How Shapa helps you reach your goals without counting calories

Think you need counting calories to lose weight? 

The truth is…calories count, whether you’re counting them or not. Simply counting calories may work in the short-term, it’s amazing what sheer will and determination can accomplish! But, if you want to lose weight and keep it off, you’ll need to build your lifestyle around your goals – and that has nothing to do with calories and everything to do with empowering yourself with knowledge and getting into better habits like you build in the Shapa program.

Shapa acts as your virtual coach. Shapa focuses your program based on your lifestyle and goals so you can build healthy habits and achieve lasting results.

Making it forever

What’s the point of making progress if you can’t keep it?

Sustainable weight loss occurs as a side effect of a healthier way of living, not the opposite way around. In fact, chasing a number on the scale may lead you to eat as little as possible, which makes you less likely to engage in physical activity, grumpier to those around you, and overall leads you to feeling pretty miserable. Inevitably, you wake up one day and decide enough is enough, and resume your former ways of eating. Guess where that leads you before long? Yup, back to square one.

Let’s get some perspective here

It’s time to get off the hamster wheel and look at the bigger picture. At the end of the day, do you walk around with your weight plastered onto your forehead? Nope! You just want to look and feel better.

So why are you fixated on a certain number? Because when you think about that weight, you envision yourself healthier, happier, and fitting perfectly into your clothes.

The problem with conventional scales is that they display a number. Based on whether this number is higher or lower than the previous day’s number, you decide if you’re winning at life or failing at it miserably. Never mind all the factors that can cause a heavier scale reading like:

• Eating more carbs than usual the day before
• Eating more salt than usual the day before
• A particularly tough workout the day before
• Being constipated
• Hormonal fluctuations
• Poor sleep

You’re made up of over 50% water! The factors I just listed greatly effect your water levels. On a day-to-day basis, the scale does not tell you if you have gained fat or lost it. It’s much more indicative of how much water you’ve gained or lost. Not very helpful, right? 

The right data

The only way to assess whether you’re actually losing fat is to track your daily weigh-ins over time and look at the trend line. Is it going down? Staying the same? Going up? Only then can you assess progress. But who has time for that? I mean REALLY?

Whether the ups and down of the scale send you on an emotional roller coaster, or you refuse to spend your time inputting data into an excel sheet, the fact is, your energy could be better spent elsewhere. The Shapa scale gives you that energy back. By gently communicating the status of your weight, while at the same time guiding you to make simple and sustainable changes, this clever device acts to promote self-regulatory behaviors proven to put you on the right track to meet your health and weight loss goals.

There’s nothing wrong with calorie counting, in fact it’s a tool I use with many of my clients – but always in conjunction with building better habits. The combination of weight control and a healthy lifestyle lead to the highest quality of life, and that’s what Shapa wants for you. There’s no better way to set yourself up for success than by hopping on your Shapa scale in the morning and being pointed in the right direction. Consistently work on improving your behaviors, and before you know it you’ll be feeling and seeing a major difference.

About the author: Sharone Sapir, MS completed her Masters of Science in Nutrition and Education at Columbia University. Having overcome her own not-so-great relationship with food, she is passionate about helping others achieve their health and weight loss goals while finding balance. She enjoys hanging out with her two daughters, husband, giant dog, and cat, especially all together when shenanigans are involved. You can connect with her on her Instagram page here.