The Weight Loss Journey

Pt. 2: Overcoming the Obstacles

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How Does it Work?

Losing weight at its fundamental core revolves around thermodynamics. Namely, that energy cannot be created or destroyed, rather, it can be transferred from one form to another. A plant receiving lots of energy from sunlight can transfer that energy into storage substances. If the plant is releasing half of that energy in order to maintain structure, it is storing the other half. Over time, this leads to a surplus of stored energy. This same fundamental principle applies to humans. If more energy from food (calories) is being consumed than is being released, an excess of storage will occur. The primary storage for humans being glycogen and triacylglycerol (TAG), where glycogen is found in skeletal muscle and liver, and TAG is found in adipose (fat) tissue. Glycogen storage is quickly maxed out if excess calories are being consumed, leaving the rest of the energy to be stored in fat tissue.

If you aim to lose weight, you must consume fewer calories than you expend. This is commonly termed as being in a calorie deficit. Another easy example is found in finances. If you are making $10.00 /day but you are spending $12.00/day, you would lose $2.00/day. To compensate, you tap into your savings account, thus depleting your savings. The opposite would occur if you made $10.00/day but spent only $8.00/day. This would net you $2.00/day in profits that need to be stored in the bank. In this example, the dollar amounts represent calories, while the bank represents fat storage. In short, to lose weight, you must consume fewer calories than you expend, leaving your body with no choice but to tap into its storage.

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Know Your Measurements

In order to be in this caloric deficit, you need to know how much food you can eat. If you are not eating enough, your metabolism will crash, micronutrients will become scarce, and you will feel like crap. You will eventually hit a massive plateau in your weight loss journey. There are several methods to optimize weight loss. The most efficient is using a Calorie Counter. This method accounts for gender, activity, height, and weight to give you an estimated number of calories your body needs to maintain its size. For example, a 22-year-old male, standing 5 feet 6 inches, exercising 5 times per week, needs 2500 calories to maintain weight. To lose weight, we can subtract from this maintenance number, thus putting us in a caloric deficit. While this part of the journey seems trivial, it provides a target, that being an achievable number, which is much more sustainable than winging it.

The next step is choosing how many calories to subtract from our maintenance. You may see people subtracting 1,000 calories from their baseline. Subsequently, you will witness these same people binging during the weekend, hitting plateaus, and being miserable. A sensible approach would be to subtract 350 calories from maintenance. Under perfect conditions, not accounting for water weight, this would result in weight loss at a rate of 1 lbs per 10 days. Not only is taking away 350 calories going to grant you substantial weight loss, it will also be sustainable. The process also reserves muscle and will be much more enjoyable than crash dieting.

Now that we know that weight loss occurs when our body is expending more than it is consuming, we have subtracted 350 calories from our maintenance. By doing so, we can enjoy steady weight loss while limiting episodes of binge eating and misery.

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Track Your Progress

Congratulations, we are losing weight at a sustainable pace, now we need progress markers to properly map out the journey. Think of tracking your progress as a way of checking the fuel in your car. Starting with a full tank, you can drive away. However, if you don’t check the fuel gauge, before you know it, you’re empty. Stuck on the side of the highway, waiting for aid. We can prevent this by checking the fuel gauge. In the same sense, we can check our weight loss gauge. Unlike a car, whose miles per gallon is relatively the same whether the fuel tank is full or low, the body adapts. As you decrease calories, metabolism slows down, and over time, what was your losing weight calorie number is now your maintenance calories number. Now, weight loss is halted, but if you didn’t track your weight, you would be stuck. Luckily, you tracked your weight using a scale, and you can see that after X weeks of eating 350 fewer calories than your maintenance, weight loss has slowed or halted.

