Weight (Fat) Loss Over Years
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Introduction
Some changes take longer. Some changes take many hours over many months, sometimes over many years. That’s depressing but set your expectations upfront. If you aim for quick weight loss, you may lose weight quickly, regain it quickly, and find yourself right back in the same situation this time next year. Instead, plan for sustainable weight loss you’ll maintain over the next five, ten, twenty years. Make a dent in one month. Lose the spare tire in one year. Build the body you want over years — like the house of your dreams.
Lose weight (lose fat)
Losing fat takes more than an hour. Hours and hours. Weeks and weeks. Months and months. Plan for a year to multi-year effort. Weight loss drives so many people to change their habits and there is so much horrendous advice out there. To change your body composition more permanently, take your time. Do it the right way. Avoid the yearly yo-yo up and down weight loss. Aim for consistent progress over one, two, three years and to keep that body for the rest of your life. Consistent progress comes with ups and downs. We want small ups and downs (a few pounds up or down per week; we don’t care about daily ups and downs). Over months and years, we want the downs to accumulate to produce a net negative fat loss. Start this journey with realistic expectations.
1. LOSE FAT NOT WEIGHT.
Change your mindset. Weight loss could be muscle, water, or an appendage — not what you want. Focus on losing fat. Get a body fat monitor. Measure at a consistent day and time each week. I measure my body fat percentage Sunday morning after using the bathroom and drinking two cups of water. At-home monitors are not as precise as other methods. With a decent monitor, if you see a trend developing over several weeks with your body fat going up or down greater than 1/2%, you know you have a real change to assess. Don’t worry about two data points. Don’t worry about small changes. Weight naturally fluctuates about six pounds per day in response to salt intake, water intake, food weight intake, medications, alcohol, hormonal cycles, exercises, illness, inflammation, and other factors. That’s six pounds! How many times in your life have you yelled at your scale when your weight is up five pounds? Be honest. Now buy a body fat monitor.
2. USE SUSTAINABLE TACTICS.
Set a goal, monitor regularly, create your environment, get comfortable with hunger, stay positive. Use science to your advantage. The first “Learn” habit is read longer, more often. Read this systematic review – Perspectives into the experience of successful, substantial long-term weight-loss maintenance. The summary is: “We found that continuous monitoring and goal setting, driven by sustained motivation and encouraging experiences, while resisting ever present challenges and enduring discouraging experience encapsulates the experience of sustained, substantial weight loss.”
What’s your fat loss goal?
When and how are you monitoring your goal?
What in your environment sets you up to eat too much?
Or eat things you don’t want to eat as much?
Who could you engage for positive social support? Who wants to see you do well?
What negative social influences do you need to reduce or eliminate?
How is stress impacting your weight and fat levels?
How much are you binge-eating? Why?
Are you binge-eating on the weekends or when drinking alcohol?
What can you do to reduce binge-eating?
Do you eat whenever you are hungry?
How can you become more comfortable being uncomfortable with hunger?
Could you set a timer to create a longer daily fasting window or shorter eating window?
Could you do a day-long or multi-day fast to train yourself to feel hunger, not eat, and know the feeling will pass? Talk to your doctor about the multi-day fasts.
3. ADD MUSCLE
Before worrying about losing fat, game the system. When you add muscle, your body fat percentage goes down. Win-win. More muscle. Better numbers. You look better. You feel stronger. Plus, it’s easier to lose fat with extra muscle. All that extra muscle acts as a sink for the glucose you eat. That means less insulin released when you eat carbohydrates. Insulin promotes fat storage. Less insulin means less fat storage. Muscle allows glucose to enter your cells like insulin using the GLUT4 transporter. GLUT4 functions like insulin for muscles but without the fat storage. Just happy, well-fed muscles. A reasonable goal for adding muscle is five to ten pounds per year, depending on your size, existing muscle, and training habits. Ladies, you will not get bulky. No one in the history of the universe has said, “Oops, I didn’t mean to add that much muscle.” Adding muscle is hard. After you add a base layer, then… it gets really hard. Give a gift to your geriatric self. No ninety-year-old ever said, “I wish I had less muscle.” Add muscle now.
