Flexibility is the key to Lasting Weight Loss
When you’re trying to lose weight you’ve got to eat less calories than you burn, that is the easy part, the hard part is deciding how and when you’ll eliminate some calories.
This was my breakfast every morning when I lost 40lbs
In general the way you eat less calories is to either cut out some eating events, or to modify the amount of calories you consume at each event.
I’m calling them ‘eating events’ because the word ‘meal’ seems too formal and people don’t categorize everything as a meal. But ever ‘eating event’ matters when you’re trying to lose weight.
For example, lets say you have a coffee and a cookie in the morning. This would be considered an ‘eating event’. For many people their morning coffee and ‘treat’ is an important creature comfort they’re not going to give up even during a weight loss program (I didn’t).
The problem with the terminology ‘meal’ is that most people wouldn’t consider a coffee and a cookie as a ‘meal’ even though it could easily has 300-500 calories (which is definitely a meal worth of calories).
A successful weight loss program has to allow you to have the ‘eating events’ that you enjoy without producing feelings of deprivation.
In some cases cutting entire eating events out can help, this could include things like snacking on cheese and crackers while watching tv, eating while driving, the second or third coffee and cookie break of the day etc.
If you can’t find any eating events you’re willing to do without then you’ve got to try and eat less during each of those events. For example you might not want to give up your second coffee break of the day but you could put less cream and sugar in your coffee or have a smaller cookie (or half a cookie) with your coffee.
This way you haven’t lost the satisfaction and the experience of having your second coffee and cookie but you’ve still managed to reduce your calories.
The point is to be flexible and use all the tools you can to achieve a calorie deficit.
You may even have to do an extra workout in order to allow yourself an extra eating event. Maybe you want to eat a bigger dinner tonight and don’t want to skip any other eating events of the day. The way to do this is to add in an extra workout (even just an hour of walking) and burn off some calories to allow you the room to have the bigger dinner without having to sacrifice any of your other eating events.
Each day you’ve got roughly your BMR to play with as far as food eaten. The more exercise you do the more calories you burn past BMR (but there is obviously a limit to the amount of exercise you can do in a single day).
You can mix and match higher and lower deficit days, by doing more or less exercise and eating more or less calories. It’s likely that your drive to have a set number of eating events is going to be a strong influence and tend to mold the pattern that fits best for you.
If you really want to have a morning coffee and muffin, as well as lunch, dinner and a snack then you’ve got to find a way to make those for events work in a deficit. In some cases you might need to do an extra workout, in other cases you might need to cut back on how many calories you consume at each event.
The only other option is to cut one of those events out completely and just do as you would normally do during the others.
Any of these combination’s are a perfectly viable option for effective weight loss and you can change them every day.
Flexibility is the key to lasting weight loss.
John
7 Responses to “Flexibility is the key to Lasting Weight Loss”
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November 29th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
“You can mix and match higher and lower deficit days,” that’s what I’ve been thinking about doing. When I lost 63 pounds, I went low calorie every day. Obviously that worked, but I’ve struggled to get back into it over the last 4+ months, so perhaps I need something more sustainable. Or at least something that I can ease into, and once I’m back into it, I can cut calories further.
Back in ’07, I did an “alternating day” diet where I would eat very little one day, and whatever I wanted the next day, repeat. I did it for the last three weeks of December. I lost 3 pounds, which was pretty good given that I was literally *gorging* on the off days thanks to the Christmas break! lol.
Clearly, alternating between deficits and surpluses isn’t a good strategy, but perhaps alternating between deficits and maintenance would be feasible. This would allow for normal-sized meals and social eating on a regular basis. It would be nice to have two or three ~2000 calorie days a week, and still lose weight.
November 30th, 2010 at 12:24 am
Jordan,
It definitely feels nice to eat up to maintenance on some days and still lose weight. I think this is a much more sustainable way of doing things. It never feels like you’re too far away from having a good day of eating. It’s sort of like the concept of a ‘cheat day’ but you never actually go into a calorie excess but rather your ‘cheat’ day is eating up to energy expenditure…and the next day feels great and it’s quite easy to get through a relatively big deficit after eating up to maintenance the day before.
November 30th, 2010 at 10:59 am
Yea, there are definitely things that I would not like to give up. For example eating with friends on some event. It could be pretty lame and embarassing to go out with friends and while they would order pizza, you would just order brocolli, because you would thought that pizza could make you fat right now.
After having a caloric restriction lifestyle for a while including fasting, I have to admit that I love the flexibility of it. It’s flexible, you don’t feel guilty because of overeating, you feel empowered instead, you have more energy, you can focus more on important things rather than just eating. And you get many other benefits like cleaner skin or no digestion issues.
Best part is that you can decide how much weight do you want to lose. It’s only up to you. More you want to lose, less you need to eat.
I like the “maintenance cheat day” idea. That is actually what I do quite often.
BTW You have mentioned adding exercises to get into higher deficit. How much can you burn by intense workout and how much by wlaking? Is there a way to calculate it?
November 30th, 2010 at 11:41 am
Tom Venuto has talked about in a couple of his books the concept of eating below maintenance for 3 straight days, then go back up to maintenance for 1 day, then back down to below maintenance for 3 days and continuing with the 3-1 ratio.
I know that my weekends tend to be the higher calorie days so i’ve been experimenting with going very low on Monday (fasting), low on Tuesday, very low again on Wednesday (fasting again) and then Thursday go up to maintenance, Friday a little higher than maintenance, Saturday probably quite a bit higher than maintenance, and then Sunday back down to maintenance again (depends though).
Been trying that out for a couple of weeks while following Adonis and it’s worked okay so far with trying to put on some muscle while at the same time, decreasing the waistline little by little.
December 12th, 2010 at 3:29 pm
You have to get over the feelings of DEPRIVATION for your snacks or booz Etc. You really do not need this stuff and it is expensive. It takes some time and discipline, but after a while you do not miss it.
What is the point of overindulging only to have to do EXTRA exercise to compensate for it? When I follow ESE, I don’t pig out when I come off of a fast. Many people work out hard, 300 to 500 calories, then over compensate with eating or resting and may actually end up with a net gain in calories. Over indulging then using exercise to try to compensate is a waste of time and money, not to mention the pounding it gives your heart, joints, muscles etc.
Sorry I rambled on a bit.
December 13th, 2010 at 1:17 pm
Lyle McDonald has a really fascinating eBook on this, its like a book on weightloss success and maintenance, and its chock full of studies on what makes for successful weightloss (maintained weightloss), and the overall conclusion was the same…
The more rigid an approach is, the less likely it is to be maintainable.
The more rules an approach has, the less likely it is to be maintainable.
On top of that I think they found a few other factors among successful mainters such as regularly performing some level of tracking. Whether its tracking calories for the rest of your life, or measuring your weight regularly.
December 17th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
[...] 5 – For the other 70% of the population, what the hell should you be eating? One of the best answers I’ve seen, because it’s the way I eat most of the time, is by John Barban – Flexibility in maintaining weight loss. [...]