Six weeks in, the number is the same and the jeans are looser. A dietitian explains why those two facts are not in conflict — and which one is telling you the truth.
Dhamkee doesn't give medical or nutrition advice. This post reports what a qualified professional said on Instagram — their original post is embedded below, in full.
Your body composition is changing even though your body weight is not. Fat is going and muscle is staying or being built, so the scale reads the same while the shape underneath it does not.
It is one of the most demoralising six weeks in anyone's training. You have been consistent, you have been eating better, and the number has not moved. Meanwhile the trousers you could not fasten in June are doing up in August. One of those two things feels like data and the other feels like wishful thinking.
Dietitian Manik, who posts as @diet_planner_manik_marria, addressed this directly on Instagram in July 2026. His argument is that the scale was never measuring the thing you care about.
View this post on Instagram
Post by @diet_planner_manik_marria, embedded with credit.
The scale adds up four different things
A bathroom scale returns one number for your whole body — fat, muscle, water and bone together. It cannot tell you which of those went up and which went down. Manik's point is that losing weight, on its own, does not tell you that anything has improved.
Nothing has changed in six weeks, so nothing is working.
Fat can go down while muscle holds or builds. The total stays put; the composition underneath it has changed, and that is the change you can see in the mirror and feel in your clothes.
Why losing muscle along with fat backfires
This is the part of his post that reframes the whole thing. He says that if you lose muscle along with fat, your metabolism slows, your body becomes weaker, and you are more likely to regain the weight — which is why people can drop several kilos and still not end up where they wanted to be.
What he says to aim at instead
Manik describes his own focus as body recomposition — losing body fat while preserving or building lean muscle. In his post he lists what that is meant to produce:
- Losing fat rather than muscle
- A faster metabolism
- Improved strength and energy
- Better body shape and definition
- Results that are easier to maintain over the long term
Note what is not on that list: a target weight.
The line worth keeping
Your weight is just a number. Your body composition is what people actually see.
Dietitian Manik
Most women who begin lifting in their thirties arrive because of the scale. It is the metric everything else was measured in — every plan, every app, every well-meaning relative. And then six weeks in, the scale stops cooperating while everything else quietly improves, and there is no obvious way to read that as progress.
The women who keep going are usually the ones who change what they are measuring. Not because the weight stopped mattering to them overnight, but because something else started giving better feedback: the jeans, the bag of rice that used to need two hands, the fifth stair. Those are slower signals than a number, and they are considerably harder to argue with.
If you want the food side of this, start with is poha good for weight loss or when to eat curd for weight loss, or the wider Indian diet for weight loss section. If you would rather look at training, the exercise for weight loss pillar collects it — and the companion question, whether any single exercise can decide where the fat goes, is answered in does cycling reduce belly fat.
Questions people also ask
How long can the scale stay flat while my body is still changing?
Manik's post does not give a timeframe. It makes the case that the number and the composition are two different measurements, not that either moves on a schedule.
Should I stop weighing myself altogether?
He does not say that. His argument is about what the number can and cannot tell you, not about whether to record it.
How do I know whether I am losing fat or muscle?
His post does not cover measurement methods. That is a question for a dietitian or a doctor who can assess you properly.
Does this mean lifting is better than cardio?
His post is about body composition rather than any particular kind of training, and it does not compare the two.
Shaina writes for Dhamkee. She is a mother of two who runs, practises yoga, and cooks — usually before the rest of the house is up. She is not a nutritionist or a doctor and does not play one here. On this blog she reports what qualified professionals have said publicly, and points you to them. More about how we work.