10 Things No One Advertises About Weight Loss

There are a lot of factors that go in to weight loss. There are just as many emotional and mental aspects to your journey as there are physical. As someone who’s dealt with her own weight loss battles over the years, and as a nutrition coach I’ve learned a lot. Most of that isn’t projected over social media or by the nutrition industry because, well, it’s just not glamorous enough and it doesn’t bring in the big bucks. These are 10 weight loss realities that no on advertises, but that you should know.

No Matter How Strict You Are, It’s Not A Linear Process

You make a change > your body adapts > you make another change > your body adapts again > repeat cycle.

Have you ever stepped on the scale one day and find that you’ve gained two pounds, somehow, overnight? We all have. But it’s a serious cause of stress and shame for a lot of women.

Below is a graph of one of my clients’ weight loss progress over the last couple of months. We’ve been working together for longer but it’s important to see this little piece of the overall picture. She’s a rock star. She puts in work, takes on every challenge with excitement and commitment and she’s 100% reaping the benefits of her hard work.

It is perfectly normal for your weight to fluctuate form day to day. The bigger picture, and bigger point, is that overall she’s seeing a downward trend. All the scale can tell you is how much you, as a whole, weigh. That number varies depending on whether or not there is food in your stomach, how much water you’ve drank during the day, how much water your body is retaining due to sodium/carbs/stress, where you are in your menstrual cycle, how dense your bones are, etc.

Your body changes – builds muscle, loses fat, gets stronger – as a response to the challenges it faces. Lifting weights, going for a hilly run, and asking your body to function at a high level while in a caloric deficit are examples of the kinds of challenges that will help you lose weight. When you increase the intensity of that challenge your body responds by adapting and you see change. Eventually, your body has adapted so well that it doesn’t need to use extra effort/calories to do the same job. That’s when you experience a plateau. To see more change, you need to increase the challenge again. It’s an on going cycle that promises that you can see progress in some form forever.

No One Can Predict Where You Will Lose Weight

Fat is does not pick and choose where it vanishes from first. When you lose weight, your body breaks down fat cells in your body for extra energy. The more work you do, the more fat cells breakdown. Your body doesn’t care where those cells come from. It doesn’t care if that fat cell is in your butt, your under arm or your belly. The only thing that matters to your body is getting that fuel from somewhere.

Everyone carries fat differently on their body. You might carry more weight around your midsection, your thighs and hips, your butt…Where you store fat is really dependent on your genetics, sex, age, your lifestyle, exercise history and current routine and the types of foods you eat. And just as you can’t predict where your body will store fat, you can’t predict where it will come off first.

This is part of the reason it’s so important to include resistance training as part of your weight loss routine. Resistance/strength training builds muscle. Not only is muscle more metabolically active than fat, it’s has more shape than fat. Muscle will shape and define your body as the weight comes off.

You Can Overeat Healthy Food

While yes, it’s absolutely better for your body to choose the avocado over the Snickers Bar, you can still overeat healthy foods. The math is simple. If you you want to lose weight and your calorie goal is 1600 calories a day, that’s 6.83 avocados.

I know what you are thinking: who eats that many avocados? First of all I’m willing to bet that someone, somewhere, eats that many avocados. The bigger point is that while avocados are packed with heart-healthy fats, vitamins and minerals and they are for sure a healthy food, you can still over do it.

I tell my clients that they have free reign when it comes to certain foods, like vinegars, herbs, and dried spices. I even give them the go ahead to eat as many non-starchy veggies as possible because let’s be real, it’s pretty damn hard for the average person to overheat say, spinach.

But for everything else we use portion control. There’s a healthy portion of peanut butter and there’s over doing it. There’s a healthy portion of salmon and there’s an enough-is-enough portion. Quite frankly, there is a healthy portion of apple pie (mentally and emotionally speaking that is), too!

What Works Now Might Not Work Down the Line

If you have a fitness goal of any kind, you will see results only as a result of adaptation. The idea that you have to change up your workouts to continue to see progress is literally built in to how progress works. I’ll show you…

First you set a goal. Next you come up with a program designed specifically for you to reach that goal. You follow the sets, reps and exercises precisely. At first, you’ll see results (and if you’re new to exercise, you’ll probably see them quickly) because your body is striving to grow and adapt to meet the challenge you’ve presented it with. Eventually your body will grow and adapt enough that it becomes really quite efficient at that workout/workout program. You stop seeing the results you used to see, because your body no longer has to work as hard to meet the same challenge.

It’s at this point that you know: it’s time to make a change. In order to continue to see results, you have to introduce a new challenge. You have to force your body to continue to adapt, and grow.

If you’re stuck in this kind of plateau right now and need guidance or support to push forward to the next level, let me know! I’ve helped moms, career women, brides-to-be and servicewomen push past those frustrating plateaus and reach the next level of their fitness dreams!

It’s Simple, But It’s Also Complicated

Calories in vs. calories out. If you burn more calories than you consume you will lose weight. It’s simple, scientific fact. But what’s simple math in a lab doesn’t always translate to simplicity in life.

