We’re bombarded with advertisements, advice, inspiration and motivation to get fit and lose weight. Especially at this time of year:
Six-week training programs that promise your leanest body ever.
Diets that’ll get you slim in time for summer.
Celebrities sharing their shake and smoothie recipes.
Apps that count calories.
Endless adverts for bum-sculpting leggings.
We’re taking an interest in keeping fit and healthy, which is great. But. What sells doesn’t necessarily deliver results.
Let me put it this way: If the get-lean program delivers you abs in six-weeks, then why don’t they stay there? If counting calories gives you more control, then why do you still feel so anxious and guilty around food?
At a population level, things don’t add up either. The incidence of obesity and chronic lifestyle illnesses such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes are at an all-time high. Mental health conditions – particularly eating disorders – are experiencing similar rates of increase.
Something's clearly broken, and I’d argue that a large part of the problem stems from our underestimating the complexity of this whole health and fitness game.
Every time I hear “it’s as simple as calories in versus calories out” I want to cry. At its worst, focusing solely on calorie (or energy) intake says that consuming eight standard Mars bars (1,824kcal) a day would be better than getting a varied diet that clocks in at 2,000kcal.
Sure, energy intake plays an important role. But the body’s nutritional requirements, and our subsequent physical and mental health, demand a whole lot more consideration than calories alone. For starters, we also need a broad range of proteins, fats, wholegrains, fruit, vegetables, fibre and water.
If you’ve ever reached for a tub of ice cream/glass of wine/bag of chips at the end of a tough day, you’ll also know there’s more that drives our desire to eat than straightforward belly-rumbling hunger and an innate need to survive. The assumption that we can simply manipulate our food intake in accordance with our weight loss goals overlooks the entire field of human psychology and does a huge injustice to the complexities of the human brain.
Meanwhile, the majority of calories out, go on simply keeping our bodies ticking over. In fact, basal metabolic rate (BMR) accounts for up to 75 per cent of the average person’s daily energy expenditure. Another 10 per cent goes on digesting the food we eat; something called the thermic effect of food (TEF). And just 15 per cent (the equivalent of about 300kcal) is spent on physical activity…
Which means you’ll be looking at a heck of a lot more exercise each – and every – day if you want to substantially increase it. That’s going to be quite the time commitment.
And here comes more bad news: Research shows that if we are consistently more active, our bodies adapt so that we expend less energy. In other words, our bodies become more efficient at burning calories.
So, it seems that upping our exercise to swing the balance in our calories in/calories out equation might not be the panacea we possibly thought it was. Another cliché, but a better one, springs to mind: "You can’t outrun a bad diet".
On top of all this, we humans love a quick fix.
Rapid weight loss and get-fit-quick programs are a case in point: Fancy marketing lures us in and promises radical results in a short space of time. Minimal effort for maximum results? Who would say no to that?!
Feeling super motivated, we have a tendency to set lofty goals. We expect to be working out five, six, seven days a week. Keen to drop some weight, we might also cut our food intake drastically.
But it’s not long before the motivation wanes or something unexpected crops up and derails us. We go from feeling invincible to feeling tired and hungry… to feeling miserable… to feeling guilty for missing a workout or overindulging at the weekend… to feeling helpless… to feeling hopeless… to giving up.
Then we berate ourselves for our seeming lack of self-control and blame ourselves for another failed attempt. Because it can’t be the diet or the exercise program; they were producing results, right?
Full of guilt and shame, with a knock to our confidence, and with no obvious alternative, it’s only a matter of time before we’re subscribing to yet another diet or exercise program and subjecting ourselves to the same thing, all over again.
It’s what I refer to as the perpetual diet and exercise rollercoaster ride.
We’re either off or we’re on. And when we’re on, it’s one hell of a bumpy ride. And herein lies the problem: Whatever we’re doing when we’re on, it’s not sustainable.
The good news is that no past ‘failure’ was your fault: The diet and exercise program you followed was never designed to set you up for long-term success in the first place. Sure, it might have delivered some short-term success, but then it abandoned you, leaving you to maintain an unrealistic and impractical level of energy, motivation, restraint, hunger, pain, commitment for ever more.
Positive eating behaviours, sustainable exercise habits, body confidence, self-esteem… these things don’t simply slot into place, enabling us to live our best lives, as soon as we grasp the calorie in/calorie out equation. Or make it to the end of a 6-week bootcamp.
The interplay between our genetics, physiology, psychology, environment, social surroundings and past experiences forms a complex web, unique to every single one of us.
In fact, what may be the simple adopting of a new habit for you, could be a long, slow and painful battle for me.
Heck, at the end of the day you only need to look around to see it’s clearly not straightforward, or else every other woman wouldn’t be on a diet, struggling with her weight, or battling with her body. And there wouldn’t be a booming health and fitness industry.
We need a better way. A kinder way. A more sustainable way. And that means flipping our approach to health and fitness on its head.
Instead of dieting or calorie counting:
Focus on preparing and eating good food that nourishes your body
Learn how to read and respond to your body's’ hunger and satiety cues
Recognise the difference between hunger and appetite, and recognise when you might be using food to respond to your emotions
Practice mindful eating
Learn how to eat appropriately for the type and volume of physical activity you do
Tune into and understand your body, so you can anticipate times when you might be more or less hungry
Learn how to enjoy your favourite foods free from fear, guilt or anxiety.
Instead of working out to burn calories and seeing exercise as a penance:
See exercise as a tool that can help you feel fit and strong, improve flexibility, balance, and coordination, preserve bone and muscle mass, reduce chronic pain, help you sleep better, reduce stress, give you more energy and help you feel good about yourself
Learn to embrace exercise as an opportunity for self-care
Choose a type of exercise that you enjoy or that affords additional benefits, whether they’re relaxing, social, mentally challenging or involve being outdoors and in nature
Learn how to train efficiently and effectively for your goals.
Instead of setting super high expectations and going in all guns blazing:
Be honest about what you can realistically achieve given your time constraints and competing priorities. You can always raise the bar once you've got a few wins on the board
Understand that making and breaking habits takes time (longer than a 6-week bootcamp) and you’ll need to be patient
Ask yourself, is this something you’re willing to do or change permanently? Because it’s not going to be a case of do it once and it’s done. Unless you’re able to maintain the changes you’re about to make, slipping back into old habits is inevitable
Focus on less tangible measures of progress, like sleep quality, energy levels, mood, self-esteem, confidence, posture, moving about pain-free
Celebrate the effort, not just the wins.
I get it. It's not quick, or flashy, or sexy. But if you really want to make changes that will have a positive impact on your physical and mental health - for the long term - then it might be time to hop off and away from the shiny diet-and-exercise-rollercoaster and try a new approach.
Need help getting started? Get in touch and we decide on the best approach for you.
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