Tracking your weight is relatively easy. Not only does it take only 20 seconds, but it is extremely cheap and valuable. Tracking your weight daily is preferred. It can be at anytime; however, keeping food/water intake consistent before weighing is important. If one day you drank 50oz of water before stepping on the scale, you would weight 1.4kg more because of the water. This wouldn’t be an issue, except people rarely drink water at the same time every day, besides upon waking. Therefore, taking your weight upon waking is the most efficient. It not only gives you the lowest weight of the day, but the most consistent measurement.

Fortunately, you have been tracking your progress and have lost significant weight. This is amazing, but now for the past 3 weeks, you have seen no drop in weight, and are left wondering where to go from here.

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Hitting A Plateau

When battling with weight loss, it can be demoralizing to hit a plateau. Then again, now that you understand what it means, we can start losing weight in no time. A plateau is when weight loss slows to almost none, and it happens because the body adapts to the amount of calories you have been feeding it. It does this by primarily decreasing heat output. Now that we know our body’s new maintenance calorie is lower than previously discussed, we have three main options. One, we can decrease caloric intake by another 350 calories, therefore reinstating a caloric deficit and burning fat. Two, we can increase energy output by exercising. I plan to cover exercise in an upcoming article. However, performing resistance training 3-6 times per week, coupled with 120 minutes of cardiovascular exercise, will increase your energy expenditure by a substantial amount. This increase will tip the scales, leaving you in a caloric deficit and back to losing weight. The last option includes a blend of one and two. A slight calorie reduction, possibly 100-300, and introducing exercise in conjunction. The scientific literature heavily supports the notion that exercise increases health and lifespan, making it a vital addition to your life. I am adding exercise to the option list when the first plateau is reached because eating healthy is a large enough task to begin with. It may overwhelm someone trying to learn both exercise and diet, and that feeling of stress increases the likelihood of failing. At this point in your journey, you may know the foods you enjoy. You may have built this diet into a habit, so now is a perfect opportunity to add exercise.

After learning what a weight loss plateau means for your journey, you have a few choices to make. Decrease current calories by another 350, add exercise, or the most efficient choice, slightly decreasing your calories by 100-300 and adding exercise to your routine.

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A Major Blockade

You may have hit a few plateaus since we last spoke, as expected. Great, you applied the options given to you in the previous section and got back to losing weight. Now you find yourself, perhaps several months/a year deep in the diet, and you feel as if your weight loss has stagnated. Before despair settles, this is very predictable. As time passed, you kept decreasing your caloric intake and increasing exercise with every plateau. At some point, a blockade hit. This is the point where you can’t lower your calories without feeling terrible or being nutrient deficient, and you can’t do more exercise. This blockade, if dieting is done properly, should not be encountered for 6 months to 2 years, depending on your level at the start of this journey.

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The Restoration

While there are several options, crash dieting or lowering your calories beyond your tolerability are not some of them. Crash dieting will exponentially increase the likelihood of a binge episode and weight regain. It is crucial at this stage to implement a metabolism restoration period. This period relies on slowly ramping up your metabolism by increasing caloric intake in small increments. This will cause weight gain that is controlled, desired, and beneficial to your long-term health as opposed to crash dieting.

To start metabolic restoration, start by bumping up your caloric intake by 200-400. This will ensure that your metabolism will ramp up, while still not allowing your body to store too many calories as fat. With the previous condition, these calories should be made of protein (80%), which acts to reduce the bacteria species responsible for lipid absorption, thus limiting fat accumulation at this stage.

The restoration period can be thought of as changing the oil in your car. As you drive, oil is used up, eventually leading to low oil levels. These low oil levels can negatively affect your car’s lifespan and performance, therefore, you fill the oil and clear up the filters. Similarly, oil can represent food. As you have dieted, food intake has steadily decreased, eventually reaching a blockade, where food intake is low enough to affect performance. To combat this, bump up the food in a controlled manner and get those energy levels back up.

