Are You Making These Fat Loss Mistakes?
Losing weight is easily the number one health and fitness-related goal. The fact that we live in a world where most people carry more body fat than they need or want is a sign of fundamental issues with how our biology is interacting with the modern-day world. What compounds this fundamental problem is that there is poor guidance out there on how to lose weight.
If you have made efforts to lose body fat, change your body composition and shed the excess weight that is holding you back and failed, keep reading to find out if you’re making one (or more) of the following mistakes.
MISTAKE 1 - TOO MUCH CARDIO, NOT ENOUGH WEIGHTS
The default for many people trying to lose weight is to ramp up cardio to burn more calories. Here’s the issue. When we go into a caloric deficit, our body looks for stored calories for fuel, as well as energetically costly systems to down-regulate in order to conserve.
With a big enough deficit, you'll burn fat but also chew up lean tissue, including your muscle, to use for energy. This is the last thing you want to happen. You worked hard for your muscle and you want to hold onto it, especially as we age. Losing weight as equal parts fat and muscle will result in you looking thinner, but you will have the same general shape and your body will not look leaner. You won't see muscle definition.
Muscle is your metabolic furnace that drives energy output when you are at rest. You want to maintain as much muscle mass as you can to keep your metabolism up in support of optimizing your energy balance equation and thereby continuing to burn fat even when you are at rest.
Therefore, the goal should be to lose body fat and hold onto our muscles, which is especially important as we age. In a calorie deficit, we need to give our muscles sufficient stimulus through weight training to let the body know we need to keep this muscle and can't afford to break it down. A training regimen that places hard resistance training as the priority will stimulate the musculoskeletal system sufficiently to ward off any muscle loss.
Keep this in mind when you create your training schedule. There is a difference between training and being physically active. When you are trying to lose body fat, you want to be even more active so you can raise your energy output and optimize your energy balance equation to lose fat. When you train (aka purposeful gym-related exercise), you want to remain focused on an approach that builds muscle and forces your body to keep trying to adapt to be stronger, thus providing a progressive overload stimulus.
Some people might think that lifting weights is only going to make them look more bulky. Sadly, this is false information that has been widely spread incorrectly by many news, media, and fitness outlets over the years.
MISTAKE 2 - TOO BIG OF A CALORIE DEFICIT
If a deficit is good, then a bigger deficit should be better, right? WRONG. Large caloric deficits should be reserved for professionals in industries that need to make dramatic weight changes for their sport or jobs. They get paid for this, know that it isn't sustainable, and will likely go right back to their previous body composition after the shoot, show, or event.
Large caloric deficits will yield short term results, but you will quickly run into problems. After about one to two weeks of a large deficit, your body will slow the rate of caloric deficit. This is your brain and endocrine system purposefully lowering your energy output. This could look like slowing down certain metabolic processes that are deemed non essential, changing hormones and neurotransmitters in the brain slightly to keep you from wanting to be active. Think of how your body responds when you are sick. All you want to do is sit in bed and do nothing. A similar thing will happen when your body thinks it is starving. This often is perceived as a loss of energy, drive and motivation.
What is the right range? For most people, I would encourage a calorie deficit in the 10-25% range of their current maintenance level of calories.
MISTAKE 3 - GUESSTIMATING
The most logical and reliable way to go about figuring out how much you need to eat or move in order to lose weight is to TRACK IT ALL. What you do and eat every day and the results on the scale and in the mirror don’t lie. By tracking your daily food intake and monitoring your activity you will get feedback quickly as to whether your approach is working (or not) to achieve the fat loss goals you have.
I often hear that people don't want to track their food as they find it tedious. This is a short-term solution, not something I’d recommend doing for the rest of your life, but you should strongly consider doing it when you get started and any time you hit a plateau.
If you are losing body fat and you don't track anything, then great. Keep doing what you are doing. However, if you are starting out or you have been stuck for weeks or months at a weight or body fat percentage you’re not happy at, it’s high time you bust out the trustly food scale and start weighing and measuring your food to log it and find out not only how much you’re consuming, but where exactly your calories are coming from!
Also, are you tracking your progress in more than one way?
I highly recommend having at least two ways to measure your fat loss and/or improvements. The scale is the obvious and simplest form, but it doesn’t tell you what you’re made of (i.e. how much body fat versus lean body mass). Taking measurements of your body circumferences (arm, thigh, waist, hips) is helpful to track inches lost (or gained). Getting a body composition analysis such as the InBody Test that we offer at Hill Country MVMT every month or two can be very useful as it provides a plethora of hard data to show you the big picture.
Furthermore, you might not be as active as you think you are.
I see folks commonly overestimate their activity levels, and the result is their starting calorie amount doesn't put them in a sufficient deficit to lose body fat causing frustration and confusion. Activity conversions on calorie estimators often look at how active you are in your entire day. If you train for one hour five days per week, but are a desk jockey at work and don't move much, then you are likely a low activity person. These people workout very hard and can't fathom identifying themselves as a low activity or sedentary person, yet based on the calculators they are.
MISTAKE 4 - POOR SLEEP + HYDRATION
Sleep and hydration are both massively important.What is the deal with sleep and hydration when you’re trying to lose body fat?
Both sleep and hydration, when they adequately meet your needs, will support better appetite control, good muscle recovery, and diminish cravings. The moment you start to de-prioritize sleep and become dehydrated, your brain is going to start to get fuzzy. You are not going to be able to ward off those cravings for sugar. Your brain is going to tell you that you are hungry and starving when you are in fact just thirsty. Your workouts and training is going to suffer and you won't be able to build your NEAT as much as if you were rested.
So please, aim for 7-9 hours of sleep regularly and drink half of your body weight in ounces of water at a minimum to help your mind and body recover appropriately.
