You’ve been working out. You’ve been eating salads and wraps and skipping the gravy every single day - yet you get on the scale, and it either doesn’t move, or it goes up, or you just aren’t feeling like much is happening. You keep hearing that diets don’t work, yet you’re being sold fad diets. Nothing is more aggravating. I’ve certainly been there.

WHY is it so hard to lose weight? 

It’s probably because you are not in a proper calorie deficit - and when I say proper - I mean just starving yourself and being in a gigantic unsustainable deficit won’t work either. 

This is a hard reality for many to accept, because they think eating healthy foods guarantees a deficit - but it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter how nutritious your food choices are, if you are not in a calorie deficit, you won’t lose weight. Starving yourself to achieve a deficit is unsustainable. To keep the weight off forever, you need to be able to continue your new habits comfortably forever.

Why is this hard? Because it requires calculation, and some form of more closely monitoring your food intake. Is that difficult? At first yes. But putting in effort and not getting anywhere is way more difficult no? 

If you want to see efficient progress, if you want to be able to fully depend on the work you’re putting in to produce results, then closely monitoring your food intake is necessary.  

That being said, you also must examine your goal. What outcome are you trying to achieve? Some people just don’t want to monitor their food, and maybe it just doesn’t fit their lifestyle for whatever reason, and that’s okay. But the expectations have to match the behaviour. If you don’t put forth the most efficient methods, you will not get the most efficient results and you have be okay with the results being less consistent.  

The Role of Fads - fad diets tend to sugarcoat the reality of having to monitor food intake. They try to make it easier, by giving you tips and tricks that are out of context, they use words like “anti diet” we hear “diets don’t work” and we see trends like intuitive eating. We dance around the truth of how weight loss is achieved to make it seem like you won’t have to drastically change your lifestyle because that’s an easier sell.  

The truth is, numbers matter. Is it hard to keep track? Depends on what you call hard. Let me give you an example. To lose 1 lb of fat you need around a 3500 calorie deficit. Peanut butter has around 100 calories per Tbsp. Let’s say you eat a peanut butter sandwich every day, and you don’t know how much peanut butter you are using. Maybe you’re using 2 Tbsps. That’s 1400 calories a week in peanut butter alone when you probably would have still enjoyed your sandwiches with just 1 measured tablespoon - and you’d cut your peanut butter calories in half. Wouldn’t “hard” be staying stagnant all because of peanut butter? Wouldn’t “hard” be skipping peanut butter and other foods you like in a hopeful (not guaranteed) attempt to eat less? If you kept track, you could have still enjoyed the peanut butter while making progress! Is it more work? Well, yeah. But you gotta choose your hard. 

So how can you figure out how much YOU need to eat to support your goals and activity level? First you need to find your TDEE, or Total Daily Energy Expenditure.  This number represents the number of calories that you need.  You can use this calorie calculator to calculate your TDEE, and adjust the calculation to whether you want to lose, maintain, or gain weight. 

You can also set your macronutrient ratios using this calculator. 

Now that you have this number, there are different methods of staying within this limit. I use MyFitSuite to track my calories and macros. I have found this to be the easiest and most flexible method as you can track as you go.  

If you don't want to track using an app you can follow low calorie recipes, follow a meal plan, or have a coach guide you.  Either way, tracking on some level needs to come into play if you want consistent results.  It's not a matter of it being "hard" it's just a matter of knowing what to do, and doing it. 

Coach Zoe

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