Do you want the TRUTH? The WHOLE Truth and nothing but the Truth?
Yes?
Keep reading because I am about to lay it ALL OUT for you.
You see, I am the kind of dietitian that believes in keeping it real, so take a DEEP breath and get ready to hear the real reasons you likely aren’t losing weight and learn how to turn it all around!
1. You eat too many highly processed foods.
You need to eat fewer calories to lose weight. BUT what most people forget is that not all calories are created equal.
The number of calories in a single serving ~28g of Doritos is 140 calories but is a relatively small volume of food and doesn’t fill you up.
Now let’s talk about Grapes; you will need to eat somewhere around 215g to equal the same 140 calories.
Now I don’t claim to be a Math Wizard, but I know that 215g is much bigger than 28g, so if I were starving and only had 140 calories in my budget to eat something, Grapes would give me much more bang for my buck. Grapes have fiber where Doritos do not, adding to their nutrition dominance in this case. (1)
The point is Junk food, while appropriate to eat mixed into your diet, is NOT going to help you stay full and satisfied, and when you are trying to lose weight, I always say, “You want to be able to eat AS MUCH as possible, WHILE you are losing weight.”
2. You eat hidden calories
No, I don’t mean someone is sneaking calories into your food. I mean, you are making choices you THINK are better for you, but you are mistaken.
For example, Agave sugar. Agave is a sugar made from the Agave plant to which marketing geniuses have gone out of their way to make sure you know it’s “better because it’s natural.” SO WHAT? It’s NOT Calorie Free!
Oh, and while I am at it, Olive oil and Avocados are also NOT calorie-free. Both are marked as healthy, but again high calorie!
Listen, it’s not entirely your fault. Marketing companies get paid MEGA MONEY to twist the truth about all kinds of food products. They take phrases like,”all-natural,” “lower cholesterol,” “healthy fat”, “low carb,” “organic”, or “plant-based” and make you think “I NEED THIS”. Or worse that the MORE you eat of these things, the more they will improve your weight or health.
Now, I am not saying these foods are unhealthy for you; I am saying they are NOT calorie-free. If you aren’t AWARE – then you are likely consuming far more calories than you think, in a sneaky way that is unassuming and makes you frustrated at the scale!
This slight change can take you from thinking, “Why am I not losing weight in a calorie deficit?” to “Oh, I am not in a calorie deficit, dang!”
3. You severely overestimate your activity level
I can hear you now, inside your head, you’re thinking, me? I know how many calories I burn! I have a fitness tracker.
If you did, and you knew how many you were taking in, why aren’t you losing weight?
Right, let’s keep reading.
So the thing about fitness trackers is that they are GREAT, IMO. But they are not perfect and here’s why.
I had 1 client using her Apple watch and she was crushing her activity goals. She and I are very much alike but I couldn’t understand why she was so far ahead on her activity from me?
I mean, of course, she could be way more active than me. But we are talking like 400+ calories more than me per day and I was averaging ~800calories a day on my Red ring.
I asked her to take a look at her Apple Health information so I could make sure everything was adding up.
Sure enough, her watch information was somehow connected to her husband’s data. This means the watch was calculating her activity like her husband, not her.
So it was reading her exercise as a man who weighs more and is taller as well.
This presented her with False information. But the good news was we caught it, and we had the information to look at in the first place, so we could adjust and move on.
Imagine if we didn’t have any information to judge?
So I ask you, how can you measure progress without anything to measure it by?
Even though fitness trackers are not perfect, if used the right way, they can help you learn so much about yourself.
They work even better when you have someone to read them and analyze them with you. (😉)
4. You restrict Mon-Fri and BINGE over the weekends, On REPEAT!
How many times have you said to yourself, “I have been SO GOOD, I deserve a Cheat Meal”?
The situation is always the same; Monday – Friday (by lunch usually), you have all your meals planned out. All calculated you have all five days of boot camp classes scheduled, and you are ready to CRUSH it this week to reach your weight loss goals.
But then… Friday at 5 pm, your friend invites you to a happy hour, and you want to be social, so you go. It’s at that moment you decide, I’ve been SO GOOD, I deserve to eat what I want for this meal, its no big deal.” (3)
And usually, it isn’t.
