The idea of dieting fills many of us with dread. We often associate it with restriction and missing out. The word carries a lot of emotional baggage, too, especially if we’ve “failed” at diets in the past or have developed fixations on particular foods, demonising them and getting frustrated when we “give in” and eat them.
The word ‘diet’ comes from the Greek word ‘diaita’, meaning ‘way of life’. Unfortunately, the diet industry has promoted unhealthy and unrealistic bodies whilst selling us a “quick fix” narrative and programs of shakes, bars, microwavable meals, books and memberships – anything that can be packaged up and keep us trapped in cycles of weight loss and weight gain. It can be challenging to unlearn these damaging beliefs, but it’s certainly not impossible.
It’s worth noting that it’s easy to overeat because, for most of us in Western society, we are surrounded by highly available, addictive foods. Overeating isn’t a character flaw; it’s what’s bound to happen if we’re not aware of what a healthy intake looks like.
At Another Round, our view on diet is aligned with ‘diatia’ – a long-term lifestyle choice where you keep yourself in a healthy balance and have lots of energy to do the things you love for as long as possible.
There are two instances where people would want to alter their diet significantly; to lose fat or gain muscle. Here we’re focusing on what it takes to lose weight or, more specifically, lose fat.
If you think of a diet as a short-term solution to lose weight for a special occasion, it will be an uphill struggle that will likely end in failure. But if you see it as a long-term change in your eating habits, you’re more likely to stick with it.
In this article, we will go over the key hurdles when trying to stick to a diet, highlighting why diets are difficult to sustain, what to avoid and how to manage your diet plan to achieve your goals.
The most common reason we see people struggle to stick to a diet is because it’s too restrictive, and they’re seeking a quick fix.
Remember that if you didn’t gain the weight in 6 weeks, you probably won’t be able to lose it (and keep it off) in this time, either. Fat loss can be quicker than fat gain, but trying to lose more than 1-1.5lbs of fat per week is not sustainable. If you start a restrictive diet, you’ll likely give up after a few weeks because you’re starving yourself, and food cravings eventually get the better of you. And, frustratingly, many people find that they gain a few extra lbs when this happens.
So, what is a better way to achieve weight loss if a restrictive diet isn't the answer? When we strip back the emotional layer, it’s really simple. If you remove just 500 calories a day from your daily intake – around 150 calories less per meal – you will lose weight in a sustainable way so long as your activity levels remain the same. If you keep that up for three months, you’ll lose a stone at a rate of 1lb/week.
1lb/week may not feel like much, but go and find something in your kitchen that weighs 500g, and that’s what you’ve lost off your body. Understanding weight loss in this way can be incredibly motivating at the start of your weight loss journey.
The first 48 hours of a calorie deficit are usually the hardest as your body adjusts to a lower calorie intake. But get through those first two days and it gets much easier. It helps if you can eat foods that help you feel fuller for longer, such as protein and high-fibre foods.
And know that you don’t have to go cold turkey on your diet. Instead, you can start by tapering your calorie intake on the first couple of days, taking out 200 calories on the first day, 350 on the second, and building up to 500 on the third day. This approach helps your body adjust to the deficit more easily and could help you get through those first few days.
There are many reasons your diet might not be working. Sometimes it can be as simple as underestimating how much you are really eating in a day. But often, it’s about your goals and motivations. If these are unrealistic or misaligned, you could be setting yourself up for failure.
We tend to think willpower is the biggest determiner of success when dieting. But that’s not the whole story. If you fail at a diet, it’s not a reflection on you as a person. There was probably something in the plan that was unsuitable for you, for example:
For the best results, a tailored diet plan will consider your lifestyle, activity levels and goals, giving you the power to make the right decisions whilst still enjoying the foods you like most.
Extreme dieting can have damaging repercussions. It’s mentally challenging and can impact your mood, affecting all areas of your life. So if you feel like you’ve tried everything and nothing’s working, it might be time to speak to a professional and make sure you’re doing what’s right for you.
