On the Wagon, Off the Wagon. How to Stay on Track.
Below I am going to give you 4 main hurdles that are not allowing you to reach your body composition goals.
Let's say you have your dieting calories and macros all worked out. You know what you'll be eating and how much of it daily. You've managed to come up with macro-friendly meals that are varied and not boring. You are tracking the food intake and staying close to your daily targets. You are also weight-training at least 3 times a week AND you are monitoring your progress regularly. Is it all 'smooth sailing' from here? I wish. The outcome of your fat loss mission will depend largely on this - adherence to the plan. If you find yourself seriously deviating from your plan after a short time period on it, it's either the plan you came up with needs to be adjusted or you need to follow your plan more diligently. Let me explain using a couple of my former clients' examples. Names have been changed to protect privacy:)
Let’s look at the first client. This is an example of a bad plan. It’s a 49 year old female, 34% body fat, “skinny fat” as some might call her. Her goals are to “look fit, with less jiggle on her body”. The physical activity she is currently doing is running every day and resistance training once a week with me. As far as eating habits and food intake, she said she “ate good” (that can mean different things to different people).
My proposed plan to her was:
A) increase protein intake
B) replace the 3 running days with resistance training
Her response was: “I’d like to follow my plan for now”. In the end she lost muscle and her RMR (resting metabolic rate) went down. Which meant she was burning even less calories at rest. We switched to the plan I outlined for her. Over the course of a year she went from 34% body fat to 26%. So, even though her motivation was great, her initial plan was bad.
The second client is a male, 51 years old, 25% body fat. His goal was to get down to 15% body fat, while building strength and increasing energy levels. He has been doing metabolic conditioning classes most mornings with 1 strength session a week with me. I noticed he had hard time pushing through the workouts and then recovering. As far as diet, he said, “I eat mostly ‘healthy’ and not too much. But I snack a lot.”
My approach was:
A) smaller and healthier alternatives for snacking (he was not open to quitting snacking at that time)
B) We discussed pre-workout and post-workout nutrition
He immediately saw positive results. The first thing he noticed was his increased energy at the gym and some body composition improvements. Then his progress stalled. My encouragement to him was to track all food and caloric beverages, which was met with passive resistance. I believe my clients’ autonomy is very important! I just lay out my plan for them to consider and tell them about the outcomes of following it vs continuing to do what they are doing. So, that’s what I did with this client. Soon during one of our training sessions together he finally decided to track his food and drinks. While tracking he had many “aha!” moments, and together we were able to find the biggest culprit behind his stalled progress - snacking on large amounts of peanut butter. We substituted that with a much less calorie dense alternative. So, this small strategic change brought awareness and allowed him to continue progressing towards his goals. Tracking was not a chore for him anymore since the results started coming in fast! At the gym his strength increased. His chin ups repetitions went up. He saw strength increase in deadlift, squat, bench and kettlebell work. Cardio capacity improved dramatically! In conclusion - results started snowballing once he started following the plan. He reached all his goals and kept the excess body fat off by continuing with the new habits that he has established.
So why I started this article with the 2 examples above? Those are the 2 reason on the macro level that can render your fat loss goals ineffective - following a bad plan and NOT following a good plan. Now, let's just assume you have a good plan. What can go wrong on a micro level here? If I had to sum it up in 1 word - that's ADHERENCE. Which can be affected by oh so many things. On a physiological as well as psychological levels. One of them influencing another and visa versa. Let's look at some examples. And this is by no means an exhaustive list. Let me know what struggles YOU yourself face.
Possible struggle (or 'hurdle' as I like to call it) #1 - All or Nothing mentality
So, according to your 'perfect' plan you got your daily calories and macros set up in a tracking app of choice, groceries are stocked, parts of the meals are pre-cooked, you train 3 days week with some light cardio on off days. Week one is a breeze. You weigh in and the weight is down, you feel lighter...you feel great! Weeks 2 and 3 are the same. You are down 4 lbs and it feels like you are on a roll. Then you get invited to someone's birthday party, a company picnic or some other event with foods that are definitely not macro-friendly. And since you've been in caloric deficit for 3 weeks now your hunger is up and you know you can't stop at just one cookie or one glass of wine, like so many times before. So you give in with reckless abandon, which doesn't stop once you get home. Why stop? I already messed up. So you head straight to the freezer and before you know it, your spoon is scraping the bottom of the pint-sized ice-cream container. With this behavior come feelings of shame and guilt. What do you do the next day? A) get back on your plan like nothing happened OR B) tell yourself “I'll never succeed at this fat loss. I just don't have enough will power!” If you said A) congratulations! You've shown resilience. This type of mindset will eventually yield the results you are looking for. If you chose B) as your answer, we've all been there. But resilience CAN be cultivated, so don't lose heart. And remember "No one got shredded from skipping a night of endless pizza and beer. The opposite is true also - you are not going to add tons of fat by having a night of endless pizza and beer." If this unplanned eating episode occurs, remember - you are only one meal away from getting back on your plan!