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A New Beginning

After you have raised your calories by 200-400, your weight in the next few weeks will reach its new maintenance weight. Depending on your weight loss goals, this may be your ideal body fat level, whereas others may have their eyes set on losing a little more fat. For those who have reached their new ideal body fat, congratulations are in order. While the maintenance phase is still difficult and requires mindful eating, by now, habits like eating healthy foods, performing regular exercise, and appreciating your body dominate the mind.

For those looking to lose a bit more body fat, this restoration period serves as the ultimate test. When a crash dieter has no experience with maintaining a level of body fat, they lose control, binge, and regain lots of fat. However, you know better. Repeatedly ramping up your calories slowly until a new maintenance weight is reached allows for complete control of weight gain. This increase in calories, specifically protein, will grant increased muscle accrual, thus further improving your metabolic health.

After several rounds of restoration, largely based on several factors, including performance and happiness, the weight loss journey can resume.

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The Final Stretch

After months or years of improving your mental and physical health, you have made it to the final stretch. As you now know, in order to lose weight, you must be in a caloric deficit, which can be achieved by increasing exercise or decreasing caloric (food) intake. With the restoration period resulting in a new maintenance calorie amount, which should have been properly tracked, start by subtracting 100-300 calories. As you can see, the last stretch does not differ from what you have already mastered before. The same rules apply, eat slightly less, perform exercise, and reap the rewards.

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Hitting the Mark

The process of switching between restoration and caloric deficit until you have reached your ideal body fat is quite subjective. Often, what someone wants is not ideal for their body and will ultimately end in disappointment and episodes of binge eating. The standard seen on tv is fake. A facade made of makeup, CGI, angles, extreme crash dieting, and often the result of performance-enhancing drug use (steroids). At this point in your journey, the ideal body fat for you lies between psychological satisfaction and sustainability. If you repeatedly lose fat and then uncontrollably gain it back, this is a sign that your psychological satisfaction is not matched with your sustainable body fat. This will be different for everyone, and is often a learned process that may take years to find out, since it may be psychologically rooted.

Hitting the mark means setting a realistic body weight, being both satisfactory and sustainable. Of course, this does not mean your journey is over. Over the course of the past year, training hard in the gym has become a habit, allowing you to gain more muscle, lose fat if warranted, and feel at your best, and this does not change now that you have reached your ideal body weight.

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Continuous Progress

Congratulations, you have arrived at what you deem is the closest point in time to your goal body. This body, merely a vehicle for your now improved lifespan, has helped craft habits like eating healthy and going to the gym. Yet your body does not define who you are. You are more than the person who lost weight. You are an entrepreneur, a parent, a sibling, a hard worker, a fit person, and the list goes on. Do not let the completion of a goal like weight loss stop you from crafting better habits, whether they are big or small.

You have amassed skills like training in the gym and eating healthy to overcome your biological precedent and improve your life.

For many readers, you may only be a few weeks into your lifestyle change, making it difficult to imagine a time where you can continuously overcome problems. Let this serve as a message that momentum in the positive direction and in all aspects of life acts as a bullet-proof vest. Your future self will face the same problems you do today. They just have a thicker vest on through years of successful habit building.

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Concluding Remarks

Losing weight is a laborious task. It involves going against your biological processes and reversing decades of weight gain. The reason no timeline is mentioned is simply that people proceed at different speeds. Maybe subtracting 100 calories from your diet was difficult, resulting in an increase of time spent dieting. As intended, this article is not a one-size fits all, but a general template to follow and it lays out the future obstacles with the answers. It is like receiving a pre-filled out study guide for an exam. After reading this, when you inevitably hit a plateau, you will know what to do.

Other articles, with a similar style, tackling different obstacles in the weight loss journey will be posted. Some of these posts focus on…

• Nutritious foods to eat while dieting
• A guide to creating a sustainable diet
• Resistance training and why it is important

With all of this being said, thank you for reading. I am optimistic and believe that you can accomplish this goal. For coaching, email me at [email protected]

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