As a concept, losing weight is easy, in practice it is awful. You hear stories all the time of people abandoning their weight loss goals because they are not seeing results. There are countless companies that exist simply to help you through the journey without quitting. If you need those companies, then by all means continue to use them, but maybe we can help you understand a little bit more about why losing weight is easy.
Your body is lazy and does not want to change. No, that is not where you get it from, but that is how we are designed to work. Our body wants to be in a constant state of homeostasis and will work hard to stay there (similar to me and my couch during my college years). Whatever weight you are at, your body wants to keep that because it wants to stay in homeostasis. If you want to change that, then you need to force your body to adapt.
To lose weight you need to expend significantly more calories than you take in. A good rule of thumb is that you want to be at a 500 calorie deficit every day to lose weight. This number will range from person to person depending on factors like age, height, weight, activity level, etc., but for now let’s stick with 500. There are generally two ways to accomplish this goal, and that is exercise and calorie restriction. Typically with this combination, the weight should start to come off, except when it doesn’t.
There are many factors as to why this may not work at first, but let’s go back to that first point that we made, which is your body really wants to stay exactly how it currently is. You may need to shock it by pushing your calorie deficit even further. Another challenge that people encounter is how people count their calories, sometimes they are not honest or accurate and end up thinking that they are in more of a deficit than they actually are. Remember, you only cheat you and your goals if you don’t keep to the deficit.
The next thing to consider is to follow the mirror more than the scale, especially if you have incorporated strength training into your routine. You may be slowly changing the composition of your body which means that the scale isn’t telling the story, but the mirror is. I have seen many people quit when they didn’t see the numbers shift even though results were noticeable elsewhere.
Another “mirror” factor to consider is what you eat. Now, we aren’t going to go too far into macronutrients, that is advanced weight loss, but we should talk about it a bit. When people decide to diet, people tend to go salad crazy, which means they change the macronutrients of what they are actually eating, and protein tends to drop significantly. This means that you will likely lose weight, but you are also going to lose muscle as well. You simply are not giving your body what it needs to gain or maintain muscle. You end up not liking how you look, so you stop. Keep your diet as balanced as you can.
Our advice is simple, because losing weight is simple. Shock your body, drop the calories by around 500 calories a day, add strength training it you can if not make sure your cardio choice is enough to get you to start sweating and breathing heavily, and don’t worry so much about the scale but rather focus on how you look in the mirror. Losing weight is hard because it sucks. We can’t eat what we want and our workouts need to be intense, so it is a slow process. Do not expect immediate results and lose faith. Stick with it; it is a slow burn with big payoffs.