That leads me to hurdle #2 - Lack of planning for possible hurdles.
If you are able to identify your possible hurdles - that's half the battle. All you need is try to anticipate them and prepare strategies to counter them. If you feel you walk into situations and they take you by 'surprise'...time to start practicing self-awareness. I like to reverse engineer that with my clients with some questions. So the unplanned eating episode happened. Where were you? What time of the day was it? Who were you with? What happened right before it happened? Did someone do something/ gave you a look/ said something to you prior to that? Once you start answering these questions for yourself, a pattern usually emerges. Then it'll be easier to fight the enemy you know. For instance, a client of mine used to find herself in the pantry snacking mindlessly on chips and other crunchy salty sources of carbs. She was finally able to jump over that hurdle once she answered certain questions for herself. It turned out she was brought up believing that carbs make you fat. That led to complete carb avoidance, while her body's natural preference was a moderate consumption of this macronutrient. Plus she trained with me during the week, and I kept noticing her low levels of energy. I am glad she felt safe enough to share with me that information. Because I had a chance to educate her on the role of carbohydrates and how our bodies store fat. "The truth will set you free, right?" It certainly started her on the path of freedom. We slowly started incorporating carbs back into her diet and the changes followed. Her energy levels went up, her body was not craving carbs like it used to, it was happy. She was able to achieve balance in her nutrition. And all that by stopping and noticing what was going on and asking questions.
Hurdle #3 - Increasing exercise and decreasing food intake.
This is so human to be impatient! When we see that our plan is working, we want to speed things up. And what's the logical thing to do? Add more exercise on top of what we are doing and create a bigger calorie deficit. That usually backfires. Our body often fights back by making us ravenous, overtrained and tired. Binges start happening and in the gym we often get injured. And then just like that...we are off the plan. When in deficit, it's wise to remember this old saying - don't fix it if it ain't broke. If you are consistently losing fat and inches, keep milking that cow. Don't change anything. Once what you are doing is not working anymore, THEN it'll be time to play with the plan. One variable at a time preferably.
Hurdle #4 - Sleep.
Sleep is often overlooked as an important part of fat loss. Scientists and health professionals continually identify sleep as the limiting factor for many people’s weight loss attempts. In one study young adult males were basically forced to be sleep deprived for 11 days. One group slept four hours a night, the other group got six. The researchers tried to gain insight on hunger levels related to circadian cycles to understand more about shift workers.
The group allowed four hours per night reported higher hunger levels, less satiety, more food consumption, and less satisfaction from meals than the six hour a night people. Both groups certainly had negative changes, but in this study, it appeared dose-dependent. The less sleep, the worse it was in terms of eating.
Two of the biggest factors for weight loss are portion control and having set meal times. This becomes increasingly difficult when we need to eat more to be full and we are less satisfied with meals. This leads to more snacking, and since we are tired, the decision to snack becomes easier.
To quote a review on the subject “Chronic circadian misalignments not only influence sleep, but also influence several other systems including the immune system, appetitive hormones, and energy balance.”
"Alright, alright, I get it that sleep is important. But I just can't go to sleep early. It's a habit." Time to start creating a new one. Here's how to hit the pillow harder: I you have a newborn, this might be hard. But for the rest of us we can A) create a new bed-time routine. However it might look for you. I personally had to move my dinner to an earlier time, say no to watching later TV, time block my work during the earlier hours of the morning and looked for general 'time leaks'. That allowed me to find a whole hour for going bed earlier. B) Eat what you know before bed. Food that won't give you any GI surprises. C) use a sleep tracker and soon you'll see a correlation between sleep and your daily patterns of hunger and performance at the gym. D) some people find Binaurals app helpful in calming their brain activity and letting them fall asleep and stay asleep better. And E) consult your doctor about Magnesium and Melatonin supplements that aid with sleep. F) This one is huge with a lot of people - once they hit the pillow they can’t stop certain trains of thoughts, conversations, to-do lists running through their mind. What helps many people is to do a so-called “Brain Dump”. Get those thoughts out of your head and onto paper in your journal or just a note pad by your bedside.
And now for the last hurdle.
Hurdle #5 - and that's Lack of Accountability.
Now, I understand that weight loss can be a very private matter. Some of you don't want to announce to the whole world that you are not comfortable with the way you look and feel and want to change it. I am with you. I was in that camp. When I was 200 lbs back in 2000 I didn't feel comfortable talking about it even to my own husband. My weight loss took 5 years mainly because I used trial and error method. It would have been a lot quicker if I had someone knowledgeable about fitness and nutrition by in my life. This is the biggest reason I became a coach, so I could help people achieve their health and body composition goals without them wasting time. So, find yourself a coach if you are able. If that's not an option, make yourself accountable to an online community run by reputable professionals. Or subscribe to YT channels of Layne Norton, Danny Lennon, Dr. Spencer Nadolsky, Sohee Lee ...I could go on and on. If you want more suggestions, drop me a line. Bottom line is, we need outside look at what we are doing. Sometimes we don't see things clearly. That and measuring your progress will go a long way!
