Weight Loss For Beginners (dispelling some myths)

If you’re looking for online coaching or personal training, feel free to contact me at [email protected].

There are a lot of misconceptions about weight-loss and nutrition, most of them, unfortunately, stems from the fitness community itself.

Note that it is a community, and not a strongly regulated medical industry (sadly). Although there are some regulations around nutritional advice, they do get ignored.

These days, too many people are labelled Nutritionist/Personal Trainer/Coach, because certifications are widespread, unregulated and rather cheap. 

This certifications rarely cover the basics and leads to trainers having to self-educate. 

A lot of this self-education also stems from the fitness community, and may be referred to as “bro-science,” i.e., Fat makes you fat, carbs are bad, eating after 6 pm makes you gain weight, etc..

These are myths and have absolutely no scientific grounding, similar to a lot of content out there.

My first piece of advice is to choose the sources of information you listen to VERY carefully.

Never believe something to be 100% true, even if someone can justify what he or she are saying. Even with scientific reference – cherry-picking evidence is common. 

Good examples are epidemiology studies, in-vitro and animals (mainly rats) – you can only infer so much from this evidence, and they shouldn’t be used for widescale recommendations.

Doing so will stop you from falling into the trap of listening to the wrong advice and using that advice to make decisions around your health. 

It would be best if you even researched everything that I mention here; self-education is a powerful tool.

So, on weight loss, you will lose weight if you are in a Calorie Deficit.

In plain English, you need a certain amount of energy every day. 

Energy expenditure is determined by the amount of activity you do, exercise or not, your age, your gender, your weight, genetics, health, your lifestyle and the climate in which you live. 

If you do not replenish this same amount of energy every day, you will lose weight.

If you need to eat 2000 kcal a day, and you eat below that, i.e. 1800 kcal, this creates a 200 kcal deficit per day or 1400 kcal in seven days. 

Your body is still burning 2000 kcal a day, this 200 kcal deficit needs to be filled, and this generally gets taken from our fat stores, as well as some muscle tissue. 

THAT’S IT. (Well, the simplified version.)

Then why all the fuss about fat and bread and diets that hate cookies?? 

Well, these tend to be the things that people overeat (not just cookies), meaning they create a calorie surplus, if you have 2200 kcal a day, while only needing 200; your body will store the extra calories as fat. 

More accurately, you will store more dietary fat (why waste energy converting sugar to fat if you can break down and keep what’s already in your digestive system right? This isn’t to say fat’s bad, it’s an essential part of any diet.)

Fat has nine calories per gram, carbohydrates have four calories per gram, and protein has four calories per gram.

It’s rather easy to eat a lot of carbs and fats in one meal (Icecream), but it’s not exactly easy to take in a massive amount of protein, this can be used to your advantage.

Increasing the amount of protein you consume with each meal, whether that be one huge meal a day or six small ones (also doesn’t affect weight loss unless you alter calorie intake), helps to keep you more full.

This then decreases the total amount of calories you can consume per meal, reducing your overall intake and leading to weight-loss. 

All diets that do cause weight loss, only cause weight-loss because they’ve created a calorie deficit, even if whoever rejuvenated the diet from the past suggests otherwise. (Most fad diets are repeated year on year with new names/branding. When you only have Protein/Fat/Carbs to alter, there isn’t much room for something new.)

Low carb diets get a lot of attention because they cause a lot of SCALE weight loss (at the beginning), carbs are our primary source of energy, they’re stored in our muscles as glycogen, as well as our blood and liver, storing some fluid with these glycogen stores. (Some diets emphasis fat as the primary fuel. No difference to weight loss when calories are equated.)

When people remove a lot of carbs from their diet, these stores are depleted from the muscles & liver to a certain extent, and retain less fluid (also leads to decreased energy levels in general, not a great long-term solution). However, it may appear there has been rapid fat loss, this is inaccurate, and most of the weight lost initially is nothing other than fluid and glycogen. You can lose fat this way, but eliminating any of the primary nutrients (fat/carbs/protein) is not the right solution.

This will quickly level off, and weight-loss will appear to slow down completely, generally leading to someone giving up. If they do stick to this diet and continue to lose weight, this is because they have created a calorie deficit, NOT because of carbohydrates.

Low-fat diets? 

Well, that one nearly speaks for itself, if fat is nine calories per gram, and generally is incredibly tasty (damn ice-cream…), it’s rather easy to eat an excessive amount of calories in a small meal containing lots of oils and fats. 

If someone then reduces the amount of fat in their diet, again, he or she creates a calorie deficit, loses weight, and is left believing that fat is the issue; a misunderstanding that has led to the creation of some AWFUL advice and celebrity style diets.

Food has different functions in the body of course, but the main one is energy supply, we eat to live. We need protein, we need carbohydrates, and we also need fat. 

Cutting out one of these macro-nutrients isn’t a sustainable weight-loss solution. 

Reducing overall calorie intake is a viable and smart approach to weight loss, as well as increasing your total energy expenditure.

Generally, if someone is trying to sell you something that promises rapid weight-loss, and involves cutting out various food’s, these diets won’t work.

If you love chocolate, and it is what’s causing you to be in a calorie surplus, learning to track your calorie intake rather than never eat chocolate again for the rest of your life is a healthy approach. 

Crash diets are called crash diets for a reason; they work for a short amount of time, then hit a wall.

So how do you lose weight?

Firstly, it’s important to realise that it will take more than 12 weeks. 

Short term is short term; you don’t want short-term, you want a lifetime. 

Losing weight takes months and sometimes years. 

Secondly, losing weight, without trying to build, or maintain muscle mass, will negatively affect your health.