But instead, you wake up the following day feeling less than stellar and say to yourself, “Ugh, well, I messed up my diet last night, might as well eat what I want this weekend and get back to it on Monday.” Sound familiar? This cycle repeats OVER and OVER, and you never make any real progress. Frustration builds, and you are left pissed off 😡without any answers.
5. It’s a combo of 1&2
So with issue #1, you are eating less nutritious and filling foods, unaware of the calories in those choices. And in #2, you are also continuing to drive the unaware bus 🚌, believing marketing and ads as your best resource for health information and not paying any attention to calories and portions and actual nutrition facts.
Yes, you are NOT AWARE of what you are consuming at all in a nutshell. The calories, servings, nutrition, and filling aspect are critical mistakes you cannot skip, especially in the beginning stages of your weight loss journey. Not to mention is it food you enjoy eating?
If you are reading this and are the type of person who wants a “meal plan,” I’ve got news for you, that is not how you lose weight for life. Sure it might work for a few weeks because you are in a caloric deficit, duh. BUT what you aren’t doing enough of is making it work for you and learning in the process.
Understanding how much you need to eat, how much activity you need to do, and how to incorporate foods you enjoy into your diet while learning more about how you feel and the progress you are making is critical to long-term success.
If you follow diets as they are and do not take into account how well they fit YOU and how to work within the long term while you live your life, then you will never keep up with them, you will lose weight, gain it back and feel like a failure because you will be blaming yourself for not being able to stick to the diet.
Now that you know, this is how do you turn all of this around!
First, I am so glad that you are still reading this, which tells me that you are likely feeling one or more of those reasons hit home, so let’s learn about my three key pillars of weight loss to change all of that!
Get some AWARENESS – start tracking your intake, activity, and progress. Use a free app like My Fitness Pal, or Lose IT to track your intake. Use a fitness tracker like an Apple Watch, FitBit, or Whoop (to name a few), and let’s start unblindfolding you.
Start Habit Stacking – Say what? You likely know what a Habit is, but the magical working part of habits only works IF you keep up with them! So start with something EASY, like the absolute most straightforward thing you can do, and start keeping track of that.
For example, combine your AWARENESS piece and use your fitness tracker to help with this. Say you know you have time to go for a walk every day; you need to do it. So plan out a time of day that works best for you, put it in your calendar, and do the damn thing. Let your fitness tracker keep track and assess how well you did at the end of each week.
Looking back at your tracker, maybe you see that you planned to walk daily at 12:30 5xweek, and your tracker only reports that you achieved this 3x this week.
Next, gain a Curious Mindset! Ok, so this is where the REAL magic happens. So you look at your tracker, you accomplished three days of your 1st easy habit. Now you can feel like a failure because you didn’t hit your 5x goal. Well, you can feel like a failure, or you can get Curious and look at the week to say, ok 3x is good; why didn’t I get 5 in? OH, that’s right, I had a work meeting coming up, and one day it was raining. So now you can decide that you are not a failure; you need to adjust your schedule when things like this come up.
Repeat those thoughts on everything you do and build that mental toughness and resilience like a boss!
Losing weight doesn’t have to be complicated. If you aren’t AWARE of what you are doing, and don’t create HABITS that stick so you can stack on them to make more, and look at each mishap as a failure rather than a learning opportunity having a Curious Mindset. You will always be setting yourself up for failure instead of success! So what do you think?
If you are curious how I coach women to master these 3 Pillars of weight loss, then jump onto my Learn Lose and Live – Sustainable Weight Loss for Women WAITLIST. I take you 12 weeks of actionable steps to eliminate the guesswork of dieting on your own. Learn how to confidently eat foods you love without worrying about the scale going up and why sometimes MORE isn’t always better when it comes to exercise and weight loss.
Let’s get to know each other better and see if I am the one you want to work with. I am not “for everyone” I demand a BIG commitment and investment into yourself. If you want someone who is just going to tell you what to do and not account for you as an individual, don’t bother. Go back to being miserable eating foods you hate and wondering why you can’t lose weight☹️.
Resources
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5797995/
- https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2017/05/fitness-trackers-accurately-measure-heart-rate-but-not-calories-burned.html
- https://mainlinenutrition.org/disordered-eating/the-restrict-binge-cycle/#:~:text=You%20may%20have%20experienced%20the%20restrict%2Dbinge%20cycle.&text=Sometimes%20this%20drive%20to%20eat,to%20restrict%20your%20food%20intake.
