Weight loss is still a really big deal. These days just about everyone wears a Fitbit, an Apple watch or some other similar wearable device that measures how many steps you take, your heart rate at any given time and tells you how many calories you’ve burned (among many other measurements). Lots of people log their food and exercise into apps like Myfitnesspal because we all know that in order to lose weight, we have to eat less and move more (input fewer calories than we output).
The Weight Loss Equation
The equation for weight loss seems amazingly simple – fewer calories in and more calories out = weight loss. If you’ve ever tried losing weight using apps like Myfitnesspal and a Fitbit, you’ve probably experienced the confusion of actually going up in weight despite micromanaging your exercise minutes and eating fewer calories for a week. How can this happen?
Factors Affecting Weight Loss
It turns out there are many factors that influence the calories in, calories out balance as you can see in the screen shot from Precision Nutrition.
Key Points When Trying to Lose Weight
Wearable devices can only estimate how many calories you’re burn when you exercise. Ideally you should not include your calories burned during exercise when using calorie-counting apps as doing so can give you an artificially high number of calories needed, it can defeat your exercise efforts much in the same way as treating yourself to a doughnut for taking a Zumba class.
People who have more muscle mass will tend to have a faster metabolism than people with little muscle mass. They will burn more calories all the time, even when they sleep. When you diet a lot to lose weight and you don’t include consistent strength exercises to build and maintain muscle mass, you can slow down your metabolism and find it harder and harder to lose weight, even on very few calories.
Make your own food, don’t buy it, even from restaurants. If you don’t know how to do this, go online and find cooking videos that are easy to follow. Buzz Feed has some that are pretty good. Here’s a link to a collection of recipes by our resident chef – Go Fit Now Healthy Recipes.
It’s what you do MOST of the time that really matters. If you go on crash diets lasting weeks to lose a bunch of weight and do this regularly, you booby-trap your metabolism and it actually gets harder and harder to lose weight.
A better approach is to eat smaller portions of healthy, unprocessed and sugar-free (including artificial sweetener-free) food most of the time. Not only will you be actually nourishing your body, you’ll probably be eating fewer calories overall as well. Combined with an exercise program custom-built for your body that includes a good dose of strength training you do consistently, you’re well set up for losing weight and keeping it off long term.
Book in for your Exercise Strategy and Fitness Consultation with us today.