A diet should fit your lifestyle, not the other way round. This is the problem with restrictive diets bound by strict rules; you’re trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. If you can account for having some of the food and drinks you enjoy in your diet every week, you can still go to events, weddings, and pretty much any social occasion. You can still have a great time and not derail your progress.
This approach is called flexible dieting and gives you complete control of what and when you eat and drink. It is the only method guaranteed to work for both aesthetic progress and hitting athletic goals over the long term.
You'll hit your goal if you track and stick to the macro and calorie guidelines set. Sometimes you’ll need tweaks along the way, but it always works in the long run. You can't say that about any other diet method.
With flexible dieting, there are no good or bad foods; they just have to fit your calories and macros. Permitting yourself to enjoy your favourite junk food on occasion or a few beers at the weekend makes this approach sustainable for life.
How does it work? You track your daily calorie intake in an app (usually myfitnesspal) according to pre-set ratios of protein, fat and carbs. An example might be:
2000 calories per day
30% protein, 40% carbs, 30% fat
Either your coach can set the calories and macro ratios according to your goals, or you can set them yourself based on your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). Then all you have to do is keep track of what you eat, ensure you hit your daily goals and stay under the calorie limit.
Even better, if fat loss is your goal, you can come under your calorie limit on some days and add those unused calories onto other days. It’s not uncommon for some of our members to be able to consume 3,000+ calories every Saturday and still lose fat.
Whilst a healthy, balanced diet is the best course for life, we don’t recommend that you track your food intake forever – far from it. But now and again, it can be a helpful exercise to remind you of what you’re really eating and allow you to change your body composition if that’s your goal.
For those times in our lives when we have new and specific goals, like losing fat or gaining muscle, we must consciously change our eating habits to succeed.
Flexible dieting, or food tracking, gives you a great sense of the calorie and macronutrient density of foods. So when you’ve been tracking for a while, it becomes easier to make educated guesses and sensible decisions to keep you at a healthy weight.
How long you diet for depends on your goals, but if you’re going to be dieting for longer than 12-16 weeks, it’s a good idea to schedule ‘diet breaks’. This is a way of breaking the diet before the diet breaks you. The objective is to take a week off the diet to relax from the framework and stop tracking (being careful not to be irresponsible).
One week of diet break in every 12-16 week block is a good ratio; it gives you something to look forward to and helps you stick to your diet.
There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, as it depends on your preferences and goals. However, if you follow these simple tips, you’ll be broadly on the right track:
Read ingredients labels and understand what a balanced plate and average portion sizes look like. Also, be wary of ‘reduced fat’ or ‘low fat’ foods; they often have higher sugar or salt content to make the food taste more like the original so always check the label.
You probably will find it hard at first, but don’t give up. Instead, stick to what you can maintain and gradually build up. Persistence will help you develop long-term habits that will improve your health.
Maintaining healthy eating habits can be challenging, but with the proper support, it can be easier than you think. Talk to your family and friends about what you are trying to do, and get them on side. It helps if those you share mealtimes with aren’t undermining your efforts with large portions or hidden calories (like cooking with lots of butter and oil).
If you’re dieting for fat loss, aim for the most bang for your buck in terms of calories vs satiety. Snacking on fruit (avocado is the rare exception) is a good strategy as fruit is typically low calorie, very filling, and gets you a load of nutrients and vitamins.
Goals help you stay on track as they remind you why you started in the first place. You can either set the goal yourself or speak to a professional who can help develop a tailored plan for you.
High protein foods help muscle recovery, which is essential after a strength training workout. Protein also makes you feel fuller for longer, so it’s worth the calories in your daily food plan instead of something less filling like crisps or biscuits.
Drinking a large proportion of your daily calorie limit is easily done, but you’re better off saving your calories to fill up on nutritious food instead. Choose low-calorie drinks, e.g. replace a pint of beer with gin and slimline tonic to halve your calorie intake, or swap a full-fat Coke for a Coke Zero. And make sure you’re drinking around two litres of water per day to stay hydrated and help you feel fuller.
