Weight loss fundamentals...

Losing weight is the easiest thing in the world. There, I’ve said it. Now, before you dismiss me as someone who doesn’t have a clue about how hard it is to lose weight, hear me out…

Everyone knows, deep down, what foods they should and shouldn’t be eating. Everyone knows that eating five or six portions of vegetables and fruit each day, and eating things like chicken and fish regularly, is important. But how many people actually do it?

Everyone also knows, deep down, that chocolate, crisps, sugary cereals, fizzy drinks etc are bad for you…but again, how many people successfully cut them out when trying to lose weight?

Even if you are one of the few people that gets the above stuff right, are you sure you aren’t sabotaging your efforts by eating things you think are good for you, but aren’t? Are you avoiding foods you really should be eating, because you are still listening to out-dated science and old wive’s tales? Chances are that if you are having ‘healthy’ cereals for breakfast, and ‘healthy’ low-fat yoghurts, and ‘healthy’ ready meals, whilst avoiding eating eggs (they’re high in fat, surely?), never cooking in olive oil and ignoring anything that looks remotely like a carb, you are doing yourself no favours.

Ultimately, losing weight – and let’s be honest, it’s FAT we want to lose, not necessarily ‘weight’ – is about creating a deficit. You want to burn off more calories than you consume. If you don’t know how many calories your body needs each day, how can you know how many calories you should be eating each day? There’s your starting point. Once you know how many calories you need, you can adjust your intake to make sure you are eating about 500 calories a day under that level. There’s nothing mysterious about it – if you eat at least 3,500 calories a week less than your body needs, you WILL lose weight.

Whilst it may seem a bit confusing sometimes, you need to bear in mind that the diet industry is absolutely massive. It’s said to be worth more than one billion pounds a year in the UK alone. Diet plans, slimming clubs etc, don’t really want you to lose weight and keep it off. If you lose weight, you stop attending, you stop buying branded shakes and books, and the money stops rolling in. Don’t think for a moment that the diet industry is there to help you. It is in their interests to make diet and nutrition as complicated as possible. It doesn’t have to be that way.

That leaves exercise. Diet will take you so far – in fact, it’s probably more important to address your diet than it is to get yourself exercising. Saying that, diet alone won’t improve your fitness, stamina or body composition. To look healthy and sleek, some form of training is needed. Ideally, this is two or three times a week doing something structured that allows you to easily measure your progress. Whether you do this alone or with a PT is up to you, but you will be far happier with your new body if you exercise as well as ‘diet’.

At Real World Fitness, I work with a significant number of overweight clients. I know what the barriers are, and I know how hard it is to start changing the way you look. I don’t expect clients to overhaul their entire lifestyle in a week, and become superfit overnight. Each client has their own life to lead, and every approach will be slightly different, but you can be certain that whatever your target, you’ll get a level of help and support that is way above and beyond what you’d expect from a PT.

On average, clients who address their diet as instructed, and who train with me at least twice a week, tend to lose between 8-10lbs in the first 4-5 weeks (based on averaging out the weight loss of 20 different individuals). I have longer term clients who have lost as much as 5st in nine months. You can do it too – it just takes hard work and a bit of guidance. The actual science of losing weight is easy!