We may never have met but if you have a weight-loss goal I understand something about you that will largely determine whether you succeed or fail.
I know that if you don’t see a significant change in the first couple weeks that you will feel frustrated and discouraged.
In fact this may very well be one of the key variables for the many that fail to reach their weight loss goals.
You can’t help it; we’re all wired for instant gratification. We want to see and feel immediate benefit from what we’re doing.
This need for immediate dramatic change is also like one of the reasons that many people fail to keep their weight off and sometimes rebound quickly gaining even more weight then they lost.
As the great Isaac Newton once said, “what goes up must come down.” The inverse can also be true when it comes to rapid weight loss.
Our approach to permanent weight loss is very different.
At first many people feel the sense of frustration because we go against traditional weight loss in almost every respect. We’ll ask you to eat more not less and additionally if the scale doesn’t move in the first couple of weeks we don’t panic, and you shouldn’t either.
Before we continue I want you to consider the following analogy.
If you tried to drive from here to Toronto without getting fuel, I guess you’d likely end up stranded in Saskatchewan. If you drove from here to Toronto and didn’t eat anything along the way your body wouldn’t die from lack of fuel like your car would.
Your body instead would adapt by consuming it’s own live tissue, it would limit production of stomach acids (limiting the ability to digest and absorb food when you next consumed some).
And if you weren’t currently ill it may limit the resources allotted for the immune system since there was no immediate threat.
Currently many people in North America are unknowingly locked in this scenario.
We’re so wrapped up in portion control and the idea that weighing less requires consuming less we fail to realize that just maybe our body has been minimizing it’s expenditure of energy for years.
It’s not difficult, when looking from this perspective, to rationalize why the instance of obesity and disease is rapidly increasing.
If you were starting a nutrition program with me I would almost assuredly ask you to eat more than you are now.
I’d also relentlessly hassle you to consume a minimum of 12 glasses of water per day.
In the first two weeks your weight might drop but if it didn’t it would be because your lean body mass would have significantly increased simply because your live tissue would be much better hydrated.
You’d find your energy levels increasing, your cravings for food lessening, and your mental and emotional clarity much improved.
In fact it’s not uncommon for people to report all of these things but then disappointingly report that the scale had only dropped by a couple pounds. This is why the scale sucks.
Just today I had a scenario exactly like this, only today was our day to not only check weight but measurements and body composition. Even though the scale only had a marginal drop, measurements showed this individual had lost nearly seven inches combined from their high waist, umbilicus and glute measures.
Additionally our body composition test revealed they had lost more than five pounds of actual body fat and had increased their basal metabolic rate by more than five per cent. This person came in discouraged, with feelings that all their hard work had been for little reward only to realize how great their progress truly was. If you’re not as impressed as I am, next time you are at the grocery store stack up five blocks of butter and consider that approximately three weeks prior my client was carrying that around on their body.
Calorically they burned off nearly 18,000 calories of fat and primed their body to burn off almost an extra half pound of fat every month even if they stopped everything they’re doing.
The moral of this story is that be careful with the scale, it’s the most inaccurate, inconsistent tool that we have. Permanent weight loss comes from understanding the body and using sustainable, enjoyable lifestyle habits to reach your weight loss goal.
Cabel McElderry is a local personal trainer and nutrition coach. For more information on fitness and nutrition, visit the Fitness F/X website at www.fitnessfx.com