Weight Loss - The Internet is Filled with Stupid Ideas

As most of you know, I spend a lot of hours reading articles and blogs posted by other fitness minded individuals looking for “new” information or research, something I can use to improve my skills and understanding. Most of my time is spent on the weekends going through blog after blog and article after article looking for something unique. Instead of finding unique articles, I have been finding unique viewpoints on old material. There is value in having a disagreeing viewpoint when it comes to creating traffic, but sometimes, the foundation of disagreement is so stupid it can’t be ignored. Two posts I have seen lately are how a lady “stopped exercising and lost weight” and how “simply cutting carbs results in fat loss”. Total click-bait, but I fell for it and got sucked into the posts and scared for the thousands of people that would read and believe these posts.

Between the magic bullet articles that promote eliminating entire food groups, “detoxing” with lemon vinegar tea coffee bean extract, or “15 fast fat burning foods”, common sense about sustainable weight loss takes the backseat because it isn’t what people want to hear. People don’t want to hear that it isn’t quick or easy. They don’t want to hear that it takes time, effort, and a little bit of common sense. They don’t want to hear that sometimes you can do everything the way your favorite fitness icon does it and fail. Sometimes their lives are so hectic they just need the Disney ending to their struggle with eating, body-image, and fitness. Sadly, Walt didn’t figure out how to make fairy-tale magic happen for us.

This would have been a short post had it not been for the number of posts and messages we receive from similar cases. The lady that stopped exercising and lost weight was like so many people first starting out. She was doing everything right, or so she thought; five hour-long sessions per week, tracking her calories in, and tracking her calories out. Where she went wrong was instead of having weight training and cardio, she was only doing cardio like rowing, walking, etc. She also made the huge mistake of estimating her caloric burn and then eating back those calories. After some time of trying to lose weight this way, she was injured by her dog and unable to be active. Because there was no exercise, there were no calories to eat back and amazingly, she lost weight! This led her to the conclusion that not exercising and eating normally is the way to go instead of performing exercise, building muscle, and still eating in a deficit by not eating back your calories.

Many people forget that building muscle is healthy for our metabolism and believe that a low scale weight is all they need. When we move from active to couch potato, our body will waste muscle, especially when faced with a caloric deficit. Remember, a pound of muscle takes up less space in the body than a pound of fat, so while the scale drops, the tape measure may increase as the body loses muscle but builds up fat. In the evil scenario, we lose precious muscle and reduce our intake, slowing our metabolism. Similar to the “The Biggest Loser Scenario” where contestants lose weight only to regain it years later, losing weight only through reduced intake is likely to result in the regain of fat. When discussing TBL and the downfalls, I’ve had more than a few people misinterpret my objection to mean not eating at a deficit. That is not what I am suggesting at all. I am suggesting having a set number of calories regardless of whether you train or not. I am suggesting a small to moderate deficit caused primarily by activities, specifically resistance exercise. No matter how you cut it, weight loss requires some form of deficit.

Another factor the post brought to light is the concept of “eating back” exercise calories. One popular food / activity tracker in particular encourages you to eat back your exercise calories by giving you a low target and increasing your target intake as you exercise. I find this to be a poorly thought out recommendation for several reasons. Calorie labels / trackers rely on averages. As PN points out in “The Surprising Problem with Calorie Counting - Calories In” it is very hard to reliably say how many calories we are actually consuming. Further, calorie expenditure, even when monitored with a good heart rate monitor has a minimum 10% error. The second part of “The Surprising Problem with Calorie Counting - Calories Out” breaks down just how bad estimates are for predicting how many calories we burn through exercise. Combine the inaccuracy of calories listed on a label with the variance of calories burned and you have the beginning of a recipe for disaster when you attempt to eat back your calories.

Some believe that adjusted macros will create fat loss. Simply adjusting macro intake won’t translate to fat loss or weight loss with few exceptions. Yes, I acknowledge the concept of a recomposition, which is the process of building muscle and losing fat at the same time. No, your body doesn’t turn fat into muscle and no, it isn’t easy. The post proclaiming all that is needed to lose fat is reducing carbohydrate intake is a sad oversimplification. Regardless of how low you get your carbohydrate intake there are other factors:

Total caloric intake and deficit - if there’s no deficit, the body has no need to burn fat stores.

Stress - causes Cortisol release. Cortisol is a factor in the accumulation of visceral fat and sugar cravings.

Sleep - it’s our body’s chance to repair and recover. If you’re not getting enough sleep, you don’t recover, have a tendency to eat more, have impaired glucose control, and are likely to have higher Cortisol levels.

