It’s clear we are a weight-obsessed culture. And I am certainly guilty of participating. In my efforts to get people healthier, I often inform them that following my protocols will help them “lose weight.” And to be honest, I’m not going to stop doing that because it’s what people respond to.

But in truth, I don’t care about your weight. And to some degree, neither should you.

Being light on the scale is not equivalent to health. If you stopped drinking water, you would lose weight, but we all can agree that being severely dehydrated isn’t health. On the flip side, you can eat massive amounts of clean meats and healthy fats, hit the weight room hard for months and weigh more than you did before you started weight lifting. And you will be much healthier.

I’m reminded of the infamous Twinkie diet. A Kansas State University nutrition professor set out to prove that weight loss was all about calorie deficits. So, for ten weeks, he ate nothing but Twinkies, Oreos, Doritos and the like–and lost 27 lbs.

He was trying to make a (dramatic) point that weight loss gurus were intentionally making weight loss seem more difficult and complicated than it really is to swindle you out of a few bucks. Well, maybe some of them are.

What he did in my eyes is basically prove the point of this article: your weight isn’t the same as your health. I can only imagine the state of his immune system, his microbiome, his mental state, his complexion, and just his general sense of well-being after 10 solid weeks of nothing but junk food. I guarantee he wouldn’t be considered “healthy.”

So forget about weight loss.

How do we measure “health”?

There are so many ways. In terms of your physical appearance–which, let’s be real, is the main motivating factor when people seek weight loss help–try a measuring tape instead of a scale. Monitor and record everything in your journey toward health: waist size, hip size, thighs, arms, etc.

If you want to get particularly in-depth, you can use a Tanita. I have two at my office. This nifty little “scale” sends an electromagnetic pulse through your body. By measuring things like resistance, the time it takes the pulse to return to the source, degradation and various other factors, the Tanita is able to measure your fat composition, your muscle mass, where exactly the fat in your body is accumulating and how well your nerves are conducting electricity (an indicator of neurological functioning).

Imagine again our scenario where you adopt a ketogenic diet and lift weights consistently for several months. If you were to submit to a Tanita scan at the beginning, it might say you have 27% body fat and 30% muscle mass. After three months, you’re down to 17% body fat and 40% muscle mass. But you weigh the same!

Another way to measure your health is your physical effectiveness. How much can you lift? How long can you jog without stopping? How do you feel in the morning? What’s your energy level like at 4pm–still raring to go or time for another cup of coffee?

The one exception

There is one situation in which the numbers on the scale are important. If someone is obese–meaning their fat composition is 25% or above. There is almost no situation or amount of muscle building that justifies a 5’8″ man weighing 400 lbs. In that case, we need to get you to literally “lose weight.”

But at the end of the day, that still means the same thing–fat burning. We are getting rid of fat and the weight that goes along with it.

Famous management expert, Peter Drucker, is perhaps most famous for his old chestnut: “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

So break out the measuring tape and start focusing on those inches, not the pounds.