What creates weight loss or fat loss?

A calorie deficit.

That’s the one and only way that fat loss can happen…you must be in a deficit, meaning you have to be expending more calories than you’re taking in.

So, if someone says, ‘I’m in a calorie deficit and I’m not losing weight’…they’re not in fact in a deficit and fortunately, there’s just no two ways about this and I say fortunately because it simplifies the solution!

Perhaps you thought that you were in a deficit and you’re not, or maybe you’re just looking to create one because you want to lose some fat…so, how do you create a deficit? You’ve got 3 options…

1.     Reduce your calorie intake

2.     Increase your activity

3.     Both #1 & #2

Option #3 is going to yield you the fastest results because it’s going to create the largest deficit.

Option #1 is going to yield the second best result and finally option #2 is going to yield the third best result aka last place, but still on the podium ;)

It’s rather obvious that reducing your calorie intake and increasing your activity is going to yield the fastest result…but why is reducing your calorie intake alone going to be more effective than increasing activity alone?

It’s because it’s incredibly easy to ‘out-eat’ your activity levels, for example if you burn an extra 200-300 calories per day which is a rather rigorous hour long workout for the average individual…that’s equivalent to two tablespoons of peanut butter, which takes all of 30 seconds to eat. So, there goes all the calories that you just burned over the course of your hour long workout in less than a minute, so it’s pretty darn easy to out-eat your activity.

We see this in runners and cyclists quite frequently, they’re really active and they workout super often, but many of them are still overweight and it’s because they’re out-eating the amount of energy that they’re burning.

Also, we tend to drastically overestimate how many calories our activities burn and one of the primary reasons for this is that the calorie burning trackers on the market at the moment are just super inaccurate…but that is a topic is another article.

So, if reducing your calorie intake is the more effective way to lose weight, how do you do it

It’s just like balancing your budget.

First you need to figure out how many calories you’re taking in, so you can use something like My Fitness Pal, the notes on your phone or you can go the old fashioned route and write everything out manually…I’d recommend tracking your intake for at least 7 days.

Let’s say that you track for a week and you see that you’re eating an average of 2500 calories per day, cool, you now know how much you’re spending.

Moving forward for the next 7 days, try reducing your calories by 200-300 per day.

Or…

If you see that your calorie intake is a fair bit lower during the week and a lot higher on the weekends, you can shoot for a weekly total instead. In order to calculate this let’s use a 300 calorie daily reduction.

2500 – 300 = 2200.

So you’re going to shoot for 2200 calories per day which equates to 15,400 calories a week.

You may choose to eat 2000 per day Monday through Friday and then you can take in 2700 on both Saturday and Sunday.

It truly doesn’t matter how you set it up, all that matters is that your weekly totals add up and you maintain that deficit meaning, you could also just eat 2200 per day every day, it’s totally your call, feel free to structure things in a way that suits you and your lifestyle best!

Also, be sure that your movement habits stay the same, so if you’re averaging 8000 steps per day and working out 3x per week, don’t dip below that when you reduce your calories because that will reduce your expenditure…it’s crucial that you keep your activity nice and consistent.

Now maybe you don’t want to reduce your calories and you’d prefer to go with the increased activity route…

I think that bumping up your daily steps is the best way to go about this.

The reason that I recommend focusing on steps more so than workouts in this instance is because workouts vary a lot from session to session based on how you feel, what movements you do, whether it’s a spin class or a yoga session…there’s just a lot of room for variability, whereas in regards to steps, 10,000 steps is 10,000 steps.

Sure one day your steps may be via hiking a mountain, but that’s fairly easy to control for as well because your step counter will actually count flights too, so that’s trackable.

Steps are also super accessible because you can do them anywhere and anytime…you don’t need a gym or any equipment at all so the barrier to entry is as low as it gets.

If you do want to go the formal workout route to increase your activity you can add sessions on top of what you’re currently doing, just remember that if you go with the increased activity route, whether you add workouts or add steps, you need to keep your calorie intake the same because if you increase your calories burned, but then also increase your calorie intake, it’s going to be a wash.

A few things to look out for…

Whether you go with the calorie tracking and reduction model, the increased activity model or combine the two…consistency is the KEY

You don’t want track your calories one week and then not the next, or do 4 workouts one week and then none the following week and then 2 the week after that

Consistency is SO important because you want to minimize as many variables as possible so that you can identify trends and then make adjustments where need be…this is exactly what I do with my Nutritional Coaching clients.

Building off of the consistency piece around calorie tracking specifically, I’d recommend tracking everything and taking the ambiguity out of the equation because for example, if you only track Monday through Friday, you just have no clue how much you’re actually taking in over the course of the week as a whole.

Or if you track your food but not your booze intake, again, ya just don’t know. The same goes for thing like snacks…if you track all of your meals, but then you don’t take your snacking habits into account, you simply don’t know what your calorie intake is…so I’d recommend biting the bullet and just committing to tracking absolutely everything. This way you can take complete control over your results.

There are plenty of things that we can’t control for, but what and how much we eat and/or drink is just not one of them. 

What I instil in my clients around tracking is doing so with the utmost amount of accuracy in mind, as opposed to trying to make their intake ‘look good.’

For example…

You had a great day, you ate nothing but single ingredient whole foods and you’re stoked on how everything played out and then…you had a couple of cookies and a small bowl of ice cream that put you 400 calories over your target. Track it because you ate it, you don’t get brownie points for not tracking things, you just get inferior results, so be honest with yourself and account for it all.

This concept is truly fascinating from a psychological perspective…a lot of us tend to bend the truth with ourselves as well as the people that we actually put in place to help us, it’s actually really interesting

We tell the dentist that we’re flossing more than we are, we tell doctors that we exercise more often than we actually do and we tell nutritionists that we rarely eat processed foods when that’s most often just not the reality of things. 

So again, be honest with yourself if you’re doing this on your own and be honest with the people you’ve put in your life to support you because…

It’s sort of like going to a financial advisor and providing them with inaccurate income, spending and tax documents…you’re only shooting yourself in the foot, they are there to help you!!

Also…the dentist, the doctor and the nutritionist know whether you’re doing what you say that you’re doing or not because your teeth, your bank account and your body tell them so.

This is what they do all day long and they’ve dedicated their lives to it, they’re experts, so they know what flossing everyday looks like, they know all the ins and the outs of a balance sheet and they know what sort of fat loss results are yielded by certain nutritional intakes.

Oftentimes they won’t call ya on it, but they know ;)

Questions about this article or just in general?

I love questions, so please do reach out!