You’re body is more complex than simple math. There are external and internal factors that play a role in just how many calories you are actually intaking and using. Factors like:

• The nutrient density of the foods you eat.
• Your macro nutrient profile.
• When you eat meals and specific foods.
• How your body digests the food you eat.
• Stress levels.
• Sleep quality.
• Your body type.
• Your age/genetics/sex.
• Body size.
• Exercise regiment past and present.
• The quality of soil/feed your food ate all its life.

You see, there is so much more to YOU than there is to a kcal calculated in a lab. Don’t get frustrated, get help!

You Won’t Automatically Feel More Confident

This is a tough one but I’m going to spill the truth: losing weight will not automatically make you more confident in your own skin. With the right coach, the process of losing weight can ABSOLUTELY make you feel more confident. But that’s not so much about weight lost as it is about realizing your worth the pride just the way you are.

Weight loss is not a magic prescription. It changes the way you look on the outside but that doesn’t guarantee that you will feel different on the inside. There is always going to be a next goal. There is always going to be more that you want to do. It’s a complicated cycle with plenty of doubt and self-critique. But if you approach it with the right mindset, you can build self-love and confidence along the way.

Here’s what I do, and what I suggest my clients do, to make sure that we aren’t beating ourselves up but instead are building ourselves ever stronger and happier.

Create self-awareness. It might be tough at first. Tough to figure out how, tough to not be too critical, tough to be truly honest with yourself. But once you do I promise, you’ll find that you have plenty to be self-confident about now. And you can continue to build on that.

Build a solid and loving support network. Friends, family, coaches, mentors, women you get to know in a Facebook group… A lot of the women who join my community are surprised (and then surprised they are surprised), to find so many women going through very similar journeys.

Finally, find something about your weight loss journey that has nothing to do with weight loss. There is so much good that comes from reaching and maintaining a healthy weight. You have more energy. You sleep better. You have a better sex life. It’s amazing what you’ll find when you stop looking to the scale for a measure of self.

You’re In It For Life

The journey doesn’t end when you reach your goal weight or build your dream body. In fact, a lot of people find it harder to maintain than they do to lose. And if you’re serious about living a healthy lifestyle, that’s a lifelong journey, not a destination.

Knowing why you want what you want, whatever that might be, is a huge motivator. We often talk about our fitness goals in terms of numbers on the scale and pounds shed but the reality is that every single one of us has a deeper meaning. Ask yourself why. Why do you want to lose 20 pounds? Why do you want to run a 10k? Keep asking why until there are no more whys to ask. That’s what keeps you going for life.

You Can’t Spot Reduce But You Can Change Your Body Shape

Exercise increases general weight loss. But spot reduction – the idea that by working a specific area of the body you can melt fat from that exact spot – isn’t possible. Doing more sit ups will not melt the fat off of your abs. You could do glute kickbacks and leg curls for days and that won’t guarantee fat loss in your lower half.

Instead of focusing on spot training for fat loss, shift your routine towards a full body workout. Total body training builds muscle all over the body. That lean muscle mass boosts your metabolism which improves overall weight loss.

You Might Need to Eat More to Lose Weight

Increasing your calorie intake can feel like a counterintuitive, and sometimes even scary, strategy to lose weight but if you’ve been following a strict diet for years, this might be the exact strategy your body needs to kickstart weight loss. Chronic dieters often find that after years of restriction it’s actually harder to drop fat than it used to be. Why?

Your body is a magical machine. Starvation has been one of the leading causes of death for most of human existence. In order to survive, the human body learned to adapt to whatever energy is available. A surplus of food triggers your body to store energy for later, when there might not be as much. A lack of food triggers your body to burn stored energy for fuel, but it also triggers your body to slow basic processes down so that you don’t use energy where it isn’t needed for survival.

Those basic processes? That’s what makes up your metabolism.

Read: Weight Loss and Metabolism (it’s not what you think).

So if you’ve adhered to a strict deficit for years and years, you can be sure that your metabolism has adjusted in order to survive on the bare minimum. What that means is that you actually need to go through a period of eating more, or reverse dieting, to boost your metabolism and jumpstart weight loss again.

Weight Loss Is Not Sustainable Unless You Take a Total Wellness Approach

Trying to lose weight without taking things like sleep, stress, hormone health and gut health into account is like trying write a book but only learning A, B, C and D. You might be able to make a short success of it, but it just doesn’t have the same strength to it.

You cannot unravel the importance of one aspect of health from another. They are like puzzle pieces. Without all of them, you know what it’s all supposed to look like but it’s never quite finished.

Eating healthy, nutrient dense food gives you the energy to workout. Working out builds muscle with that fuel, boosts your metabolism and tires you out. Because you’re body is tired your sleep quality improves. When you get more sleep your muscles have time to recover, your hormones stabilize and you’re better equipped to handle stress. Less stress and better rest means you won’t be as inclined to stress eat or reach for crappy carbs for energy so you have the focus and motivation to eat healthy. The cycle continues.