3 Steps to Mega Fat Loss

I received a couple of emails this week from clients I’d love to share with you.  One was from a woman who exclaimed, “Help!  I’m working out like crazy – I burned 1,286 calories yesterday, 759 today, and I’m just not losing!”  Her next sentence was telling: “…and, no, I haven’t been keeping up with my food journaling.”  It reminds me of a client I had lunch with near Pittsburgh last week while speaking at a health expo.  She happily reported to the group that she had been lost weight like a champion before the holidays and a surgery – and hadn’t gained any back.  But now she can’t seem to lose…ever since she stopped writing down her food.  She offered that it may be due to not eating enough. She said she finds it very difficult to get more than 8 to 10 grams of fat in per day and thus her calorie intake may be too low.  At lunch the next day I observed her eat her salad (with an ounce or more of cheese, deep fried croutons, and a moderate amount of a delicious raspberry vinaigrette dressing, which had oil in it.  A good oil, but fat nonetheless.)  I’m sure the chicken breast on top was marinated and grilled in a manner that added a few extra grams of fat than if she grilled it herself on the back porch.  This particular restaurant, instead of run-of-the-mill fries, took thickly-sliced potato chips and deep fried them a second time (to add a real crunch) as a novelty and served them standard with sandwiches.  She nibbled on roughly half of her son’s through lunch.  So…..hmm…..”hard time getting more than 8 to 10 grams of fat per day” and on her best behavior eating lunch with a guest-speaking nutritionist, I estimated her meal to be 30 to 40 grams of fat.  Maybe there’s a bit more of a correlation to losing faster when she was tracking food than to “not eating enough.”    

Contrast that to a client who has lost over 20 pounds in the last 2 months, who exclaimed this week how easy it was to lose weight all of a sudden, when she never could before.  Ironically, coincidentally, I get a daily nutrition log from her every single day.  And, she’s always where she needs to be.

Trust me when I say that even for a nutrition expert, dieting isn’t easy at all if you don’t have an objective game plan and if you don’t have a way of measuring your success against that plan.  I find that a diet that maps out every detail for you, however, will always fail.  It’s common and normal to want the most detail possible when getting started.  I hear it from clients every day.  “Just tell me what to eat and I’ll eat it – every day, every meal; I don’t care – I’ll eat it!”  Within two days they realize it’s impossible and we have to have some flexibility.  With that flexibility, however, must come a way of still knowing we’re on track.  I create ranges of macronutrients – protein, carbohydrate, and fat – a step further from just total calories for clients, depending on their goals, body types, activity levels, and other variables.  With quality food guidelines, this gives tremendous flexibility still in meal size, meal spacing, macronutrient ratios per meal, etc.  Even my book, The Diet Docs’ Guide to Permanent Weight Loss: Secrets of Metabolic Transformation, has beginning ranges for a general population demographic to get started with.

Studies confirm that no matter what diet structure a person starts with, the number one determinant of success is whether or not they track their food with simple journaling.  My almost-20 years of experience confirms that what you track matters just as much for PERMANENT success.  Learning what levels of foods are right for your goals, your body type/metabolism, and even your own taste preferences, is a surefire way engraining  an endless repertoire of meals and meal patterns for days that you like and work well for you into your brain.  Without learning this and affirming it through objectivity, you just continue being a slave to regaining body fat and moving on to the next fad diet.

There are three steps between you and a lifetime of easier weight control, better health, and even six-pack abs:

   1. Chose or create a game plan.  Make sure it’s not a cookie-cutter approach; you have to find something that works well physiologically and that makes you dig in and work a little to learn.
   2. Journal.  You have to be objective at all times or you’ll deceive yourself into mediocrity.
   3. Outline Goals.  Whether it’s a friendly challenge with a friend, a contest of sorts, or even a health/medical improvement, we all work better with a finish line to reach for.