What’s the big secret to losing weight?

Time and time again when anyone has seen my own weight loss transformation photos I get exactly the same question, “how did you do it?” then I watch as their eyes widen in anticipation as I’m about to reveal some well kept hidden secret reserved only for a select few or members of the illuminati. Then as I tell them my daily diet, how much exercise I put in, the meal preps, what time I would get out of bed to exercise so I could get to my part time job for an hour before starting my full time job, I watch their interest fade, or they zone out, almost like they’re annoyed that I won’t give up the name of the secret pill manufactured in some underground warehouse that would help the fat melt away.

The most irritating thing to me about this response, is that most people I talk to have lost weight at some point in their lives, even if they only stuck to their diet for a few days, surely they lost pound? In that case they already know how to lose weight, they just don’t know the big SECRET to losing a lot of weight… CONSISTENCY. Now I know a lot of people reading this will have zoned out, because that’s just the usual response isn’t it? But if you stick with it, and keep going right until the end, you might learn something, or lose more weight, if you see this as more of an analogy.

Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar, you’ll book a holiday and get a sudden bout of motivation and you’ll decide that your diet starts on Monday, well Monday is only 3 days away so you have to enjoy your last weekend of freedom! So a banquet fit for Henry VIII starts as well as enough wine and gin to take down a small village. But that’s it, it’s out of your system! Monday is here, you cut your calories to 1200 a day, and in the first week of your diet you drop a stone. The first thing you do is run straight to Facebook, announce it everywhere and your friends ask all the same questions that I got asked before, only you’ll answer with the fact you practically starved yourself for 5 days on an unmaintainable about of food, but who cares if you’re starving, you lost a stone didn’t you? Well unfortunately the answer is no as well, you just got weighed on the first day after practically force feeding yourself for an entire weekend, and the food contained that much salt the water that your body was holding went through the roof, then of course the ‘diet’ started, you lost that water, as well as maybe an extra couple of pounds of fat from eating less, and the weight loss is therefore exaggerated. Well you’ve done that well in your first week you treat yourself, the feeding frenzy starts again for the weekend, and on Monday the weight is back, as well as the water weight and 0 progress has been made. Repeat this cycle until the time of your holiday and you look exactly the same as when you booked it. Or perhaps not losing weight after starving yourself has killed your motivation so you just give up all together. Either way the results remain the same.

“So tell me Aaron, what should I do???” I hear you cry! Well I’m not saying I’m the fountain of knowledge, but I have been at this a while, and when my clients are consistent and stick to my advice or plans that I lay out, then I get results every time. So here’s my advice, firstly find a calorie calculator online, put in your height and weight as always, and when it asks you how active you are, be honest with yourself, I know you probably think you do a lot “because you’re on your feet all day”, but very active is an elite level athlete, or someone who carries a ton of building materials 8 hours a day, THEN goes to gym, all whilst biking to where they want to go, sedentary is an office job who doesn’t exercise, if you hit 10000 steps and do a gym class, that’s moderate. Trust me, you don’t exercise nearly as much as you think, and exercise doesn’t make as much difference as you’d like to hope it does either, hence the saying, you can’t outrun a bad diet. Your 5km run might have burned 500 calories, but 2 slices of pizza on a weekend will cancel that run out in the 2 minutes it took to eat them. Extend this bit of advice to when you count calories, don’t start adding calories to the amount you’re allowed because you’ve done exercise, tracking the amount of calories you burn is EXTREMELY unreliable, chances are the guestimate from your smart watch is way over.

The website usually gives a few options here such as maintain weight all the way to extreme weight loss, always choose the mildest option, play the long game with weight loss and make it into more of a lifestyle change. Get out of this starve yourself 4 days and binge for 3 mentality, it is unsustainable. Also, forget this idea that you can drop a stone in a week, or even 2 weeks, you should aim for a 1 to 2 pound weight loss in a week, every week.

So you have your calories, now find a calorie counting app and track EVERYTHING! The odd biscuit every day is still 560 calories a week, so there’s one of your 5ks out the window again. “But it’s too much messing about to keep adding everything on my phone”, most apps have a bar code scanner, so the total time spent on your phone in a day is about the same amount of time you’ll spend reading through takeaway menus on just eat. Finally, in regards to tracking calories anyway, alcohol does count, sorry to be the one to drop that truth bomb on you, track that as well.

Now it’s unreasonable to expect you to be perfect until the rest of time, and we all want a treat sometimes as well, and you can! But… yes you guessed it, TRACK IT! And if you go a bit crazy and you do write the day off, don’t start again on Monday, don’t starve yourself the next day to try and balance things out, get back into your routine and be consistent! If you find yourself feeling tired and sluggish, it’s not because you aren’t eating enough, it’s your food choices or not drinking enough water, you wouldn’t put cheap petrol in a Ferrari and expect it to perform at its best, and your body is much more valuable than a Ferrari.

Follow all this advice and a month down the line you’ll find the weight loss might slow down, well then there’s another step to take. The original calculation was for your original weight, and seeing as though you’re less now, you’ll need to calculate again.

It’s not rocket science, it’s not magic, and it’s not some secret everybody is hiding from you, its consistency. It’s for your health and well-being as well as wanting to look good on the beach, it’s worth putting the time in if it helps to make a difference.

Finally the last piece of advice I want to end this blog with Is, I know your friend eats loads and doesn’t put on a pound whilst you look at a pizza and a button pops off your top, I’ve made this same excuse, we aren’t special, we’re either lazy or greedy, or both, consistently. Whilst your friend with the magic metabolism is telling you about her bad days, but majority of the time, consumes her maintenance amount of calories, so they aren’t special either. If you don’t believe me… TRY IT, what have you got to lose, the majority of you have “tried everything else” anyway.

Aaron

P.S. You aren’t holding on to fat because of ‘starvation mode’, you’re holding on to fat because you aren’t in a calorie deficit, simple as that, people who have starved to death don’t die fat for a reason.