Recently I was scrolling through Facebook and came across a
post from a coach that I think was absolutely brilliant.
This post was by a coach named Jade Teta, and in his post, he broke down how pretty much any and all diets work. In the end, diets work because you are in a caloric deficit which pretty much means you eat fewer calories than you burn. That way your body will need to turn to some stored calories for energy.
At the end of the day, the weight loss equation is pretty simple, it is not necessarily easy but it is simple. Eating a smaller amount of calories on a daily basis consistently can be challenging for many reasons. Things come up such as stress from work, balancing what your kids want to eat vs what you know you should eat, and going out to social events it can be hard sometimes.
In the post he broke down 6 different strategies people use in order to create a caloric deficit. Today I want to share those 6 strategies with you and how each of them work.
You may not be ready to give up certain foods or to try new ones and you are completely comfortable with the food that you eat. That is perfectly cool because you do not necessarily need to do that. You can continue to eat all the foods you love just eat less of it. The challenge with that is you leave a lot up to chance. Simply saying “eat less” may not give you enough structure. What might help is tracking how much you eat either by simply writing it down, using your hand to measure or, weighing and measuring your food. Have you ever read an ariticle in a magazine about how someone ate Mcdonalds or cookies for a month straight and lost weight? It is absolutely possible they were simply eating less calories than they were burning.
The exact opposite of the first example is to eat larger volume of lower calorie foods that fills you up. You may be thinking to yourself that if you continued to eat the food you do but eat less you will be absolutely starving (probably not a good idea for long term success). To prevent that you can fill yourself of on larger volume of low calorie food. Generally things such as vegetables and lean proteins will be most helpful for this strategy.
Everywhere you turn it seems like we keep seeing someone say the best thing to do to lose weight is to eat smaller meals more often. Instead of eating 3 biggers meals during the day maybe you eat 6 or so smaller meals spread out. The idea here is that you will have less time between meals to become “starving” and you will feel more full and satisfied throughout the day. Now this strategy absolutely does work for some people butit may not work for everyone. For some people their schedule does not allow them to eat 6 times a day, or they have to worry about other peoples feeding schedule like their family which makes it harder.
Contrary to the strategy above some people say eating larger meals less often during the day will help you lose weight. Again they are not wrong but it does not work for everyone. If you feel more full and satisfied eating larger meals and less of them during the day by all means go for you!
Low carb diets and the Keto Diet seem to be the new trend that everyone is talking about. Once again these strategies do absolutely work, but there is nothing special or magical about them. They simply put you in a caloric deficit which causes you to lose weight. For some people having such a strict rule such as eating absolutely no carbs or no fat may help them stay on track and eat less. Some people feel that they can’t control themselves when it comes to carbohydrates so it is easier to cut them out completely. For others it can have the reverse effect, they may be able to cut out carbs for a little but then feel deprived and they go to have some and end up eating a whole box of pasta, bread followed by some cookies for dessert. I think you know that this will not help you lose weight.
Intermittent fasting has also been one of the hot diets to try lately. There are different ways to do intermittent fasting but simply putting it you only allow yourself to eat during certain hours of the day, for example, you may only eat from 8am-8pm and fast from 8pm-8am. Now while some people claim that fasting boosts your metabolism and turns you into a fat burning machine at the end of the day you are simply eating fewer calories. For some people, this may work because having that strict time frame of when you can eat will help you avoid any excess calories late at night. If you find yourself eating a whole pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream at 7:59 and think it’s fine for you because it’s not after 8pm you may want to rethink your strategy.
I hope this helped you understand how there is truth behind all of the “diets” and strategies we read and see in fitness magazines and on the news. However, the end goal for all of them is to eat fewer calories and that is it.
Now you might be waiting for me to tell you what strategy I think is best and what you should do but unfortunately, I do not believe one strategy is better than the others. I believe the best thing you can do is the one that works for you, the one that allows you to be happy, satisfied, reach your goal, and sustain it for a long time.
Another thing Jade pointed out that I think is super valuable is to note that if these strategies work because they put you in a caloric deficit the inverse must also be true. If you find yourself not losing weight you are not in a caloric deficit plain and simple.
-Coach Pat