 You can’t lose fat without losing muscle, so doing everything you can to preserve muscle mass, or as a beginner, build muscle mass, is extremely important while losing weight.

Weight training will alter the ratio of muscle to fat loss, as it will prompt your body to maintain as much muscle as possible while you reduce calories.

Weight training will also increase your daily energy expenditure, that 2000 kcal mentioned earlier goes up to 2200? Great! More food! 

The more muscular you are, the more calories you will burn WHILE AT REST, as well as while you are training. (Not to overstate this – it isn’t a massive amount of calories burned – but recovering from exercise takes energy, as does building muscle and using bigger/more muscle.)

This prevents the endless cycle of continually reducing calories in an attempt to lose more and more weight, which is a non-sustainable approach.

Learn to count calories or measure your intake. The most accurate way to do this is to track the food you consume. 

This sounds like a daunting task, but with some practice, it gets easier over time. 

It doesn’t require a lot of work; you’ll need a food weighing scales, ideally, one that will show negative grams (I’ll explain why), as well as a food tracking app, myFitnessPal is available on Android and iPhone, the basic version is free and will allow you to set nutrient and calorie goals.

If you’re not sure how, it will calculate your calories intake based on your weight, age, and gender, and although it’s not perfect, it’s better than being entirely in the dark about how many calories you’re consuming in comparison to how many you need daily. 

It’s essential to set this up correctly, it will ask for your level of activity, so if you sit at a desk most days and aren’t very active, make sure you select that, be honest with yourself through the whole process.

Start tracking your food.

Do this by scanning the barcodes of the food you eat, or manually entering the name into MyFitnessPal or whatever food tracking app you decide to use.

Using your food scale to weigh it, input the amount you had, this will be deducted from your total calorie intake by the app, as well as give you insight into your nutrition, like protein intake. 

A scale that goes into negative values is handy for tracking things like butter on bread, place the butter on the scales, zero the scales, then use as much as you’re going to, the scale will give a negative value of the amount you’ve used, and you can then input that.

This works well for any sauce or spread, or if you want to know how much that piece of ham weighs from the packet.. pfft, 20 grams.

Side note: Creating a calorie deficit through diet or exercise will lead to weight loss; however that doesn’t mean that a higher calorie deficit is better, humans have been around for a long time, and our diets today are very different to what they were before; if food intake is excessively low, the body will naturally down-regulate energy expenditure. 

Simply put, you will move less throughout the day and will be very hungry – you may hear the term “starvation mode” thrown around by some people, where the body clings to fat in some imaginary process.

The body will aim to preserve organ tissue/muscle mass and sacrifice fat to provide energy in an actual starvation situation – you can be hungry and still consume too many calories (alcohol, highly processed foods, sweet drinks etc. aren’t filling but pack a ton of calories)

 If you want some damn strong evidence against starvation mode, watch some episodes of Bear Grylls The Island, anyone participating in these challenges loses a massive amount of weight, both fat and muscle, and you’ll notice that the less food they have access to, they continue to lose weight, but most days are spent lying around rather than chasing animals for food, this is the natural downregulation of energy expenditure in an attempt to preserve energy for when its absolutely necessary, but they are still losing fat AND muscle during this process. 

A calorie deficit of 200-300 calories over a long period works best without hurting hormone and energy levels.]

Start tracking your weight (don’t pay too much attention to the scales if you are weight training, for the first while there will be a lot of fluctuation.

If you are in a calorie deficit, there will be a downward trend if you were to graph it. [ideally, an app will graph it for you, there are lots available] 

There are lots of influencing factors when it comes to total body weight.

This is important to know, because as your weight decreases, so does your calorific need, or, if your weight increases (ideally from all that resistance training you’ve been doing).

This will increase your calorie need, so its best to review your weight at the end of each week. 

The lowest value recorded within the past three days is an excellent start to set as your current weight in MyFitnessPal, this will recalculate your calorie goals for the next week and keep you progressing!

You will hear and read a lot of advice as you start your journey, and it can be challenging to wade through all of the misinformation, even for qualified trainers and coaches.

A general rule of thumb is that if the source is a newspaper or your family member that always knows about the latest Facebook post referring to the TOP TEN FOODS TO INCINERATE BODY FAT – It’s probably not trustworthy information.

Be incredibly sceptical, search for trusted sources of information like nutritional scientific journals, or google the advice that was given, and add “Pubmed” to the end, for example: “Carbs make you fat PubMed”.

Chances are you won’t find MULTIPLE articles to back that up, which is important, one study might say otherwise. Still, majority rule by peer review is how science stays fact-based.

So, well done if you managed to read through all of that, I hope you learned something, most of all to be sceptical of information that’s widespread as hard facts – except gravity.

Lift some weights, build some muscle, don’t kill yourself with cardio or H.I.I.T (high-intensity interval training).

Its easier to try to burn more calories daily because you’ve increased your resting metabolic rate because you have more muscle and you’re more active, rather than increase your daily expenditure to burn more calories with excessive H.I.I.T.

Track your food, track your weight. 

Take tape measurements if you feel comfortable to do so, or if you’re more comfortable doing so, take monthly progress pictures. 

Take them in the same place, the same lighting, standing the same way as previous, ideally wearing the same thing, once a month. 

It can be easy to manipulate body position or lighting to give false results, be honest with yourself.

Lastly, your goal shouldn’t be numbers focused, at the end of the day, you want to be healthy and happy, and to be able to move for life.

Tracking is simply the most accurate way to get there if you’re currently stumbling around trying different fad diets, lousy training programmes etc. 

A scientific and balanced approach tends to lead to the best results.

If you have any questions about the information above, or if you’re looking for online coaching or personal training, feel free to contact me at [email protected].

Chris.