For Fat-Loss, Focus on Diet First
You’ve probably heard this before: “You can’t out-train (or out-exercise) a bad diet.” And yet, we all try to do so. Even I used to. You strap on the Garmin watch, or look at the calories burned calculator on the treadmill or bike or elliptical. You watch it sloooooowly tick upward as you reflect on the food you “can’t believe” you ate.
Weight Watchers and other diet plans give you extra points or calories or macros if you exercise. Instagram shows athletes “re-fueling” or “re-feeding”. Or having a post-workout meal that rivals Thanksgiving.
Most everywhere you look, you see exercise and diet wrapped together, and together affecting your weight, size, and shape.
It’s no wonder that some of my clients have a hard time believing that nutrition, more than exercise, will affect their fat-loss goals.
Why Nutrition:
Two studies this week looked at the role nutrition plays in a healthy weight. One study compared US children to hunter-gatherers in the Amazon. The other looked at low- and middle-income countries, most of which suffer the double burden of malnutrition. That is, when obesity and undernourishment occurs together.
You can read more about each of these studies in my Sunday snapshot, or through the references below. In a nutshell, both studies support previous findings that nutrition plays a bigger role in our weight/fat gain or loss, than exercise. (And yes, that is a high-level nutshell)
Now, exercise definitely plays a role in overall health. It affects the physique. It improves the way your body uses the calories you feed it. But, as the saying goes, you cannot out-exercise a bad diet.
Accepting this will help you hit your weight/fat-loss goals. Here’s how.
One Thing at a Time:
You simply can’t make a bunch of changes at once and expect it to be sustainable. That’s where most New Year’s Resolutions go wrong, and why most fail by Valentine’s Day.
The brain loves patterns, routines, habits. Most behavior is just that: routine, habit, patterns. And most behavior makes sense, when you really take the time to pick it apart. Often, these “bad choices” that “blow our diet” or new exercise routine, aren’t bad choices. They are coping mechanisms.
Eating the tempting food or skipping the workout, are your brain’s way of coping with stress, fear, anxiety, a sense of feeling unsafe. Whether you realize it or not.
When we make a big lifestyle overhaul, the first day or so may go just fine, but eventually, the brain is like: Wait, what? No. Too much. And we start battling with ourselves.
As behavior change pro Krista Scott Dixon says in this fantastic article, such change is akin to a traumatic experience. So of course, you’re going to cope and seek comfort in your old behaviors.
To outsmart this and really make change, you want to make one small change at a time. If the goal is weight/fat loss, then it makes sense to focus on the biggest bang for your buck, and tackle your eating habits first, right?
Right. Check out Friday’s article for tips on how to do just that!
References:
The Double Burden of Malnutrition. (2019, December 16). Retrieved from https://www.thelancet.com/series/double-burden-malnutrition.
Urlacher, S. S., Snodgrass, J. J., Dugas, L. R., Sugiyama, L. S., Liebert, M. A., Joyce, C. J., & Pontzer, H. (2019, December 18). Constraint and trade-offs regulate energy expenditure during childhood. Retrieved from https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/12/eaax1065.full.