5 Things You Might Not Know About Losing Weight
How many of these did you know?
1 - Losing 1 pound per week is too aggressive, and a bad idea for most people.
Even though 1 pound is a nice round number, it would mean you have to eat 500 calories per day less than normal to continually lose 1 pound per week. That might be an entire meal!
If you’re a female who isn’t on the taller side, that might mean slashing your calories down to 1200 or 1300 calories per day.
If you’re a male who isn’t super active, that might mean cutting down to 1600 calories or less.
And while you can probably endure a few days or even a week on crazy low calories, eventually hunger shows up on your doorstep holding a bag of tortilla chips with your name all over it.
A less aggressive calorie deficit like 250-350 per day won’t give you as quick of results, but you’ll be able to stick with it, which is ultimately what matters for lasting results.
2 - The first few pounds you lose on a diet aren’t fat.
It’s Monday morning and you’re finally starting that diet you’ve been talking about.
What foods are you going to avoid?
Bread, pasta, crackers, chips, cookies, cake, ice cream, candy…
Sure, all of those foods have a lot of calories, but what else do they have in common?
They have a ton of carbohydrates.
If those high-carb foods have been part of your normal diet, cutting them out means that you’re going to lose a bunch of water weight right off the bat.
Look at the word: Carbohydrate
Carbs that aren’t immediately burned for energy are stored as reserve energy in your muscles and liver in the form of glycogen.
For every 1 gram of carbs stored, it binds with about 3 grams of water.
So in the initial days of a diet (ya know, when you aren’t eating as many cookies), you aren’t storing as much glycogen.
This is the intoxicating appeal of low-carb diets. That initial water weight loss makes you think you’re killing it.
But as you reach a “new normal” level of glycogen, things quickly plateau, and as always… How much weight you ultimately lose comes down to how many calories you’re eating, regardless of whether they come from carbs or not.
3 - Doing extra cardio when you slip up on your diet is counterproductive.
Tell me if this has ever happened to you. You’re rolling right along with your diet, but then you mess up.
You go over to your friend’s house for dinner, overdo it on drinks, appetizers, and dessert and subsequently feel like a gross failure.
You have a stroke of genius and decide to make up for the slip with an extra 60-minute HIIT session, a long jog, or a class or 2 on the Peloton bike.
Bad idea.
For starters, you’re laying the foundation for an unhealthy future relationship with food and exercise.
Secondly, why do you assume the extra calories you ate are going to be stored long-term as fat?
A big part of your calorie burn every day happens subconsciously through non-exercise activity. Stuff like fidgeting and tapping your foot. It’s called “NEAT”.
If the overindulgence truly was a rare occurrence, there is a good chance your body will see those extra calories, and burn off the majority of them by ramping up your NEAT the following day.
Sure your weight will have spiked up from all of the extra food, but after 2 or 3 normal days of eating things will be back to normal, and you won’t have had to punish yourself.
If you’re someone who works out, you might even see a short period of increased performance from the abundant energy. Thanks, cake!
The last reason extra cardio as a punishment for a slip is a bad idea is because it’s going to make you even more hungry.
Exercise can be an appetite suppressant in the short term, but the day following your cardio penance, don’t be surprised if you’re ravenous and find yourself elbow-deep in a bag of Fiddle Faddle.
We teach our clients that the best thing to do when you have a slip-up (like everyone does) is to simply make the next right decision. No need for shame or punishment.
4 - Whatever method you use to lose weight needs to become your new lifestyle and habit base.
Let’s say you work really hard to pay off $25,000 of credit card debt.
You stop going out to eat, you delete the Amazon app, you cancel Hulu, and you commit to making your own fancy-ass coffee at home.
After a year of hard work, you look down and have paid it all off. Go you.
The next day you celebrate with a Venti Pumpkin Spiced Latte and are instantly reminded of what you missed all year.
The next week you finally treat yourself to the nice pair of workout pants that Instagram has been showing you for months.
It’s baseball playoff season and your team is in the running, (Go Astros!), so you drop some coin on a FUBO subscription.
Fast forward 6 months, and you’re fully back to your old spending habits.
You know, the ones that got you into debt in the first place.
The budget and the spending habits you used to get out of debt are gone and you’re headed right back to where you started.
There was no permanent change.
This is exactly how most people approach losing weight.
They follow a list of rules to accomplish the goal, and then throw the rules out the window and go back to whatever they were doing before.
And not surprisingly, since their old habits got them into the situation they were in before, they end up regaining the weight and feeling like a failure.
In their mind, “the diet worked” since they lost the weight, so chances are they’ll just repeat the cycle over and over with the same result.
Understand this: Whatever method you choose to lose weight…The ONLY way you will keep the weight off is by maintaining a very close semblance of the method you used to get those results.
Think hard about that before you start another round of Whole 30, Keto, Optavia, Weight Watchers, Macros, Faster Way, or a detox cleanse.
If you were to ask one of our clients what diet they’re on, they wouldn’t be able to tell you.
We don’t diet at all actually. We educate, and help them make a fundamental change to the way they eat that’s based on habits so that the results they get never go away.
Ok, last thing you might not have know about weight loss:
5 - Sweat has nothing to do with the process of losing weight/fat
If you come from the mentality of burning calories to lose weight, this one might surprise you.
The sweat that soaks your shirt while you work out is your body’s natural cooling response.
You get hot, so you sweat so you don’t boil over inside (not an exact scientific explanation).
But like I said, sweat isn’t a sign that you’re burning fat or losing weight.
Heck, when we lived in Boise we did some super high-volume training sessions in our frigid garage that left our muscles lifeless. But we never produced a drop of sweat because it was so friggin cold.
By that same token, I’ve sweat buckets simply walking 50 feet to the mailbox when we lived in Houston.
The fat cells in your body only give up their energy when you’re eating less calories than you need, regardless of how sweaty you are or are not.
As a matter of fact, almost all of the fat you lose comes out of your nose and mouth after being turned into carbon dioxide. Weird, right?
If you’re bordering on being obsessed about burning off those unwanted love handles or thighs, you’ll have better luck by focusing on what you eat vs. how much you sweat.
Are you wondering how you can break free from all of the nonsense and unsustainable junk in the fitness and nutrition world?
It starts by clicking the button below 😀