The solution:

Avoid the scale -

Like many others, I recommend limited use of the scale only to track patterns in weight gain or loss. Scales can be highly inaccurate measures and vary up to 10 lbs per day depending on our size. Unless you are severely overweight, there are better measures. If we only watch the scale, we risk losing the right kind of weight for the wrong kind.

Body Composition -

We know it’s possible to be at a “healthy weight” and have a high bodyfat percentage and that it’s possible to be “overweight” and have a low bodyfat percentage. There are hundreds of pictures of people that have gained weight yet become slimmer by building muscle. Even if the goal is to lower your weight, there needs to be a focus on building and maintaining muscle to keep burning calories. The result of losing muscle is a soft physique with less than ideal metabolism.

Hip & Waist Measures -

While body composition is one of the best, tracking changes in hip and waist circumference (two places we all tend to store fat) is a good indicator of our training and diet progress. There is also a high correlation of disease associated with people that have a high waist to hip ratio.

Tracking -

Track what you are eating, not necessarily taking calorie count as being exact, but understanding it is a range. When you find how much you can eat and maintain your weight for a week, decrease your calories by a minimal amount, say 10%. If you aren’t active, add some activity. No fancy gym necessary, but some basic bodyweight work to start.

Use the scale to track for weight changes, knowing that your weight can fluctuate +/- 10 pounds every day depending on your size. I like to keep a running five-day average, which will allow for those daily fluctuations.

Track progress using a variety of tools:  clothing fit, tape measure, progress photos, general feelings throughout the day. If two or more measures are moving in the right direction, you’re making progress, even if the scale isn’t moving.

Patience -

Be patient. Understand that most changes takes several weeks to show up and that good, lasting progress will take time, so if your goal is to be “bikini body” ready in 6 weeks, it may be time to re-think and re-plan.

Be patient through the failures, the slip-ups, and the lack of progress. Each time we don’t move forward is an opportunity to learn and make progress. Each opportunity allows us the chance to figure out to do it better and how to forgive ourselves when we make mistakes.

Hooray! Now what?

You finally did it. You prepped. You dieted. You trained your ass off. It took hours of prep, self-control, thousands of hours of work, and months of your life, but you did it. You finally reached your goal weight and now you come to the amazing question: "What next?" You just put in all that effort and now you have to decide on how to maintain the results.

It seems like a fairly easy concept, right? Finish the bulk or the cut and then just maintain your size, but let's be honest, we screw this up all the time. If we all got it right, the diet industry would be shut down in a matter of years...

Whether you are losing weight or trying to gain, your post-diet is just as important as your diet!

If you just finished your diet:

Coming back from a diet can be tricky because there are so many variations and more possibilities than I can ever address.  Some diets require lowering of calories, others, the elimination of macros, and some changing the time period when you eat. Since the ultimate goal at the end of your diet should be to establish a sustainable eating style that maintains your weight, the important principle must be achieving a maintenance level of eating that matches your level of activity.

The largest of these principles is the SLOW recovery to maintenance. Whether you ate low calorie, low carb, or fasted, the diet effected your body's metabolism and hormones. Depending on how long the diet period lasted could have tremendous impact on how long the road back to maintenance will take.

You may be asking yourself "Why can't I just go back to my regular eating?" Your body seeks homeostasis, with weight, fat levels, etc. Simply, as you reduce calories to lose weight, your body is smart enough to slow metabolism and adjust hormones to maintain the current levels. In short, the gradual recovery will allow your body to recover it's metabolic rate, readjust hormones, balance gut bacteria, and set you up for sustaining the weight you worked so hard to achieve.

So how do we perform a slow recovery? Time for everybody's favorite answer, "It depends."

I was eating at a small deficit, how do I get back to full portions?

The answer is patience. If you were on a low calorie diet, recovering is just a matter of increasing our calories weekly until we reach maintenance. This has become wildly popular under the name of "Reverse Dieting" and can be found in books, websites, and even web software. One of the best books for explaining the concept is Reverse Dieting by Sohee Lee and Layne Norton. Essentially, you increase your calories weekly or bi-weekly with the idea that you will improve your metabolism and hormone profile with little to no weight gain and you will be able to return to your maintenance level calories over a period of weeks. Nobody can give you an exact time-frame, but the longer you dieted, the longer it will take to recover.

I was eating a specialized diet, can I go back to normal?

If you were on a diet like VLC, Atkins, or some other elimination style diet, your re-introduction could come with some nasty side-effects. When you remove a food type, the bacterial composition in your gut changes. With those changes come changes in how we digest and how we absorb the nutrients. Sometimes it's as simple as having a "gassy" feeling, other times it leads to diarrhea, leaky gut, or possibly worse with full out allergic reactions.

