Weight loss might be one of the most hotly debated topics in human history.
Everyone has an opinion on what the best method or approach for losing weight is and no one seems to agree. Not only this, but it’s almost impossible to distinguish truth from the high-budget marketing campaigns designed to drain your wallet and prey on your insecurities. It truly is a minefield out there.
Now, you might say, Andy – are you any different from these charlatans flogging magic beans and promising an hour glass figure or a six pack? And it’s a fair question. After all, I’ve been a personal trainer in Doncaster for over 10 years, and my business is predicated on the fact that we help out of shape and over stressed men & women lose weight and get healthy. So it’s easy to lump us in with the meal replacement, slimming club, fad diet types that leave you in a worse place than they found you.
However, I hope that by sharing the knowledge I have on setting up a weight loss approach as a beginner in this article, I may gain your trust. I hope to illustrate to you that losing weight doesn’t have to be a yo-yo, all or nothing or miserable process that you can’t wait to finish. I hope to show you a better way, a more pleasant, simple, patient and sustainable method of not only losing weight, but protecting your muscle mass and creating a body shape you are incredibly proud of – and one you can maintain for many years to come.
But first, we need to define the problem…
The Problem
Weight loss isn’t really the problem, is it? If you wanted to lose weight, you’d do one of the myriad of crash diets you’ve done in the past. But you know how that story goes, you’ve been there, done that and got every t-shirt there is to offer. You lose 10-15lbs in a couple of weeks. Feel absolutely miserable because you’re on marginally less calories than an adolescent sparrow. Force yourself to go running every morning in the pouring rain. Eventually, you cave and have something “not allowed” on your diet. This drives feelings of guilt, shame and regret. But then it happens again. And you finally think “well, I’ve ruined it for this week. Might as well start again on Monday”.
But by Monday all those habits are ancient history. You’ve had your first takeaway since starting the diet. You had the day from hell at work and the kids were… challenging. You decided one glass of wine to wind down after all of that won’t hurt. After all, you deserve it, right?
By the middle of the next week you’re officially not dieting anymore. You’ve put all the weight you lost back on, and probably a couple of extra pounds to boot. You resign yourself to being overweight for life and declare fitness and weight loss as “not for you”. Then you go right back to your old lifestyle, getting the same results you’ve always got. All the while feeling deflated every time you catch your own reflection in the mirror, exhausted all the time for no apparent reason, and fed up of your lagging fitness and strength levels. Not to mention the fact you’re not getting any younger and you’re really starting to worry about the state of your health in years to come.
Does any of this sound or feel familiar?
If it does, you’re not alone. The reason I can talk in such depth about this is that usually when someone comes to me for help, they’ve been through this cycle 7 or 8 times and they don’t know where else to turn. It’s my job to then educate them on the right way to approach weight loss, so we protect their health and create a real, lasting and sustainable change that positively impacts the rest of their life, without making them miserable. Let’s talk about what that means…
You Know The Answer, You’re Just Impatient
By now, we’ve all heard the fitness buzzwords that form the baseline of weight loss. In fact, I’m willing to put money on the fact that if you hear the words “calorie deficit” from some 20 year old fitness bunny on Instagram one more time you might throw your phone out of the window on the M1. I get it.
But unfortunately, those annoying influencers have a point. Kind of.
There is no way around it. Weight loss is determined by energy balance – in simple terms, how many calories you consume through food/drink, versus how many calories you burn off through exercise, movement and metabolic activity. If you take in more than you expend, you gain weight. If you take in less than you expend, you lose weight.
Great! Let’s all go on our latest shake diet and drastically drop our calorie intake. Well, not so fast there sunshine. Here’s a good rule of thumb:
The faster it comes off, the faster it goes back on.
