Reduction of subcutaneous fat mass, decreasing cholesterol, looking sleek and trim to fit into your best friends brides maid outfit she intends for you to wear in three months at her wedding, getting ready for a cruise through Greece in the Mediterranean basin, or simply losing some pounds to feel better physically, emotionally, and mentally fuel a goal that gives people a reason to endure the rigors of dieting and hanging out on a treadmill for hours at a time. This goal is weight loss. Whether it’s a recommendation from your physician, motivation induced by viewing a few social media feeds about diet and exercise, or self-inspired motivation to shed weight and decrease fat mass, the goal of losing weight stands among the top motivating factors to revise lifestyle habits.
A few commonly recognized effective tactics to lose weight include burning calories through physical activity, monitoring the amount of calories consumed throughout the day, and avoiding the temptation to head to the freezer after dinner and enjoy a few spoonfuls of ice cream. These tactics may seem obvious to most of the population, but why do seemingly simple tactics, such as getting more exercise and tracking what you eat, seem as mind-boggling as matching up the squares on a Rubik’s Cube when it comes to establishing weight loss strategies? Perhaps it’s not focusing on what needs to be done, but rather on what we can change to achieve and maintain a healthy weight.
I can recall one of my mentors at a previous gym I worked at explaining to me that losing weight is easy: “All you have to do is exercise more and eat less food.” If I were to tell potential personal training clients who come into our fitness center for the first time this, we’d probably be out of business. Why? Because people are really smart. The general population knows that consuming too much sugar, consuming too much alcohol, and sitting at a desk and not doing anything about it is bad for the human body. So, why can’t people adjust their habits to include eating less food and exercising more? I have an answer that everyone can probably agree with: ice cream tastes really good, and throwing back a few beers while watching the first week of football season with the guys after a long week of work is fun. And, who wants to hit the gym at 5 PM after spending an impressive amount of emotional energy at work for eight to ten hours? In other words, activities that require less energy and involve consuming amazing-tasting food that triggers fat mass gain are usually more enjoyable and easier to participate in than focusing on weight loss tactics.
The words “I want to lose twenty pounds” have more context than just the six words included in the phrase. To understand how to lose this additional mass attached to the body, it’s worthwhile to recognize how it got there in the first place. Most likely, an individual who weighs twenty pounds more than their desired weight has eaten too much of the wrong foods and hasn’t moved enough over the past year. However, unveiling the types of foods consumed excessively and the activities lacking helps paint a picture of the contributing factors that led to an overweight status and how an individual arrived at that point in the first place. A tactic that we’ve seen incredibly helpful in successful weight loss with our personal training clients is to focus on skillful decision-making when it comes to food selection and physical activity. Elaborating further on skillful decision-making by understanding and educating oneself on the mechanisms of suboptimal decision-making versus optimal decision-making makes a significant difference in weight loss success.
Losing twenty pounds in a week is challenging and borderline unrealistic to achieve. Unless a parasite has been contracted after accidentally drinking standing, rank, unfiltered water from a pond in a Saudi Arabian desert and an acute case of gastrointestinal distress occurs, we’re probably not going to lose twenty pounds in one week. We need to reassess what’s within reach, which can come down to the decisions we make.
Sometimes referred to as “low-hanging fruit,” short-term and attainable goals can be accomplished through actions that yield an outcome that doesn’t require a lot of time. A dietary short-term and achievable goal might be to focus on the types of food that end up on your plate at dinner time. For example, suppose our dinner plate is full of bread, rice, pasta, and cheese. In that case, we’re just begging to absorb unused carbohydrates and fat into our fat mass that usually resides on the back of the arms, abdomen, hips, and the “love handle” area on the lateral aspect of the abdomen. However, a decision to support weight loss might include limiting oneself to no more than three nights per week of having carbohydrates and cheese on the dinner plate. This tactic has the potential to decrease the amount of carbohydrates consumed later in the day, when activity levels are low, which is typically around dinner time when humans generally move less and expend fewer calories as energy.
Adjusting skillful decision-making by limiting the number of dinners that include carbohydrates on the plate or restricting the amount of starchy, sugary, and fatty foods at nighttime is an attainable tactic for most people, as their decision to say “yes or no” is directly in front of them. One could imagine that adhering to a goal to make a decision, saying “yes or no” to certain situations at the end of the day, is an easier task than “eat less food and exercise more.” Instead of focusing on the daunting number of pounds to be lost, perhaps concentrating on tactics involving how many times one can say “yes or no” to excessive desserts, alcohol consumption, and late-night carbohydrate-dense dinners is a more attainable tactic to support long-term weight loss.
Sean McCawley, the founder and owner of Napa Tenacious Fitness in Napa, CA, welcomes questions and comments. Reach him at 707-287-2727, napatenacious@gmail.com, or visit the website napatenaciousfitness.com.