3 Common Mistakes When Trying to Lose Fat (and how to avoid them)
1 - Weekend binges/taking weekends off
It’s very common to see people mess up their diet by giving themselves weekends off. It can cause a lot of frustration because they’re working so hard and sticking to the plan most of the time only to those two days snatch away all that progress. We don’t want to constantly be applying damage limitation measures but forward planning can do exactly that, when it’s needed.
Let’s use an example of someone with a maintenance calorie intake of 2500. Monday to Friday, they eat at a 2000 calories per day and 3500 calories on a Saturday and a Sunday. 5 days a week of being strict with their diet might sound good but a bit of maths reveals the damage those 2 off days can do. Here’s how their week pans out:
Monday to Friday
2500 calories under maintenance
(500 calorie deficit x 5 days)
Saturday and Sunday
2000 calories over maintenance
(1000 calorie excess x 2 days)
Weekly total
500 calorie deficit
(2500 - 2000)
That’s an average daily deficit of just 71 calories! Not an amount they’re going to see results from and it can be incredibly frustrating given the 5 days of effort sticking to their diet.
The ideal way to avoid this would be to rein it in at the weekend and eat more consistently. However, we also believe you shouldn’t be miserable and might have social commitments at weekends.
Using our same example client from earlier, here’s a way they could have manipulated food through the week to account for that weekend:
Monday to Friday
4000 calorie under maintenance (1700 per day)
(800calorie deficit x 5 days)
Saturday and Sunday
2000 calories over maintenance
(1000 calorie excess x 2 days)
Weekly total
2000 calorie deficit
(4000 - 2000)
That’s an average daily deficit of 285 calories. Not as great as the 500 deficit that they planned but still enough to keep fat loss progress coming and they didn’t have to give up their social life.
While it’s not ideal to regularly take this approach and it would be preferable to eat consistently everyday, if you know your going to over indulge on a particular weekend, planning ahead can keep you heading in the right direction instead undoing your hard work that week.
2 - Going too big
When people start a diet, motivation is often sky high. This is great but it can come with some pitfall like feelings of failure. Often this is misplaced because the plan was laid out when motivation was at its highest. You’re determined this time. You’re gonna lose some fat. At that specific point you probably believed you could stick to the plan, even though that plan required you to train 6 times per week, completely ban carbs (or any other food group) and only eat 1400 calories per day. Heck, you probably even stuck to it for a few weeks but there was that one week where you were a bit under the weather and work was mental. You only trained 3 times that week, you ate a potato and a slice of bread and you averaged 1700 calories per day. Now you feel like you failed because you didn’t stick to the plan. In reality the plan has failed you. It was laid out with the best intentions but was too heavily influenced by motivation. It asked too much of you.
Here’s another perspective on that bad week:
You trained 3 times this week. Nice, well done! 4 weeks ago you were only training once a week.
You ate some carbs. So you ate potato and a piece of bread, no big deal. Carbs are very useful supplies of energy and boost performance in training.
You ate 1700 calories. Yeah it’s 300 over “target” but you were eating 2500 when you decided to change to 1400. You’re still in a very large deficit. Congratulations, you probably just lost some fat!
You’re still well on course for your fat loss goal. The only difference is if you hadn’t set yourself unreasonable targets, you wouldn’t feel like a failure. Feeling like a failure often leads to people giving up all together. They tell themselves they can’t do it. Instead, if you’d set the bar a bit lower and planned for a time where you might feel less motivated, you’d be giving yourself a pat on the back and looking forward to what you can achieve next week.
3 - Staying on diet calories after a diet phase
Staying on lower calories is normally the result of fear about undoing the progress you just made. Dieting is stressful to the body and various reactions take place as your body regulates systems in order to adjust to the new scenario. What really happens is you have to live a constantly restricted lifestyle with no room for error by priming the body to store any excess calories as fat, damaging your hormone systems and and denying yourself the attempt at further fat loss without health consequences. After a diet phase the goal should be to return to a maintenance calorie intake, not remain on the number of calories you ended your diet. By doing this you give your body a chance to recover, return to a healthy and sustainable calorie intake and the opportunity to run another diet phase as needed.
Imagine you finished your diet, you’re pleased with what you achieved but might like to lose a bit more fat at some point. We’ll say you finished your last diet phase at 1500 calories and your current current maintenance is 2000 calories. Maybe you want to lose another 3kg in the next 6 weeks. That’s 0.5kg per week. You’ll need a deficit of somewhere around 500 calories per day to get you there. If you returned to maintenance calories and let the body settle (roughly the same amount of time as the diet), then you’ll need to drop to about 1500 calories to get the job done. Not easy but definitely doable for 6 weeks. Now imagine you stayed at that 1500 calorie figure after your diet and kept that consistent for a period of time. You’re not losing fat anymore because your body has adjusted and caught up from the changes you made on your diet. Now you need to drop another 500 calories to facilitate the next bit of fat loss you’re after. That puts you at 1000 calories per day!!! Not only is this going to be incredibly hard to stick to, more importantly it’s just not healthy. Then you apply the same logic that made you stay at 1500, only now you’ve got to stay at 1000. There’s only two outcomes here. You stick to 1000 and start to lose muscle and become quite unhealthy or, more likely, you’re unable to stick to it and because of the disruption to your systems from such a low calorie intake, you rebound hard and gain the fat back.
In order to sustain results, diets have to have an end point, otherwise it’s not a diet anymore, it’s just under eating. Strategically returning to maintenance calories will not only make it far easier to keep the results you got but also lay the foundations for future progress.