Obesity (42.4%) and Overweight (73.6%) is growing each year in the U.S. Prior to year 2000, CDC estimated that by 2020, overweight population will be over 60% and by 2018, the U.S. has passed 70% easily. Clearly, something is not working the way it should.
What is not working is all of the fitness and nutritional advice and concepts along with advertisement of food and beverage industry pulling people away from healthy eating habits.
What is also not working is the way people are approaching diet and exercise. This can be fault of those fitness gurus coming up with phrases or information that can be misleading. However, in many situation, people get off from the program way too soon because of their expectations are too high.
What you are about to read is something that I have been seeing and what change people should be making so that they can see a weight changes. Some of these information are common sense and some may be controversial. My hope is to help you rethink of what you are currently doing. If what you are doing is working, keep doing it.
Exercise Is Important
I do appreciate the mindset of "weight loss is 80% diet". Majority of the population do have poor eating habits and poor food choices. There is no argument that nutrition is very important part of losing weight.
However, I do not like how they worded because this sounds like exercise are less important. Both diet and exercise are equally important and mindset should not be 80% nutrition, 20% exercise. Mindset always should be 100% nutrition and 100% exercise because both has to work together to get a optimum weight loss results. Which means, you have to exercise. People who are advising 80% nutrition, usually already have descent exercise routines.
Make sure to have 250 minutes of exercise time per week for weight loss. Ideally mixture between strength training and conditioning for ideal results. Precaution! If you are in the gym for 3 hours but socializing 3 hours and not exercising, that does not count.
Too Much Calories and Not Enough Physical Activity
Although it is not just calorie in and calorie out, however, if you are eating more than what your body need (not want) then it will be difficult to lose weight. Yes, you will need to control your hormone, like insulin, to enhance the fat loss but you will need to cut down unnecessary calories and move more, which I will cover more below.
When you choose a natural food source, it is difficult to consume too much calories since you will be stuffed with less portion compared to eating more of processed food.
For exercising, according to American College of Sports Medicine, you should be exercising at least 250 minutes per week for weight loss and ideally with strength and conditioning training. 250 minutes is not only at the gym but also hiking, kayaking, recreational sports and so on. If you are working out 3 times a week for an hour a day, you are already working out 180 minutes. If you are walking additional 20 minutes extra for 5 days 250 minutes is cleared.
Create a habit of using what you have eaten.
Consuming Food Too Frequent
On average, the U.S. population consume 6 meals per day including snacks. Because of bodybuilding becoming popular, many trainers are advising their clients to eat more frequently with less portion each meal. If you are looking to gain weight, this is a great strategy. However, terrible with weight loss. When you eat, insulin will spike. When insulin spike, the body will be in storing mode and will not be able to use stored energy, also known as fat.
Check your eating frequency. If you are in 4-11 meals per day category, and working towards losing body fat, you will need to cut down to 2-3 meals per day including snacking. Ghrelin, "the hunger hormone", may alert you initially, but will taper down in about 14 days so ignore them.
Cheat Meal Too Early And Too Frequent
While on weight loss, people look forward for cheat days. I used to suggested people should have 1 cheat day for feeling sorry for being missing their ice cream. I was wrong. Reason I was wrong is because insulin resistance need to be improved and takes about 12 weeks to stabilize our insulin sensitivity.
This 12 weeks is from my experience with my clients and not from any studies. However, for those who are on weight loss program and have frequent cheat meal, even just a cookie, ice cream, or cake, can set themselves back to insulin resistance and will be almost impossible to see any weight loss.
At least for first 12 weeks in your weight loss, you should not have any cheat meal. Even after 12 weeks, you shouldn't cheat more than once every two weeks until you are seeing consistent weight declines.
Setting a Weight Loss Goal Too High
You should be setting your weight loss goal according to what weight you should be at. There is no issue there.
Problem is people have tendency to set the monthly weight loss goal way too high because some celebrity was able to lose 50lb in a month and discourage because they cannot attain it. If you have been struggling with weight loss, start from 1lb weight loss per week.
Most likely, because of insulin resistance, the body does not know how to utilize fat as energy source and may take some time to get this process going. First step to weight or fat loss is to create a habit of proper nutrition and ideal duration (150 min/wk.) of physical activities.
Poor Sleeping Habit
We are the only species that deliberately deprive sleep and 1 out of 2 people in the U.S are sleep deprived.
Have you ever had a situation where you need to eat something when you are awake, for whatever reason, late at night? The hunger hormone, ghrelin kicks-in in a high gear thinking that you are in starvation mode because you are forcing yourself to stay awake. And usually, choice of food during this time is not very good.
If you are sleeping less than 6 hours, you need to fix your sleeping habit, not just for weight loss purpose but for your overall health. Set a schedule for bed time and awakening time and follow the schedule as much as possible. Room temperature should be below 65F for better quality of sleep. Work on shutting down ALL of electronics at least 60 minutes prior to bedtime.
There is a reason for everything. Even when you are losing weight or not losing weight, there is a reason. Above 6 points are some of the common errors that I see in people. And For those who are seeing results they are on top of these 6 points. Start fixing these 6 points and stick with it for at least 12 weeks.
Kota Shimada
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