In their attempts to lose weight and get
fit people often turn to the latest “Diets” to solve their problems for them.
From the most recent trends and Instagram
gurus to the well-known weight loss clubs that have been around for years.
These multi-million pound businesses
have a vested interest. While it is in their interest to get people results,
the efficacy of their programs is irrelevant once they’ve sold you their
product, so clever marketing is their number one concern.
Before your health and successful weight
loss, comes your money.
People buy into things based on what they
believe from the marketing and word of mouth/popularity.
Before and after pictures bombard every
advertisement for these products because they’re convincing and people want the
results they see on the ad, but here’s the thing – no one diet works for
everyone!
If 1,000 people follow a diet, it WILL work
for a proportion of them, maybe 10%; maybe more, maybe less, but it will work
for some.
10% of those 1,000 people is 100 success
stories and THOSE are the stories/pictures they’ll use for the advertising. The
ads wouldn’t be so convincing if under the fantastic transformations it said
“you have a 10% chance of achieving these results”.
I’m not saying that all of the diet plans
out there are bad, in fact most of
them are very good… for some people.
But how do you figure out which plan is
right for you?
The key here is not to follow a
specific plan.
While this may sound illogical, let me
explain…
A “Diet plan” is set, minimal room for
variation or flexibility. Since everybody is different, and what works for you
won’t necessarily work for the next person, any plan set out in writing will
fail the majority of people.
Instead, you need to look for the common
factors in all of the successful diet plans. Trends and patterns, guidelines
and rules of thumb.
The most successful diets (and I don’t mean
for short-term results, but for lasting, “keep the weight off” results) have a
few things in common, they:
● get people preparing their own meals
● get people eating fresh, whole foods as
opposed to pre-packed ready meals
● help people build healthy habits into
their lifestyle rather than tell them “you
can’t have this”
● help people establish their own eating rules and guidelines
suited to them specifically
● help people determine how much they should be eating, how often, and
when
● look at exercise as a form of calorie
reduction rather than just cutting down food intake
● improve the HEALTH of the person, instead
of simply looking at their weight
If the main focus is purely on weight loss,
you’ll likely do your body harm and end up, long-term, with a failed attempt.
If you make HEALTH the main goal, weight
loss will follow and you’ll feel fantastic for it. Long-term success is much
more likely.
In order to have success in dieting, you
need to look at many factors and create your very own diet plan that works for
YOU (and no-one else).
No-one looks the same, no-one acts the
same, no-one has the exact same problems; everyone is individual. Your diet
needs to be too.
The above listed rules and guidelines do
apply across the board, but to tailor a diet to suit YOU, you need to figure
out exactly how to integrate all of these things into YOUR lifestyle; kind of
like your very own “Owner’s Manual”.
The bare bones of weight loss (or weight
gain if that’s your goal) is energy balance, or calories if you will.
While I hate the whole process of counting
calories (or allocating points to
calories), there’s no escaping the fact that you cannot create energy from
nothing.
…meaning you cannot gain weight without
eating more than your body needs, and you cannot lose weight if you’re eating
more than your body needs.
What your body needs is unique to you and
there is no equation or formula that can tell you specifically what you need.
There are formulas that will give you a ballpark figure of what someone your
height, weight, size needs, but it doesn’t take into account the myriad other
factors, like stress, diet history, hormones etc., therefore it needs refining
to suit you.
If you’ve slowed your metabolism by
following a low-calorie diet for a long period of time, your daily calorie goal
according to the calculations will likely be much higher than your actual need
(since your body has become more efficient and shut down anything that requires
energy that it deems non-essential to survival).
So following a diet that uses these
calculations will mean you’ll gain
weight.
As an example,
A 35-year old female, weighing 80kg (176lb,
or 12 ½ stone), and 162cm (5’4”) tall, who exercises 3 times a week would
require 2,030 calories per day to maintain that weight, and any reduction in
that number should see her lose weight.
But if our example has been following a
low-calorie diet, say 1,200 calories per day for a long period, chances are
weight loss has stopped despite being 800 calories below her daily maintenance
level.
What’s happened? Her body has stopped all
non-essential energy consuming activities and slowed things down to survive on
1,200 calories per day (which is far too low for this individual anyway).
So if, having “failed” at her current
weight loss attempts (now it’s stopped working) she started a new diet that
used the standard formulas and said that to lose weight she needs to eat 1,800
calories per day (a reasonable assumption given that her maintenance level is
2,030 calories), she would gain weight;
because her body has adjusted to burn only 1,200 calories per day. So we now
have a 600 calorie surplus!
This is why the standard calculations don’t
work. They do not take into account diet history and current eating habits.
For long term success, you need to start
your nutrition plan right where you are. Assess your current eating habits and
make adjustments from there.
Anyone who is overweight due to over-eating
will have success using these formulas because their body is burning as much energy as the calculations would suggest (maybe
even a bit more if they’ve been over-eating for a long time). So for them, a
simple cut in calories will result in weight loss.
But for anyone who’s been dieting, not over-eating,
and has cut calories already, the equation will fail you every time.
As a coach, I rarely see food diaries with
excessive amounts of food on them, but regularly see food diaries where people
are under-eating yet still not losing weight.
In order to achieve successful and healthy
weight loss (or gain), you need to establish what you’re eating now and what
results it brings i.e. if you’re gaining, losing, or maintaining your weight.
Once you’ve established your current
calorie intake and its results, you can make adjustments from there to get the
required outcome.
Be aware though that if you’re already below
your daily calorie intake (i.e. maintaining weight at a calorie count below
your BMR as in our example before), further reducing calories is NOT the way to
go.
You’ll need to find a way to increase
calories without gaining weight to get back to a healthy calorie intake and to
increase your metabolism to burn more.
This is the real basics of weight
loss/gain, and it can’t be cheated. There is no shortcut and there are no
supplements that enable you to bypass this simple fact. Energy cannot be
created out of nothing, or burned without the required effort – a pill will not
burn fat!
The pyramid below shows the order of
importance for weight loss (or gain).
There is a hierarchy here, and trying to
utilise any of the sections before you’ve mastered the section below will
result in failure.
This, if you read between the lines, tells
you exactly what you need to do.
Anyone, be they a trainer in the gym or on
the internet, a fitness “guru”, or a huge trusted company, selling you
supplements for weight loss without first covering all of the other factors
involved are either after your money, or lacking the knowledge to help you. Be
VERY cautious who you listen to.
I’ve mentioned in previous articles to be
careful who you listen to, and if something doesn’t make sense, it’s probably
not right. Find someone who speaks sense and you trust, and follow their advice
over hearsay.
There are many “Diets” out there to choose
from, but finding your own will be the best move you ever make. It won’t be one
you can find online or buy in a book, or one you can share with someone else
once you’ve found it, because it will be YOUR diet, and yours alone.
It will also never be static and will
change as you do. As your body changes, so will your dietary needs. If you
change your exercise habits, lifestyle habits, or even your job, your
nutritional requirements will change too.
So before you choose your next ‘Diet’,
think about these things and look over the proposed Diet. Does it tick all the
right boxes and does it make sense? Or does it sound easy and too good to be
true?
And perhaps most importantly, does it start
with you establishing your baseline and work from there (most likely through
either a food diary or a number of questionnaires, or both)? Or just ask for
your basic details (gender/age/height/weight/goal weight) so it can punch them
into an online calculator and generate a program from that.
Or even worse, does it not even ask for any
of those and simply give you healthy recipes to eat?! (Which is great – but is
just a cook book, not a diet)
Tread carefully and think through your
decisions when making dietary choices as they will affect not only your weight,
but your health and your sanity too!
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