In part 1, you learned the top 5 most common weight loss tactics people use to lose weight that often end up backfiring. Let's dig a little dipper into five more issues I see when it comes to sustainable and long-term weight loss.
6. You don’t have enough muscle
Ladies, pay attention! Building muscle is a secret weapon for effective fat burning and achieving that toned physique. The amount of lean tissue you have is directly proportional to your metabolic rate and how many calories you burn. Resistance training is often overlooked, especially by women afraid of building “bulky” muscles. Bulkiness only occurs with the wrong workout and diet combination (more on that here: link to blog on resistance training for women). Plus, building big muscles for women is extremely difficult. It takes dedication and true discipline to do this, something the average person isn’t willing to do. Building muscle will give you that toned look and is crucial for fat burning. Not to mention, it keeps you young and prevents premature aging!
You’ve heard the expression, “use it or lose it” and this is spot on. If you tell the body that you don’t need muscle (by doing nothing), why should it keep such an energetically expensive tissue? It won’t. And what happens is you age faster and get fat. After the age of 40, testosterone levels will start to plummet, and you’ll begin feeling tired and the weight gain will start to creep up. You don’t want that. Do the resistance training, build the muscle, and you’ll stay young while building an aesthetically pleasing, toned figure.
7. Being too rigid with the numbers
Obsessing over calorie counts and rigid meal plans will disconnect you from your body's natural hunger and satiety cues. Often, people will ignore their body’s desire to eat (or not to eat) because they have a specific plan with very specific numbers to follow. The thing is, you don’t have the same exact calorie requirements every day, yet everyone is trying to follow the same number day in and day out. For women of reproductive age especially, it will depend on where you are in your cycle.
If you ignore what your body is telling you, it will fight back. It's much smarter than us. Remember, any time it senses stress or there’s maybe not enough food around, it will react accordingly and do what it needs to for your survival. Besides, do you really want to live your life tracking every calorie? I didn't think so.
8. Neglecting Micronutrients:
While macronutrients are essential, don’t neglect the micronutrients. These are the vitamins, minerals, and electrolytes that are needed to run all the metabolic processes in the body. They act as cofactors and electrical signals to carry out the thousands of reactions that occur every second. Some people think that all calories are created equal and there is no difference. Or that a “carb is a carb” and all calories are created equal. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
If your full focus is on nothing but proteins, fats, and carbs, with no regard for nutrient density, I guarantee you will run into problems later. There’s a reason why vitamins and minerals are “essential”, because the body can’t thrive without the proper amount.
To keep the metabolism humming along, you need to prioritize a nutrient-dense diet. And before you think you can take a multivitamin to “cover all your bases”, think again. Too much of a certain nutrient is not a good thing, and multivitamin formulas can easily create an imbalance in the body. I’ve heard several stories from clients where they’ve experienced weird symptoms while taking too much multi-nutrient formulas. If you need supplements, it's actually better to do it separately and based on your needs (and only) to fill in the gaps where food can’t. Food comes first and always works better than synthetic vitamins.
9) Not Sleeping Enough
This is a big one. Deep sleep is the time where you release the most growth hormone and burn the most fat. Growth hormone is an anabolic hormone that’s essential to grow, repair, and restore your body. It also stimulates and regulates fat and carbohydrate metabolism. If you’re not getting deep sleep, these processes can’t work. Not only can this make losing weight more difficult, but it will cause you to age faster because you’re not repairing and regenerating your cells.
Furthermore, your appetite-regulating hormones get disrupted when you don’t sleep. Ghrelin (the hunger hormone) goes up, while leptin (the satiety hormone) goes down. That’s why you tend to feel hungrier the next day when you don’t get enough sleep. Sleep is one of the first things I work on with my clients.
10) Copying someone else’s eating plan
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because something worked for someone else, it will work for you too. Everyone has a different metabolic starting point. Athletes, fitness influencers, and nutritionists are all over the internet sharing what they do or what they “eat in a day”. Don’t copy this. Their metabolic starting point is likely very different than yours. And it's very likely that most of them have much more lean tissue (muscle mass) than the average person. This means not only do they have different dietary requirements, but also a huge leverage to eat certain things that you may not be able to.
Remember, diet is dependent on a persons’ lifestyle, activity levels, lean body mass versus fat mass ratio, sleep quality, light exposure, history of dieting, medical conditions, and more. Even if they DID have the exact same situation as you (not likely), it doesn’t mean their plan will be enjoyable or sustainable for you. If you don’t enjoy it, you won’t stick with it.
Conclusion
There you have it! I hope you can see how complex weight loss really is, and why the "calories in, calories" out method is far too simple. A comprehensive approach is the best and quite frankly, the only way to lose weight for good.