On top of the gut health issues, a diet that restricts carbohydrates tends to have an initial loss of weight associated with lost water weight. There's a lot of science behind it, but when you cut carbohydrates from the diet, the initial weight lost is primarily water, so naturally, when you reintroduce carbohydrates, the body will retain some water. A lot of people aren't prepared to see the scale rise and automatically assume it's fat. This is where a little extra time researching your diet is a worth it.

Again, the solution is slowly reintroducing the removed macronutrient WITHOUT creating a large surplus of calories. (Remember, caloric deficit = losing weight, caloric surplus = gaining weight)

What about if I want to change "Eating Styles?"

Sometimes, our diet has us changing from eating three meals a day to a modified eating plan, five meals a day, or possibly intermittent fasting. Although changes like these are typically lasting and are a way of eating for life, some people want to return to their good old three squares a day plan. Essentially nothing changes macro-wise, but you will have to fight through feelings of either being full or starving and possibly a little upset stomach if you've been avoiding morning meals. The best suggestion I have is to continue with the same calories while transitioning back to the three meals per day and then gradually increase calories if needed.

What if I did something radical and possibly stupid to lose weight?

Yup, there are STUPID ways to lose weight that will work in the short term. I do not personally recommend any of them, but people have done things like extended juice fasts, major calorie cuts (like 1/2 their intake cut), or one of the many extremist fad diets. The inherent risk with any of these diets is their effect on our metabolism, our gut bacteria, and our hormone levels. While they may accomplish the short term goal, the consequences could be long term damage, and sometimes the rebound could result in more fat gained than lost.

Of course, people will still do these diets and there needs to be some way to help them recover. Again, I believe "Reverse Dieting" is one of the better options if the extreme diet was run for only a short period (less than two weeks), but the first thing I recommend after a prolonged extreme diet is talking to a physician and allowing them to run blood tests. At the point where hormone levels are outside of the "normal" range, a medical professional will have the safest protocol to attempt to return the hormones to normal. And despite the weight loss, the safest option may be to regain weight and diet back down the right way.

If You Just Finished Your Bulk

This is a far shorter answer. Eat less! Cut the total calories by cutting back on carbs and fats. Again, the key is slowly cutting back each week until you find your maintenance levels. The one macronutrient I recommend keeping high is your protein to keep supporting that new muscle. Unlike after a diet concludes, the conclusion of a bulk allows for a much easier return to maintenance.

The Keys

1. Be Patient
2. Make Slow increases or decreases in calories, radical changes can have bad effects
3. Weigh yourself each week and add or decrease total calories until maintenance
4. Keep protein high to support your muscles
5. If you're doing it right and something isn't right, SEE YOUR DOCTOR.

A little knowledge goes a long way. Now that you've reached your goals, take it slow, recover the metabolism the right way and maintain that body you worked so hard for.

Is Your Coach Worth the Money?

There are few things that bother me as much as broad generalizations in Health & Fitness. Before you dump a lot of money into programs that might not work and get frustrated, you need to consider that no two clients are exactly alike. While a program may work similarly for 1, 2, 5, 15, or even thousands of other people, it may not work for you.

I've seen coaches employ the cookie-cutter plan in diets, eating styles, and training programs. Some coaches assign their clients a basic cookie-cutter program like Stronglifts 5x5 or other free programs that can be found online. I've heard a self-proclaimed nutrition "guru" insist every client change to a VLC Diet with a specific set of macros without concern for the previous diet experience of their client. I've worked with another coach's failed clients because he insisted their clients all switch to Intermittent Fasting without considering their background because "it worked for so many others." And the worst, I've witnessed a trainer openly admit they didn't know why "their own" program worked!

Sadly, I see people get sucked into these programs with shining testimonials and expert promotion because the "promise" is too much to ignore and "all the others that are getting results can't be wrong." And then something goes wrong; the program isn't working and the "expert trainer" doesn't know how to adapt the program to make it work. The trainer blames the client, or just falls back to "it worked for others."

Before jumping into a training program, consider the trainer, their knowledge and experience, their previous clientele, the results compared to your goals, and the methods.

If a trainer is worth paying and trusting, they can not only explain what they're doing and why it works, but they can quickly adapt if it isn't working. If a trainer has a "successful" program, but can't explain why it works, then there is a good chance they won't know how to make it work for you if you aren't one of the lucky ones. So before hiring a trainer / coach, take the time to talk with them and have any of your questions and concerns addressed. If they aren't willing to or aren't able to give answers to your satisfaction, consider going elsewhere.