find more of his work at
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All right, I hope you found this useful.
Signing off, this Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com.
This has been Chris Masterjohn Lite.
And I will see you in the next episode.