Aesthetic change is gradual and subtle. Measuring progress using a combination of the data on the scales and photos of yourself can help with motivation. Just be sure to capture your starting weight and photo, and after 2-4 weeks, you should start to see the difference. You might not see the weight go down every day. Some days, you might even see it increase – especially if you’re experiencing hormonal changes. Don’t get disheartened; instead, focus on the long-term downward trend in your weight.
The principle of Keto is removing the majority of the carbs in your diet. This often results in significant weight loss in the first week and continued losses weekly, but it is tough to maintain.
Some Keto dieters lose up to 10lbs in a single week.
But weight loss isn’t the same as fat loss. Keto works so quickly because cutting 1 gram of carbohydrates or glycogen will remove 3 grams of water, which makes up a large proportion of the weight many of us hold in our bodies.
"This is why a low-carbohydrate diet tends to make people lose quite a lot of weight in the first few days. The weight loss is almost entirely due to glycogen and water." – Anita Bean, The Complete Guide to Sports Nutrition 7th Edition
Keto can be hard to keep going for extended periods, and many people struggle to keep the weight off when completing a course. But because of the initial quick results, it feels like a magic fat-burning diet.
If you have a goal to reach quickly, then Keto can help for a quick fix but will result in abandoning many of the foods you enjoy temporarily to reach your goal, and you will have lost mostly water weight, not fat.
Measuring your progress is key to keeping yourself both accountable and motivated.
There are two at-home ways of doing this; using data from bathroom scales and visual aids like photos of yourself or looking in the mirror.
For both, timing is critical for accuracy. You will usually look different post-workout from how you look pre-workout. You will probably weigh more in the evening or after the weekend than in the morning or mid-week. Whichever method you use for tracking progress, make sure to measure in the same state every time – we recommend first thing in the morning, mid-week.
Many of us go on a diet to lose weight for aesthetic reasons, and measuring progress is key as it’s hard to see, particularly in the early days.
Looking at ourselves in the mirror can be very disheartening – we don’t tend to see change at all. However, if you look at two photos of yourself, four weeks apart, nine times out of ten you’ll see a difference, even if it’s small.
You can also measure progress in the way your clothes fit. For example, you might notice that a tight pair of jeans start to feel a little looser, and that t-shirt you couldn’t wear suddenly fits again.
As with any form of data, it’s rarely a) 100% accurate or b) the only measurement you should consider.
Be wary when using at-home body fat scales as they often miss half your body. They usually measure from one foot, up your legs, and then down to the other foot. The inaccuracy can be up to 10% compared to a professional machine. It’s better to use the bathroom scales once a week to gauge whether your weight is going down overall.
Members often ask us: “if I’m building muscle through more exercise, will my weight still go down?”. The answer is yes. If you’re trying to lose weight, you’re unlikely to be building significant muscle. But even if you are, this levels out very quickly, so your weight should go down overall if losing fat is your primary goal.
Remember that your weight fluctuates, and especially for women, this can be up to 2-4 lbs/week. However, your weight should decrease over an extended period, so measuring once a week can help give you a good indicator.
Using data to measure your progress isn’t about chasing a number on the scale. It’s about seeing the number change over time as an indicator of progress. It’s likely that as your athletic performance improves, you might find that tracking a number on the scale isn’t that important to you anymore. Instead, you’ll be more interested in how you feel, how you move and how much energy you have.
Once you have accepted that weight loss won’t happen overnight and you are committed to making permanent lifestyle changes that will benefit your health, you will soon start to see progress, and it may even feel easy.
Fat loss is inevitable when you are in a calorie deficit for more than a few days, and often all you need to do is maintain this consistency until you reach your goal weight.
When you’ve made nutritional choices that align with your needs and goals, your body will start functioning more effectively, and you’ll find that you hit your goals quicker.
The changes don’t need to be drastic; they should be tailored to you and easy to sustain. Maintaining a healthy, unrestrictive diet is the key to success.
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