Hi all, I've been posting here for a week or two, and while I enjoy it, I also see the same things cropping up over and over again, and I decided I'd put as many of my recurring thoughts in one place as I can for future reference. I'm curious what you all think.
1. Thinking you’re the exception to the rule that you lose weight if you eat fewer calories than you burn. Those who believe they’re the exception to what amounts to a law of physics are invariably mismeasuring what they’re eating or what they’re burning or both.
2. Blaming long-term weight gain or plateau (longer than a week) on water weight. Water weight can cause pretty sizeable short-term fluctuations, but I see way too many people reaching for “water weight” to explain plateaus or weight increases that have lasted well over a week. “It’s probably just water weight” can be accurate in the very short term and is definitely a day-to-day factor, but too often becomes a rallying cry for people who don’t want to face up to the fact that they’re not in a calorie deficit.
3. Thinking that because “calories in, calories out” is true, it doesn’t matter what you eat for the purpose of weight loss. The reality is that there are certain foods that, calorie for calorie, make it much more difficult to lose weight on a practical basis: processed carbs, refined sugars, and liquid calories are the unholy trinity. They cause spikes and crashes in blood glucose that trigger sugar cravings stronger than mere hunger, they are less sating on a per-calorie basis, and they wreak hell on your insulin production. “Pop tart diets” theoretically work, but rarely do in practice.
4. Treating every person who needs to lose weight, including yourself, like they’ve got anorexia or might develop it at any minute. People who are underweight and still believe they’re fat have a mental disorder, which I say without judgement. It’s simply an objective fact, and I wish them well overcoming it. People who are overweight and believe they’re fat are…correct. It makes no sense to talk to both groups at the same time using the same advice, and it’s actively unhelpful to import the concerns and language that are appropriate for speaking to people with anorexia into conversations with and about overweight people, especially yourself.
5. Rejecting daily accountability. It can look like calorie counting, body fat calipers, a tailor’s measuring tape, or getting on the scale, but if you aren’t taking daily action to objectively monitor your progress, it should be the least shocking thing in the world if progress is slow, erratic, and/or nonexistent. What gets measured gets managed.
6. Believing that regularly getting on the scale is somehow counterproductive or emotionally unhealthy. If you're trying to track an extremely important number that has weird and sometimes large day-to-day fluctuations but over the long term reveals useful information, you want to take more samples, not fewer, to help sort through "noise". As a byproduct, the emotion associated with getting on the scale vanishes, and you also begin to figure out the reasons behind a lot of the day-to-day weirdness.
7. Overestimating the impact of exercise on weight loss. Exercise is beneficial for many reasons and I strongly recommend it, but it’s not the critical component of weight loss. Even the saying that weight loss is 80% diet and 20% exercise doesn’t adequately convey the reality. Your diet must be in order if you're going to achieve any weight loss at all. A bad diet and great exercise doesn’t produce 20% of the results you could otherwise achieve, it produces no results, because unless you’re a pro athlete (and sometimes not even then) it’s impossible to out-exercise a bad diet. Exercise supercharges weight loss that your diet is already causing. Far too many people prioritize exercise at the start, then burn through their motivation without noticeable results.
8. Believing that you won’t have energy for your daily activities if you don’t eat constantly. This one’s probably the most controversial, but it’s important to mention, because it’s really hard to control calorie intake if you feel like you’re doing something unhealthy and bad if you skip a meal or don’t eat when you feel the desire. The objective reality is that unless you’re seriously underweight, your body has more than enough energy reserves to get you through a month without meals, never mind an afternoon – and when you miss a meal, your BMR goes up, as does focus. There is absolutely no reason, in terms of energy or focus, that you need to eat 3+ times a day.
If your diet is crap, though, you will experience sugar withdrawal starting 2-3 hours after your last meal, which is utterly vicious and often mistaken for hunger by people who eat processed carbs/sugar every day (bread, yogurt, juice, etc.). When most people talk about the debilitating effects of hunger, that’s really what they’re experiencing, not the effects of hunger itself.
9. Allowing cheat meals to become cheat days. I’m not saying a cheat meal, defined as eating whatever you want until you’re full (i.e. the first time you find yourself pausing – no going in for another attack run) or until an hour passes, is necessary, but it’s also not much damage. Even someone who seriously pigs out is going to be hard-pressed to consume enough calories before putting the fork down to impact the progress made over the course of the whole previous week. On the other hand, the amount of damage that can be done over the course of a full day is effectively unlimited.
10. Believing you can make consistent change through willpower alone. You almost certainly cannot. We have a limited reservoir of willpower, and if your environment puts a constant strain on your willpower, the latter will crack. To make a consistent change to your habits, you must change your environment to be conducive to good habits, which often requires lifestyle sacrifices or social awkwardness that people don’t want to engage in (which is one of the major reasons many want to believe they can get this done on willpower alone). The book Atomic Habits by James Clear is an incredibly effective exploration of this concept.
11. Taking too large a first step. In the zeal that comes with the initial burst of motivation to lose weight, nearly everybody makes an ambitious multi-pronged plan that survives for a little while and then collapses, putting them right back at square one, but this time even more demoralized. The hardest but most necessary thing is to restrain oneself and start with one or two modest changes that you are absolutely guaranteed to succeed at in the long term – the goal being in part to modify your self-conception from being “the person who can’t control themselves” to “the person who has total control over their actions”. This doesn’t mean aggressive weight loss is bad or impossible, just that you first need to take the time to lay the groundwork by slowly but surely modifying habits/environment – you’re turning a supertanker that’s usually had years to build up inertia.
12. Not addressing alcohol consumption. If you have a problem with eating, it’s a near-guarantee that if you drink, you’re going to screw up and eat food you shouldn’t, in addition to the caloric damage from the alcohol itself. The issue here not even necessarily being the calories per se, but the loss of control, which derails the building of positive habits and positive self-conception as someone who is capable of being in control. For those who drink more than once a week, alcohol usually has to be one of the first things brought under strict control, or more realistically, at least temporarily eliminated.
