Being a personal trainer in Manhattan, the all too common question I get is, “why am I not losing weight, I do this, that, and the other. Yet I still haven’t dropped down”. Well, there are a lot of variables to take into consideration with weight loss but I’ve found that these 5 tips below seem to be the most common. So let’s jump right into it!
Consistency
It’s pretty much understood that you need to be consistent to have success. Consistency means to hit your markers, goals, and/or habits for more than month a time. If you focus on a nice clean diet and a strong fitness program for x8 weeks, it can show great results. But with that said, for most, you won’t be looking like Daniel Craig at the end of that period. You would need to be consistently working out hard and dieting for much longer to get those types of results.
Trainer Advice:
I would focus on developing habits and focus on accomplishing them. Focusing on small habits and building success through will help the habits become a lifestyle. Keep in mind that when you start off, the habits should be achievable but challenging, it can be small things such as:
- Every Sunday goto the grocery store to have food to prep.
- Workout 3x a week, if it’s a good week x5 🙂
- Drink x8 glasses of water a day- to do so you can have a canteen that has a notch for the amount of times you’ve refilled it.
Expectation
Fitness magazines and many fitness reality TV shows tend to boast crazy results, “lose 100lbs in 3 months”, but for most people this isn’t healthy or achievable. *You can read more about how fitness marketing is infuriatingly full of shit HERE*.
Moving on, I’m sure you’ve seen this but it hits the nail right on the head:
Trainer Advice:
The sooner you learn to block out all the interruption marketing the “fitness professionals” put out, the better off you’ll be. While it’s great to use certain people as inspiration, it becomes toxic when you start trying to compare yourself to them. I hate it when I hear people say, “well so and so has lost X amount of weight and I have only lost this little bit”. They fail to see the main point, which is that they are LOSING weight = awesome! Second, everyone adapts differently and at different rates so it’s not fair to compare (apples to oranges, am I right?), finally the fitness magazines are lying to you- we’ll talk more about that later. Point being is to keep your expectations with reality and to focus on yourself not on what X fitness magazine “says” helped Jennifer Aniston get her amazing body.
Rest
You know the drill, you should try to get around 8-9 hours of sleep. But this is NYC, we work hard so it’s pretty difficult to get the recommended amount of sleep. I can go over all the ways to help you try to get some sleep but Precision Nutrition did a great job HERE.
Rest isn’t just sleep, it also means to take time away from the gym. Most people when starting to hit the gym are super eager and want to go on a crazy high intensity workout non-stop. While this is great, you will eventually burn yourself out and need to rest. It’s a hard pill to swallow, especially when you’re so determined to get your goal, unfortunately this is all part of the process.
Trainer Advice:
Progress isn’t a straight linear line, so you need to add in various intensities to allow your body and mind to recovery. Sometimes it’s great to even just get away from the gym and do your exercise outdoors or at rock climbing center instead, change it up.
Example:
- Day 1- Total Body Weight Training- Intensity = High
- Day 2- Rock Climbing – Intensity = Low-Medium
- Day 3- Outdoor biking – Intensity = Medium to High
- Day 4- Total Body Weight Training Intensity = Medium
- Day 5- Yoga – Intensity = Low
- Day 6- Recovery workout – Intensity = Low
- Day 7 Total Body Weight Training Intensity = High
While this is a pretty active week, you can see that the intensity cycles through and it’s not always at a HIGH intensity.
Hydration
Water is the key to pretty much everything. Without water we can’t survive, so make sure that you’re drinking plenty of water to help your body run efficiently. An efficiently run body can potentially help you lose weight. Dr. Michael Boschmann et al. found that after drinking 17 oz of water had helped the metabolic rate increase by 30%. They also estimate that over the course of a year, if you were to consume 1.5 liters a day you would burn an extra 17,400 calories, for a total weight loss of 5lbs. With that said, I believe there still needs to be further research done to prove that theory, but the point is that water is good for you. Water Research HERE
Trainer Advice:
Pretty simple, drink more water. 🙂
Not Enough
This is going to sounds weird but sometimes people just aren’t eating enough calories. Eat more calories to lose weight, what?!
Your body is very smart and it wants to stay where it’s at, so when you constantly in a calorie deficit, you may initially drop down but it will eventually plateau. This means you can’t always be in a negative calorie balance, otherwise you’re going to get stuck or even lose lean muscle mass = look soft.
Trainer Advice:
There are many variables to this but generally speaking you can do a *calorie cycle or you can take off a couple days and allow yourself to eat a calorie surplus. Either one is beneficial but the point is that you can’t always be in the negative.
*Calorie cycling- means you’re changing the total amount of calories taken in per day or per week.
Example:
- Day 1: 2600 Kcal
- Day 2: 1800 Kcal
- Day 3: 2200 Kcal
Train smart,