I see a lot of people trying to lose weight who are following very restrictive diets because they think that’s the only way.
And I see a lot of people avoiding even attempting to lose weight because they think they have to give up all the indulgences they love entirely.
In my personal quest to get down to 10% or lower body fat and experience having my dream 6-pack abs, I hired a fitness nutrition coach during the summer of 2019 to help me dial things in.
He did give me a lot of helpful things, including:
-getting me to get an Apple Watch to track workouts and TDEE (total daily energy expenditure aka how many calories you burn each day) and that’s been a complete game-changer for my workouts, being active throughout the day, and dialing in how much I need to eat every day depending on my current goals.
-better protein for muscle-building (whey-isolate that is fast-digesting and doesn’t bother my somewhat dairy-sensitive stomach…I now started a regimen where I switch to casein protein before bed, but that’s a story for another time)
-he got me doing regular cardio, which is great for your heart, and can be a helpful weight-loss supllement to a solid strength-training program
…and getting me on the healthiest diet I’ve ever eaten. I felt better than I had in a long time, even while eating at a caloric deficit (eating fewer calories than I burn) to lose more fat. He also had me eating lots of carbs…gasp! I know. More on that later.
It’s a diet I still use as my base half a year later, and while I’m now in the midst of a lean bulk to gain muscle while minimizing fat gain.
The problem is that he was crazy restrictive. He didn’t want me going off the meal plan at all, much less for indulgent food or drink. He tried to shame me out of having a damn piece of cake at a wedding, and he told me that I was slowing my progress down when I had a few tequila sodas on the weekend, even when I logged them in my MyFitnessPal food diary and adjusted my eating to not go over on calories.
That is total bull crap. But I’ll get to that in a second.
The worst part is that he vastly overestimated how many calories I needed to lose weight, and I initially gained a little fat…and yet he still blamed my carefully-budgeted indulgences for my going backwards.
And this, my friend, is where so many go wrong and buy into fitness guru snake oil and why I’ll probably never work with anyone who’s so restrictive again.
Keto and low-carb dieting works.
Carnivore dieting works.
Paleo dieting works.
Vegan and vegetarian dieting works.
But all diets that work, work because you end up in a caloric deficit at the end of the day.
If you eat less calories than you burn (your TDEE), you’ll lose weight. If you eat more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight. All fat-loss diets that work do so because they get you into a caloric deficit, one way or another.
There is no magical, hormonal thing that makes any diet work. Again, it’s the calories and how well you adhere to its method for getting you into a calorie deficit that makes it work.
Some diets may make you feel more satiated (and healthy and happy in general) than others and be easier to adhere to, and that may be a little different for you than for me.
So, once we got the calories right, I started losing fat again…yes, even while eating 40% of my calories from carbohydrates. Carbs are great energy and very filling, too.
And I kept losing weight after my time with him ended, and after I went back to, you know, living. Indulging my foodie (and outright fat-kid-in-a-candy-store) tendencies, having a drink here and there, etc…because I tracked, logged, and budgeted it all against how many calories I was burning as carefully as I could.
As I consulted some more people in the fitness world who I respect, I decided in October that it was time to do this lean bulk I’m on now…and despite eating things like cake or pie (or other carb-y indulgences) nearly every day, my hydrostatic body fat tests indicate the ratio of muscle to fat I’ve gained has been pretty damn good so far here in January 2020. My physique shows it, too. No, I’m not quite as lean-looking right now as I was in the beginning of October, but I haven’t lost all my muscle or ab definition, either.
…Because I track my calories as closely as I can. It gives me the freedom to budget for lots of indulgences.
Hell, between Thanksgiving and New Years, I fully went off the deep end with sugar and saturated fat. I was legitimately embarrassed when a friend sent video to other friends of how I was eating over Christmas. LOL.
That was not a period of healthy eating, to say the least. And I’m not advocating it, either. And what does matter weight-wise is that if you eat enough crap and not enough quality nutrients to feel like crap, sleep like crap, and/or have crap energy, then yeah, that’s going to impact your performance at the gym and your overall ability to burn enough energy (calories) to stay in a calorie deficit. And 500 calories of low-quality nutrition isn’t going to make you feel as full as 500 calories of nutrient-dense, “clean” food. Day in and day out, that can add up.
You should also always be cutting calories from carbs or fat, NOT protein. You need protein to build muscle, to help maintain muscle while losing weight, and protein is usually very satiating.
My point, though, is that in spite of all that, I still lost weight when that was the goal, and have really limited fat gain while bulking.
Be reasonable. Eat healthy, as often as you can.
But to have your cake and eat cake, too, just learn to track and budget your calories with free online calorie estimators (or an Apple Watch) for how much you need to eat and a food-diary app like MyFitnessPal.
It’s not that hard. Though it for sure can be tedious and annoying at times.
If tracking sounds totally horrible to you, then yes, a more restrictive or simpler diet like the ones above might be easier for you to consistently get yourself into a caloric deficit.
But for me, it’s a no-brainer that some time tracking and budgeting is totally worth having the freedom to eat what I want to eat when I feel like it while steadily progressing towards my goals.