4. REDUCE CARBS.
Even further. Carbs aren’t bad. Excess carbs are. What’s excess? It depends. Are you a world-class athlete? You can eat carbs all day. Are you a desk worker? Are you overweight? Then aim for less than one-hundred grams per day. Enough to eat all the non-starchy vegetables you want. When the fat comes off, you can eat more carbs up to the point the fat comes back. If your energy levels feel like you’re on a rollercoaster (tired, hangry, anxious, confused, irritable, headache, etc an hour or two after eating), eat fewer carbs. If you can lose the weight eating more carbs, that works too. Some people have a hard time digesting extra protein or fat. You can lose fat eating moderate to high carb but for most people, reducing carbs reduces your appetite. Research shows that people who eat very low carb eat fewer calories. For me, carbs are easy to eat. Fat and protein take more effort. Most overweight people in Western society are eating more carbs than they need. Eat as much glucose as you can tolerate and stay at your ideal body fat with stable energy levels, enough protein to build muscle, and use fat to fill in the rest of your calories.
5. INCREASE YOUR LOW-INTENSITY CARDIO.
Walk more. Work up to thirty to sixty minutes per day. Or use more Zone 2 sessions. Or sub a bike ride or playing sports or hiking or anything where you’re moving. You can also sub high-intensity training, but don’t overdo it, overeat, and over rest. Low-intensity cardio gets the job done.
6. CREATE A CALORIC DEFICIT.
With the existing suggestions, this should have happened already. Only use this if you’re still not losing weight or like this level of detailed measurement. Measure your calories in and calories out per day, then increase your activity and/or reduce your caloric intake to create a deficit. Tracking calories is hard. Weighing what you eat and doing the math is hard. Finding your basal metabolic rate is hard. Finding accurate measurements for how many calories you’re burning from activity is hard. You can estimate them. But if you’re off by even a hundred calories on each (which is very easy) you’re going to scratch your head at why you’re gaining or losing weight when the measurements say the opposite. If you’re going to track calories, aim for a low surplus if you’re trying to add a little muscle (ex. 100 calories per day) and a bigger deficit if you’re trying to lose weight (ex. 250 calories per day). The bigger deficit will help with the natural measurement inaccuracy. It won’t eliminate it. Prepare for frustration. Track calories if you’re stagnating.
7. SEE A DOCTOR.
Sleep, hormones, medication, many things besides the factors above affect your body composition and fat loss. You need to find the right doctor. That’s hard. Most are not well educated in all these aspects of exercise, nutrition, and fat loss. But by this point, you’re becoming educated. So you handle that part unless you find a doctor-unicorn. Still, you might need a sleep expert if you’re not sleeping well. You might need a specific endocrinologist focused on thyroid or stress hormones or other hormones. You might need to look up all your current medications to see their impact on fat loss and discuss them with the doctor who prescribed them. Finding a good doctor for this is hard. So is spending the rest of your life overweight failing time after time to lose that weight.
8. ACKNOWLEDGE SOME PEOPLE ARE BORN WITH A CERTAIN BODY COMPOSITION.
And that someone might be you. If your metabolic numbers are optimal, if you’re strong enough, if you’re not adding weight, if you don’t have a lot of visceral fat, consider your weight and fat level might be optimal for you. You know how some people are skinny-fat. Well, some people are also fat-skinny. They look fat, but they’re skinny where it matters most — around their organs. Fat-skinny people have low visceral fat. If your appendages have more fat than your belly, you might be a fat-skinny person. Maybe get a DEXA scan to confirm this. These aren’t cheap… yet. You’ll get a more detailed breakdown of your body fat, muscle, and tissue breakdown, including your visceral fat. If you’ve come this far and still feel frustrated, it’s worth it. You might be a fat-skinny person who doesn’t need to worry so much about the number on the scale.
