Are you dieting and exercising in order to reduce fat and creating a calorie deficit but aren’t seeing the weight loss results that you want?
Over the years, the status quo has told us that in order to lose weight, all we have to do is to burn more calories than we are consuming. Sounds pretty easy, right? Well, while we can agree that it may work at first, the vast majority of people who try this method of losing weight will most likely gain it all back again in just a few months. As part of an improved approach, a mindset shift, this time from a technical perspective, is required to begin walking the path of a sustainable physical transition. We have worked with many people who lost a considerable amount of fat years ago and are still living the results.
Assess your physical condition
It is often recommended to our clients to start an assessment of one’s current physical state with a blood test, in order for us to gain the most accurate information needed when planning around each individual’s condition. Most of the time, there may be unknown, underlying issues which can hinder your fat loss journey or fitness plan of action. Ranging from thyroid-related issues to undiagnosed diabetes, the list of unknown hindrances can be quite varied and undetectable unless further tests are carried out.
Getting Proper, Professional Consultation
Fat loss is one of the most common and arguably the most difficult body feedback to address. These are all gaps which should be tackled through professional consultancy so that best practice solutions. Health and fitness are individual and personal, not a one-size-fits-all recipe. A course of action that might have worked out for your friend will not necessarily work for you. Each and every one of us are built differently, with individual body type and needs.
Calorie Restriction Can Do More Damage Than Good
When you start to restrict your body, your system doesn’t instantly recognise that you are on a diet. This is when the problems can occur. Your body doesn’t know that you are trying to lose weight; it may as well think that you have no supply of food and that you are going to starve. The thing is that we as human beings are genetically hard-wired to resist weight loss. Our bodies are designed to naturally retain fat, rather than lose it. You might see yourself lose weight for some time by calorie restrictions, but unfortunately you will also lean mass. It is not a sustainable form of physical health and fitness. Your body begins to conserve energy, making you more lethargic and physically makes it harder to train, slowing your rate of fat burning. This is because the body feels that you need to conserve energy, kicking into survival mode. This is where the diet ends for many people, at which point most people start to gain weight more than they had lost.
Even if on the next time round you believe to have some more motivation, you will effectively fall back into the same cycle again and again, where the same results will happen. By just reducing calories on their own, you are just allowing your body to reactivate the ancestral hard-wired mechanism.
Hormone Balances Play a Huge Part
There is another way of thinking about weight loss or let’s say fat loss. This way is more in sync with how our bodies work. Here we need to talk about hormones. Hormones are chemical messengers that use your bloodstream to travel throughout your body to your tissues and organs. Imagine a network of messages that communicate different messages with different parts of your body. There are five of the most important hormones that help our body function properly; Testosterone, Estrogen, Cortisol, Melatonin and Insulin. Melatonin, for example, is the hormone responsible for our sleep and waking cycles every night and day. Cortisol is the stress hormone, which acts as our natural alert system. While it’s helpful, consistently high cortisol levels can cause mental health fatigue, heart problems and even play a part in weight gain.
Now, let’s take insulin, the fat storage hormone. Understanding insulin is crucial for us - it makes it possible for your organs, liver, and fat to absorb glucose. High insulin levels promote weight gain and low insulin levels promote weight loss. Now ask yourself where the calories come into this? You see you can have a calorie deficit and still get high levels of glucose or high levels of insulin. Instead of getting caught up on calorie deficit, our focus should be on the real marker that can boost change, which is regulating our insulin levels.
Whilst caloric deficit may be a good entry to reduce fat, monitoring your insulin levels is far more important when managing fat loss. Calorie deficit brings fat loss in the short term which can be a good start, but rarely produces long term results as much as proper Insulin monitoring and management.