Six Things Nobody Tells You About Dieting Down
At some point or another, you’ve probably tried to lose weight. Nearly everybody has. Sadly, of the people who do embark on a diet, most of them fail. Of the people who succeed in getting the weight off, most of them will gain it back within a year. One of the reasons that people fail to lose weight long-term is that they don’t know what it involves or some of the hurdles they’ll have to clear. They then meet these challenges, think it’s a sign of failure, and then give up. To avoid joining the horde of people who don’t succeed, here are some things that nobody tells you about dieting for fat loss.
Your weight is going to fluctuate…a lot. Depending on how much you’ve had to eat, whether or not you’ve heeded nature’s call, how hydrated you are, or some combination of all of the above, your weight can vary by up to five pounds from day to day. That’s a lot. After days or weeks of doing everything you’re supposed to, you may step onto the scale and find that you’ve “gained” weight. This can cause you serious frustration if you don’t know about it. Aside from being aware of it, what can you do? To start, I recommend to all my clients that you weight yourself at the same time of day, on the same scale, and in the same condition (ideally, just woke up, peed and pooped already, but haven’t eaten or drunk water yet.) This takes away as many of those variables as possible. Yes, you’ll still see variation due to all the things listed above. But it won’t be anywhere near as big. Second, don’t worry about the variation from day to day. Instead, see what your average weight is for the week. If the average is less than it was the previous week, you’re doing fine despite what any given day says.
There will be times of slower progress, plateau, and regression. You’ve been doing all the right things. Then, all of a sudden, this week you’re not down from last week. You’re the same or maybe even up. What happened? Is the whole thing now a giant failure. Not at all. The truth is it could come down to any number of things. Maybe you were slightly less active. Maybe you went out to eat and the restaurants used more oil than you thought. Maybe you’ve been stressed and therefore your metabolism was reduced. Maybe you just weren’t as active as you normally are. It’s impossible to take every single factor into account and calculate it. So what can you do about that? Sadly, the only thing you can do, apart from manage what you actually can manage (food intake, daily activity, stress levels,) is to just accept it as part of the game. Our metabolisms are so complicated that people who have Ph.Ds in this stuff still don’t know exactly how everything works. I mean, we don’t even know why muscles grow (though we do know what to do to make them grow.) The human body is such a complicated thing and our environments are even more complicated. Sometimes things just don’t go as planned and you have to keep forging ahead.
No matter how good it is, it’ll suck sooner or later. There will be times where you don’t want to do it anymore. No matter what diet you go with, you will have to give some things up. This is just the way it goes. The trick is to figure out the things that you’re willing to give up, the boundaries you’re willing to live within, the compromises you’re willing to make. Diets are tools and need to fit the person, not the other way around. No matter how great a diet is, if you can’t make it fit your life well enough, then it’s going to fail because you’ll quit. Even if you find the best diet for your life, you’re still going to suffer somewhat because you’re intentionally starving and your body doesn’t like that. You’re fighting millions of years of evolution. When you do that, no matter what tricks you play on your body, sooner or later it’s going to be hard. This is normal. Find strategies that make it less onerous and don’t be afraid to take a diet break once in a while. Just don’t give up.
You’re never finished. People often think that a diet is something you do to achieve some goal, then immediately throw out and go back to doing what you were doing before. But let me ask you this: if you go back to what you were doing before, won’t you go back to the way you were before? This is part of why so many people who lose the weight gain it back. They don’t think about what the diet will be after the diet. They eat really well until they lose the weight, then go back to fast food and sitting on their butts all day. Maybe it’s time to stop thinking of the whole thing as “being on a diet” and start thinking of it as “your diet” in the sense of “what you eat on a regular basis.” In other words, it’s no longer a thing you do for now. It’s changing how you live your life. If you focus on building good habits to last a lifetime, then the weight will stay off way more easily than if you just make short-term radical changes then return to your old ways.
Sometimes you have to diet up to diet down. What this means is that after a certain amount of time, you’ll need to eat more so you can lose weight. This sounds like sorcery or a bad joke, but it’s not. The truth is that after a certain amount of time, you and your body are tired of being in a deprived state. You yourself get sick of tracking all your food, not being able to eat this or that, and are psychologically worn out from being half-starved for weeks on end. Your body adapts to being in a low calorie state and you have to play increasingly extreme tricks on it to drop more weight. After all, it thinks you’re in a famine and is trying to protect you. The solution then is to add food, not subtract. This is part of why bodybuilders have bulking and cutting phases. It puts on muscle that you lost when dieting down, makes you feel like a human again, and lets your body adapt to higher calories so that when you cut them again, it’ll respond and you’ll lose weight.
There are no magic foods or protocols or supplements. It all comes down to calories in versus calories out. I’ve probably said it a thousand times by now, but that’s the truth. If you’re not burning more than you eat, you won’t lose weight. It’s that simple. Everything we do, all the tricks we play, all the protocols you follow, and all the supplements you take are designed to manipulate one or more sides of that equation. Anybody who tells you that you can eat more than you burn in a day and still lose weight is wrong and almost certainly trying to sell you something.
It’s a shame that most people don’t know any of this before they enter the wild world of weight loss. If you’re going to start taking steps to drop some body fat, it’d be a good idea to keep these things in mind. This way, when you stumble upon any of them, you have a good idea of what to do. At the very least, you won’t be surprised by them.