Why? Because if you drop weight at a ridiculously rapid rate, you’re likely doing something unsustainable. If you can’t see yourself doing these the same thing you’re doing now in five years time, it’s a short-term fix and you’d be well advised to rethink your approach.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s more to it than just monitoring your calorie intake, and we’ll talk about that shortly. But the fact remains that you know how to lose weight already. The problem comes when you’re too impatient, and you rush into a super low calorie diet and a demanding exercise regime. This impatience generally stems from some sort of pain or frustration with how you look and feel. But if you can temper that for just a second and look at the bigger picture, you might be able to finally solve this weight loss problem for good. And now, I’d like to help you get there.
Sound fair? Then let’s dive in.
Grab The Low Hanging Fruit
I’m going to start by making an assumption. Well, a couple of assumptions. The first is that you’re not currently happy with your bodyweight. The second is that your bodyweight is fairly stable right now – even though it’s a lot higher than you’d like it to be.
If those sound accurate, the rest of this article will apply to you.
Firstly, if your bodyweight is currently stable (i.e. not massively trending upwards or downwards), then whatever lifestyle you’re currently living and whatever number of calories you’re currently taking in on a daily basis is maintaining that stable bodyweight. Remember, if you eat less than you burn, you’ll lose weight. But if the amount of calories you eat and the amount of calories you burn are roughly the same, you’ll maintain your current bodyweight.
This insight opens up an opportunity for us. If we know that we’re not currently gaining weight, we know what our baseline calorie intake is. It’s what we’re already doing!
So, theoretically, if we make any changes to our total calorie intake, either by eating more or eating less, we should see that reflected in our bodyweight, as we’ve altered the energy balance equation. But here’s the key: we don’t need to alter the equation by very much to see changes. Literally dropping our intake by 100 calories per day from what we’re used to eating will result in some measurable weight loss – and 100 calories a day is barely noticeable from our lives.
It Starts With Awareness
Look, all this talk of calories is very nice but the reality is you probably have no idea how many calories you’re eating on a daily basis. If you’re anything like the vast majority of people, you probably just eat food without a second thought to how many calories are in it. Which is fine, until you’re stuck with weight loss.
The first thing we need to do is find out a ballpark figure of how many calories you’re eating per day. With my 1-1 and small group clients, I ask them to keep a food diary for at least 3 full days, listing everything they eat and drink that contains calories. We do this without attaching any positive or negative associations to the food they’re eating. There is no guilt, shame or embarrassment involved. It’s just cold, hard, data. And when I say everything, I mean everything. Every cheeky biscuit, every piece of fruit, every sugar in the tea. Everything. We use a free calorie tracking app like “My Fitness Pal” from the App Store on your smartphone – this works all the calorie amounts out for you when you scan the barcode or search for the food you’ve eaten.
This tracking process does two essential things. Firstly, it gives us an idea of your current calorie intake, and gives us a starting point to work from. Secondly, it brings some awareness to your own eating habits. We can be so caught up in the stresses and strains of daily life that we eat mindlessly, and although the contents of our meals might be fine, we find ourselves forgetting those 15 trips to the fridge each evening.
OK, so now you’ve got an average calorie amount as a rough estimate of what you’re currently eating on a daily basis. Now what?
Well, now we very slightly cut this down for our starting calorie allowance. Let’s say you’re eating 2500 calories per day on average now. We drop this to 2400 calories per day, and by the definitions of energy balance set out earlier, we should see some weight loss – without having to eat rabbit food.
Going Beyond Calories
Huzzah! We’ve cracked the calorie problem! Now we can go on our merry way without a second thought. Well, hold your horses there, hotshot.
Calories are a starting point. It’s a pre-requisite to everything that follows. You can’t get around the fact that calories matter, but calorie control alone does not make for a healthy nutritional plan. We need to look at a few more variables to make sure we’re moving in the right direction with weight loss.
Protein
By now most of us have heard about the importance of protein. But what’s the big deal with it?
