Follow Kristine on her weight loss challenge. She will be following the same process as Gold Arrow Fitness clients. Her goal is to lose weight the right way with consistent, healthy behaviors. Weight loss coaching will help her set the right strategy and stay on track.
Kristine is a former NFL cheerleader for the Indianapolis Colts. After her cheer career was over she found that she lacked structure in her life relative to fitness. She will be working one on one with a Gold Arrow Fitness coach over the next few weeks. They will focus on developing healthy habits and routines to support her weight loss.
Weight Loss Difficulties
Who doesn’t want to lose a few pounds? Many people live their entire lives battling those 10, 20 or 50 excess pounds. Why does this task to shed a few pounds seem so impossible? We’re of course talking about body fat here, not lean body mass like muscle. Fat is how our body stores energy. The science behind body weight is relatively straight forward. Excess calories, beyond our daily requirements, are stored as fat. When you look at it that way, it becomes more of an accounting problem than anything else.
Most of us know that if we can burn more calories than we take in then we’ll lose weight. If we take in more calories than we burn then we’ll gain weight. It’s almost too simple. At least simple enough that nobody should have an issue being at their desired body weight. There are a few misconceptions that tend to hamper people’s weight loss goals.
Weight Loss Misconceptions
First, people tend to overestimate the role of exercise in weight loss. As a general rule of thumb an average size person can expect to burn about 100 calories for each mile of distance they go or every 10 minutes of exercise they complete. When you consider a can of Coca-Cola is 140 calories, that mile you just ran kinda sucks! You can’t spend 30 minutes walking on a treadmill and expect that to negate that late night run to Arby’s. Exercise hardly touches calories compared to eating healthy. But before you discount exercise because it’s not helping you lose a bunch of weight, you must recognize its monstrous impact on your overall health! Did you know new research suggests that not exercising may be more damaging to your health than heart disease, diabetes and smoking!
On the flip side, people underestimate the role of healthy eating in weight loss. It’s hard to wrap our heads around what we eat sometimes. Food calories are paradoxical because one meal doesn’t really make a difference. But your body weight is all of those “one meals” that didn’t matter. See what I’m getting at? Every meal matters but no one meal matters. Ugh, no wonder weight loss is such a huge problem (no pun intended)!
One of my favorite all time quotes leads into my third misconception about weight loss – “we overestimate what we can achieve in the short term and underestimate what we can achieve in the long term.” The human brain is not wired to think long term. We are wired for short term behaviors and immediate gratification. These attributes conflict massively with weight loss. Humans instinctively look for immediate reinforcement for their behavior. Weight loss won’t give you that. When humans don’t get that immediate reinforcement, they don’t repeat the behavior.
The Key to Success
The most effective way to change behavior is incrementally with small changes. Over time these small changes will add up and produce amazing results. Author James Clear introduced me (not literally) to a man named Dave Brailsford. Brailsford was a coach for the British cycling team. He implemented a bunch of small changes that allowed the team to achieve great success. He called his philosophy Aggregation of Marginal Gains. Weight loss is best achieved through this same process. What do small changes look like in weight loss? I typically start evaluating a client by looking at their beverage calories.
Beverage
We drink more frequently than we eat throughout the day. As a result, beverages can have a significant cumulative effect on calories. We actually don’t ever need to ingest any calories from beverages. We drink a lot of beverages that contain calories. Soda and alcohol are more obvious examples of calorie dense beverages. Other examples aren’t so obvious. Milk, juice and coffee are all sneaky sources of excess calories. People will quickly point out that there are some nutritional benefits to these beverages and there is no way they could ever give them up! Nobody is expecting you to give these up all together because that wouldn’t be making small changes. But making small changes and minor adjustments to what you drink can have a huge payoff!
Fruits & Vegetables
Adding a fruit or vegetable into daily eating is another example of a minor change. Fruits and vegetables are mostly water so they will help you stay hydrated and nutrient filled! They will also reduce your overall calories because they will crowd out more calorie dense foods in your day. If you’re eating a banana before your pasta then you aren’t going to eat as much pasta as you would otherwise. The typical push-back to adding fruit is that fruit has sugar. People making this argument don’t typically have sound knowledge about nutrition. A string cheese is not a better option than an apple no matter how much these people believe it to be true.
Lose It App
The Lose It App is the glue that will hold this whole process together. Kristine will use Lose It to record what she eats and drinks. We will even use Lose It to chat and record weekly weigh-ins. Lose It will also show us what small behavioral changes to make because it summarizes data for us. Between technology, human interaction and a good plan Kristine should have everything she needs to lose weight. She is going to be doing the program for eight weeks because that’s about how long it takes to see significant results from Aggregation of Marginal Gains. Stay tuned to see her progress over the eight weeks!