Stop Worrying About Losing Weight And Focus On Getting Stronger!
“Don’t worry about losing weight” is a bit of an odd suggestion to hear from the fitness industry. But it’s true. One of the most destructive ways new trainees sabotage themselves is by putting entirely way too much priority on the weight scale. Their entire life training beigns to revolve around it and it ends up dragging them down into failure.
What makes it even worse is that the solution is easy; focus on getting stronger! This article is going to break down why putting too much emphasis on burning fat is destroying your success.
Burning Fat Is Actually Very Easy
Now hear me out. The difficult part about losing weight isn’t the physiological process, it’s the mental fortitude required to maintain a healthy style of living. If you have ever tried to lose weight, you know this to be true. We are creatures of habit and changing those habits can be hard.
That being said, when we look at the physiological process, burning fat is very simple and requires you to be in a caloric deficit; in other words, you need to burn more calories than you consume. Most professional dieticians and health coaches suggest a simple 300-500 deficit for the majority of people with the upper end being 1,000 calories for those whose weight is causing health issues. These numbers are to mitigate muscle loss and prevent higher levels of metabolic adaptation (your metabolism will eventually slow down to meet the calories you eat)
So that’s what you need to do, be in a 500 caloric deficit daily. This is incredibly easy to achieve through diet and being involved in a proper strength and conditioning program. For example, a strength training program with correct intensity and progression will burn about 300 calories an hour (conservative estimate). Then, merely not eating a banana and switching from whole milk to almond milk will come close to those other 200 calories. Add in taking your dog for a walk and you’ve surpassed 500 calories.
These numbers are a bit more complex when you're trying to determine how many calories to eat as most calculators account for the exercise. However, the point is that reaching 500 calories through exercise and strength training is not hard.
There’s no need to try to optimize every single aspect for maximal fat loss. In fact, that can ruin your workouts.
Ineffective Workouts
One of my biggest pet peeves is to hear people going to lift weights to lose weight. Now, don’t get me wrong; you can definitely lose weight doing weight training! I just mentioned the calories you can burn.
However, burning fat is not the main focus when you lift weights; it’s to build muscle! When you use caloric burn as your main variable when choosing a resistance training program, you are neglecting it’s main benefit. Therefore, you often see people using methods that are inferior for building muscle such as HIIT or circuits. These are great for improving VO2max and muscular endurance but to build muscle.
Sure you might burn slightly more calories, but you’re also not building muscle. Remember, building muscle will not only make you look better, it will also increase your BMR (i.e. your body will burn more calories). Plus, any extra calories you may burn can easily be accounted for with your diet. Or, better yet, just add in one round of HIIT after your strength training.
In fact, when you look at professional trainees and athletes, their workouts don’t vary that much when trying to lose weight or gain weight, their diet does,
Your diet dictates if you lose or gain weight, not your training.
Weight Loss Isn’t Fat Loss (And The Scale Doesn’t Know)
If I could get my clients to stop using scales or “body scans”, I would. I have seen these cause more problems than actually help. Weight scale merely measure your body mass at that given point in time and makes no differentiation between muscle mass, fat mass, water, glycogen stores, excess waste (pee and poo), etc. While scales can be used for a reference, they do not show the whole story.
Some think they can get around this with “body scans” yet they are also terribly misleading and highly inaccurate. Most in-home body composition scales use what’s called BIA (Bioelectric Impedance Analysis) which pass electricity through the body. And that’s it. There are many factors that limit its effectiveness but it’s been concluded; “ ‘it’s’ large errors for an individual limit its clinical application”. In other words, it’s readings aren’t reliable.
In fact, this study found an 8% error in using BIA for measuring body fat%. To be clear, that means if you’re BF% was 15%, BIA could read 7% or 23%.
What does this have to do with worrying about fat-loss? People who fall victim for this push of fat-loss are the same ones who live and die by the scale. Stop looking at the scale and start looking at how much you bench, squat, and deadlift.