Well, protein is the macronutrient responsible for building and repairing muscle tissue. So not only does it help to keep the most essential parts of your body ticking over, but it helps to build and repair skeletal muscle (like your thighs, biceps or chest). Big deal, it’s not like you’re trying to be Arnold Schwarzenegger. Well, muscle turns out to be a pretty important thing when it comes to health, weight loss and longevity. We’ll talk about the weight loss aspect in the next section, but sarcopenia (muscle wastage as we age) has been associated with cognitive decline and dementia, heart disease, falls and significant fractures of bones. This is no joke. Having more muscle makes you harder to kill. Not only this, but it could seriously boost your quality of life, keeping you more mobile and agile long into later life.
The amount of protein you eat per day matters for these reasons. Eating sufficient protein helps to protect and even build that muscle mass that’s so essential for health and longevity. But how do you decide how much protein you should eat, and what foods actually have protein in them?
Well, the stock answer for how much protein you should eat from most fitness professionals is something like 1g per 1lb of bodyweight (or a variation on this theme). And if you can hit this number, fantastic. But for many of us, hitting a number that may be in excess of 200g per day is way out of our comfort zone and so far removed from our current reality it’s scary. So, we take the same approach as we did with the calories. We look at how much you’re eating right now, and try to bump it in the right direction. That means revisiting our food diary from earlier, looking at how many grams of protein we ate per day, and setting a target slightly above that. I’m talking – if you’re currently averaging 80g of protein per day, try to hit 100g per day. It’s not a huge increase or burden on your life, but it will make a difference to your lean muscle mass.
In terms of what types of foods to eat, the most bioavailable and nutrient dense protein sources are without doubt animal foods. Red meat and fish are the kings of the diet game here. But if you’re not a big fan or you have made other dietary commitments, just check the labels of the foods you’re eating and aim to hit your protein targets however you can.
If you’re wondering about the rest of your diet, there’s a reason I’ve stopped short of diving into carbohydrates, fats or anything else. Studies show that when you control for calories and protein, the ratio of carbs and fats doesn’t really matter for weight loss. In other words, as long as you tick the calorie and protein boxes, you can fill the rest of your food allowance as you see fit, and still lose weight. That doesn’t mean that eating donuts all day is healthy as long as it’s in your calorie allowance, but it does make the job of losing weight a little easier.
Weight Training
When I first started as a personal trainer in Doncaster way back in early 2014 – weight training for fat loss was a really hard sell. People just hadn’t been exposed to weight training as a methodology for fat loss and general health, and the general consensus seemed to be that weight training was reserved for the ‘meat heads’ of this world and picking up anything heavier than your average handbag would result in an immediate transformation into a hulk or she-hulk type figure.
Hopefully, we’ve come a long way in the last decade. Now people tend to understand that weight training isn’t going to make you the next Arnold Schwarzenegger. But what exactly is the link between weight training and fat loss?
Well, it all comes down to your metabolism. Your metabolism is basically how many calories you burn at rest. Right now, by doing absolutely nothing, you’re still burning a certain amount of calories through your day-to-day essential bodily processes.
When you build some lean muscle through weight training and eating sufficient protein, you increase the demand on your body to supply this new muscle with blood flow, oxygen and nutrients to ensure it’s survival, repair and growth. This all has an energetic cost, increasing the amount of calories you burn at rest.
In short, someone with more muscle will burn more calories by doing nothing than someone with less muscle. So, the biggest cheat code I can give you for fat loss is to increase your lean muscle mass!
To read more on big reasons to train with weights, click here.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully you’re now a little clearer on what actually matters when it comes to setting up a weight loss approach that works – without leaving you starving or craving any kind of food with some flavour. The key thing to remember is that it doesn’t need to be life or death, you can absolutely lose weight and feel better without turning your entire lifestyle upside down.
I hope this article has shed some light on how to do that, but if you still need some help our team of personal trainers in Doncaster are happy to help. We’re based in Tickhill, and we have exclusive men’s and women’s only small groups for the over 40s. To check us out, click on the link below to learn more about our private personal training packages with our world class personal trainers in Doncaster: