How To Heal Emotional Eating

Emotional Eating is one tough subject, as is how to heal emotional eating.

It’s tough because writing this Blog I want to make sure that it is nuanced and careful enough to show empathy with what you are struggling with and show you the action steps to try and help you move forward.

It’s tough as well, because of how much you are suffering with it, and the difficult work that you will likely have to do to unpick your emotional eating behaviours in order to rebuild your relationship with food, and in truth, yourself.

The next most important thing to say here is that there is an inherent link between emotional eating, disordered eating and eating disorders. It is a sliding scale of severity, but I would encourage you to reach out to a Medical Professional if you feel like you may have any of the following eating disorders:

• Anorexia Nervosa - severe food restriction and sometimes extreme exercising and other purging behaviours

• Bulimia Nervosa - repeatedly binging on large amounts of food and then purging it

• Muscle Dysmorphia - affecting men more than women, a disruptive obsession with musculature and physique. The individual will fixate on obtaining the ‘perfect’ form of musculature.

• Orthorexia Nervosa - someone becomes so obsessed with planning a perfect diet that it disrupts their life.

There are 12 eating disorders and if your experience isn’t represented above then please head here to find out more.

Added to that there are some excellent charities that will be able to help you as well:

• BEAT - UK

• NEDA - America

• Butterfly Foundation - Australia

Despite there being a link between eating disorders and emotional eating, I am not a medical professional. I will not be dealing with how to help you with an eating disorder. This blog will be about how to heal your emotional eating tendencies. If you recognise yourself to have any of the above eating disorders then please contact one of the charities above, or see your GP; please do this.

The only other thing I want to say is to thank you for being here. Thank you for trusting my words to try and help you through such a difficult topic.

Thank you for being open and willing to do the work involved in improving your relationship with food, and yourself as well.

It can be overcome. It can be worked on each and every day, and I have every faith you can conquer this.

So take my hand, and let’s help you figure this out so that you can stop being overwhelmed and controlled by your emotional eating behaviours.

We will find solutions.

I promise.

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Table of Contents for How To Heal Emotional Eating:

1. What triggers/causes emotional eating?

2. Strategies to stop emotional eating

3. How to improve your relationship with food

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What Triggers/Causes Emotional Eating?

This is a big list - and even the list I have curated here doesn’t cover it all, simply because the causes would be very different for everyone.

• Stress

• Boredom

• Feeling unheard

• Feeling unappreciated

• Feeling overweight

• Feeling lonely

• Food guilt

• The need for affection

• The Media

• Living in a fat-phobic society

• Medical concerns

• Feeling out of control

• Lack of self-confidence

• Lack of self-esteem

• Addiction to food

This Blog post will reach thousands and thousands of people, and they will all resonate with something on that list. This is good news for you because it shows how normal it is. It shows that you’re not the only person who struggles with this and that you aren’t alone.

And not being alone is always a good place to be.

I can remember two very clear occasions when emotional eating took me over. I am a human being with a good understanding of my emotional self, I don’t suppress emotions and I do have a balanced relationship with food.

The first was when my agent, who I had been with since I left Drama School, told me that he could no longer represent me.

The second was when I split up with one of my past girlfriends.

On both occasions, I responded to my emotions with alcohol - and that does seem to be the food I go to when I do emotionally react to food.

However, on both occasions, I knew that I was emotionally resilient for that reaction to not embed itself into me as a habit.

I had two things helping me here.

The first is my resilience. I do think of myself as more resilient than your average person, I don’t think you could be a semi-professional football referee and not be a resilient human.

The second was the fact I was responding with alcohol. That put a natural barrier in place for me to not allow it to become a habit - because I know how addictive such a substance can be, and because of this my objective brain will always take over.

The causes of my reactions are quite clear here. The ending of two very significant relationships
in my life. Things that meant a great deal to me, and still do.

Please remember this:

“To fix emotional eating, don’t focus on the eating: focus on the emotions”

— Adam Berry

Every time I have a client working with me online on my Strong & Confident Program, and they tell me that they are struggling with emotional eating, they always follow it up with this statement:

“I love food”

We ALL love food.

Truly we do, because food gives us life. Whenever you say this statement or my clients say it to time, they are actually saying:

“I am addicted to the comfort that food gives me when I am feeling vulnerable. Food is my safety”

And this makes much more sense at a neurological level. In the study Mood, food and obesity [1] they illustrate this pathway really clearly:

In the study they also state:

“Reward and gratification associated with food consumption leads to dopamine (DA) production, which in turn activates reward and pleasure centres in the brain. An individual will repeatedly eat a particular food to experience this positive feeling of gratification. This type of repetitive behaviour of food intake leads to the activation of brain reward pathways that eventually overrides other signals of satiety and hunger. Thus, a gratification habit through a favourable food leads to overeating and morbid obesity”

This is critical for your understanding on how emotional eating works. When you eat, you get a hormonal response to the food you are eating, through what is also known as the “feel good” hormone; dopamine.

When you eat, you feel good, at a cellular level. Food bridges the gap for you.

Let's say you have had a disagreement with your boss at work, and they patronised you, made your points or concerns feel worthless and you were frustrated and upset by the whole exchange.

You might then turn to food because of these feelings. By doing that, you know you will get the sense of pleasure and comfort which you are craving.

This pleasure and comfort come in the form of dopamine. The more you practice this routine, the more you will come to rely on it. You also learn to develop this routine in other areas of your life where you might feel vulnerable.

And before you know it, your emotional eating has become a habit, a reflex, that feels out of your control, and the part of this equation that seems easier to fix, is trying to fix the food you are eating, as opposed to the emotions you are feeling, because you physically see the result of the emotions in the food, but seldom in life is trying to change the result of something a worthwhile endeavour without fixing what is causing that result.

The reason I have outlined all of this at the start of this post is so that you can now see why it is so hard to heal emotional eating, you are not just having to wrestle with your emotional core, but also your physiological self.

And that’s ok. It can be worked upon, and understanding your emotional eating in this way will hopefully help you start the process of healing from it. because you can now empathise with yourself a lot more on why it has been so damn hard, as opposed to just feeling like a constant failure every time you try.

So how do you heal from emotional eating…

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Strategies to Stop Emotional Eating

The first thing to say is that you shouldn’t shout at yourself, nor should you think that it is a switch that can be turned off overnight.

You will always feel emotions. You must eat.

We cannot stop these two human things, so just trying to “stop” will be futile, I assure you.

My best piece of advice when it comes to healing emotional eating starts with the following quote which I want you to imprint on your brain.

Space and Time

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

— Viktor E. Frankl

Take that mental picture of the quote…

This is one of the most powerful quotes there is when it comes to understanding human behaviour. Viktor E. Frankl was an Auschwitz survivor during World War Two and after the war, he became a psychologist developing his theory of psychology called logotherapy in Vienna.

Logotherapy is based on the belief that striving to find meaning in life is the primary, most powerful motivating driving force in humanity.

When you are in a pattern of emotional eating there are a series of events that occur which causes you to “emotionally eat”.

1. Conflict occurs which will trigger/upset you with someone else or within yourself

2. Your search for a resolution to the conflict doesn’t end positively.

3. No human collaborative resolution occurs.

4. You find emotional resolution in the food you eat.

It is the lack of resolution in steps two and three that drive you to emotional eating.

The timeframe will always differ based on different situations and how strong the emotions are or how intense the conflict is, but in every situation there is one common occurrence:

You are failing to find a resolution to your conflict.

In the quote above “resolution” is what Viktor E. Frankl is referring to when he says “space".

When you are faced with a conflict, the most important thing to do is to develop your own space. When we are in conflict as humans we often look for a resolution to conflict from an outer source; another person, a parent, a partner, a child, or a colleague.

The issue you have here is that you aren’t taking responsibility for managing your emotional self, you are allowing others to do it for you…fast forward that ten to twenty years and your whole centred self is dependent on others.

Which removes your own power.

Jim Carey was right:

Or more: you have the power.

And your power to lies in creating space and space is the key to healing you from this complex web of emotional eating.

So how do you create space and time in order to choose a different response to your emotions?

Strategy 1: Sit with uncomfortable emotions

This is a lot harder than it sounds which often means it is the first place to look - the harder the work, likely, the more positive the result.

One of the more obvious ways to create space and time is to simply let time pass. The issue with this is that it will mean sitting in the uncomfortable feelings that are driving you towards emotional eating.

The food you eat is your current solution to these feelings, but you also want to stop using food as the solution to these feelings. Here you need to get objective about the role food is playing in your life in these moments.

When you “fix” these feelings with food it is temporary relief because soon after you begin to feel guilty and upset about the food you just ate, leading you to more uncomfortable emotions. When this occurs you need to work with objectivity towards your food. Recognise this role it is having in this cycle of behaviour and do things to distract yourself from reaching for the food:

- Go for a walk or get some exercise in

- Journal about what caused your emotional state

- Talk to a friend about what happened

- Meditate for 10mins and practice some box breathing

- Reflect on how the situation could have occurred differently, what you weren’t happy about with what happened and how you might re-approach a similar situation in the future.

All of these actions are designed to help you process the emotion and distract you away from the need to reach for that food. To pattern interrupt your default setting, so that over time you can develop a different reflex in reaction to an emotional trigger.

Strategy 2: Have a structured diet

There are very few things in fitness that a structured diet will not help tremendously with, and emotional eating is high on that list.

In this day and age, we don’t protect our meal times as much as we need to. Whether that is protecting the time we actually eat, or whether it is protecting the moment we have with our food from distractions and other intrusions which de-values the role food has in your life.

Your body is then constantly guessing when it is going to be fed, and how it is going to be fed, and your relationship with food is equally compromised because hormonally you have a lack of regulation, and you aren’t valuing how food can impact your life each and every day.

By eating in a structured manner, you will manage your hunger hormones in a much more level way, and this will allow you to not overreact to your hunger signals when you are feeling stressed in other parts of your life.

A structured diet is also the first step to repairing your relationship with food in all areas - something that you should always be looking to improve, to help heal emotional eating. You have a right to eat, you have a right to nourish yourself with food, as opposed to allowing your emotions to dominate all aspects of your diet.

A structured diet should look like this:

• Breakfast.

• Lunch.

• Dinner.

• Two snacks.

• Each meal must fit on one plate.

• You should also eat uninterrupted and participate as much as possible in the making and creating of the food.

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FOR MORE HELP wITH THIS HEAD HERE:

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Strategy 3: Sleep

A lot like having a more improved structure to your diet, there are few things that optimal sleep doesn’t help cure. The issue here is that optimal sleep isn’t as available to everyone as being able to structure a diet properly is.

I do believe, deep down, you know this next statement to be true: lack of sleep equals more emotional responses to the world around you.

We are all more cranky when we are tired. We are all more sensitive when we are tired. We are all more stressed when we are tired.

This means that we are also a lot more emotional when we are tired, and therefore more susceptible to emotional eating.

There is a part of your brain which is responsible for your emotional responses to the world, it is known as your amygdala. The less sleep you have, the more active your amygdala is, and therefore the more likely you are to respond emotionally to stimuli around you.

Therefore the more likely you are to try and fix that feeling with food.

This is important for you to know for two reasons. The first is that there are some easy wins here for you. If you can improve your sleep, in any way that is accessible to you, then you will naturally be more likely to improve the chances of healing your emotional eating.

The other reason is that you now know that you can take action to improve your emotional eating in an accessible way, because we all have to sleep right. So by optimising that, you have a clear and direct path to improving this aspect of your life, overnight.

Some top tips I have for improving your sleep can be found here.

Strategy 4: Stop trying to change the size of your body

If emotional eating is a constant recurrence in your life and that is paired with constantly trying to lose weight then your desire to lose weight will always be a difficult process.

This comes down to the foundations you are setting yourself up with.

To lose weight and to be able to sustain it you will inevitably need to have a good relationship with food, as well as yourself.

One of the key aspects of building a better relationship with food, is loving the role food has n your life, as well as loving yourself within that process, and for as long as you are eating in a guilt-laden emotional state, then you will forever be destroying that relationship with the food you are eating.

Food is love. Food is nourishment.

In the same way, I am always telling my clients that the gym is a place to get stronger, I am telling them that their food is not there to be demonized, in fact, is a thing in your life to be celebrated and enjoyed.

Food is not destorying your body. It is sustaining it.

When you only view the food you are eating through the prism of how it is causing you to gain weight, as opposed to it actually keeping you alive, then you will inevitably begin to walk down a path of developing a toxic relationship with your food.

But you can’t avoid eating your food.

And then you reach emotionally to this frustrating situation you are in.

This leads to more food, which leads to more destruction of how you feel about the food and yourself.

The best way to stop this cycle is to stop trying to lose weight and start trying to build better habits and relationships with those habits surrounding your food.

And then by taking the pressure of your physique away from your food, and building these better habits, you will more than likely end up with a much stronger and more solid foundation to set a weight loss goal when you feel in a much stronger place with which to do that.

Some things that you will need to work on to get into this stronger position would be:

• Releasing your guilty associations with food

• Engaging in a much more balanced diet

• Sticking to structured eating as outlined above

• Keeping yourself hydrated

• Not feeling exhausted at the prospect of being on a diet aka “diet fatigue”

• No longer view yourself as “on a diet” or associate with a particular dietary style

The aim for you is to turn around that mental war you have with yourself which is associated with trying to lose weight. Once you do that, by working on the bullet points I laid out above, then you can begin to see the positive role food has in your life.

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How to improve your relationship with food

Being an emotional eater is a sign that you don’t have a very positive relationship with food.

And if you start taking on everything else I have outlined in this article, then I would hazard a guess your relationship with food will start to improve.

However, there are some other signs that you might need to work on your relationship with food:

• Avoidance of “bad” foods

• Speaking about food in the negative most of the time

• Speaking about yourself in the negative most of the time

• You have “can” and “cannots’” in terms of what you eat outside of medical reasons

• You believe certain foods are “good” and certain foods are “bad”

• You are stressed when eating in a social setting because the food choice is out of your control

• You ignore your hunger cues and fullness cues

• You are overly reliant on calorie counting to control your food

• You have had a history of yo-yo dieting

• You over-exercise in response to overeating

• You engage in disordered eating patterns or engage in eating disorder behaviour

You might not relate to all the things on that list, but you probably have one or two that really stood out to you.

But don’t worry, like any relationship, if you put in the work you can get more out of it and heal what is going on here.

1. Releasing yourself from dichotomous thinking

When I say: “Pizza”, “Doughnuts”, “Alcohol”, “Sugar”, or “Cake” what is the first word you think of in relation to these foods?

And when I say “Salad”, “Vegetables”, “Water”, “Protein”, or “Unprocessed Foods” - what word springs to mind?

This is dichotomous thinking; believing that certain things only fall into a good or bad category.

The truth is that all food has a place in your life - all food nourishes a part of yourself. A doughnut can be like eating a small hug, which has an emotional nourishment to it, and eating a broccoli stem might have a nutrient value that provides nourishment.

Either way, you are being nourished by that food.

Food has no moral value, and by telling yourself that eating a bag of crisps is naughty or bad for you, you are essentially telling yourself that you are naughty or bad.

And over time, if you do this with everything you eat, that will have an effect on your self-esteem - believe me, I have seen it in thousands of clients over the years.

It is also standing in the way of your ability to actually lose weight, as this study [2] describes:

“We conclude that holding dichotomous beliefs about food and eating may be linked to a rigid dietary restraint, which in turn impedes people’s ability to maintain a healthy weight.””

— PMID: 25903250

This thinking is often related to diet culture in the sense that you have an ingrained belief that eating “good” foods will lead you to lose weight and change your physique.

If you are trying to heal emotional eating, then that should be the goal, and in order to get there, understand that you require a balance of all foods in your diet because that is part of the process of healing this relationship.

If you do feel like you need a physique goal associated to this project, then I would suggest getting stronger should be your goal and that will help release the pressure of always trying to lose weight.

Remember, nothing bad can come of getting stronger…can it?

2. You have to give yourself permission to eat anything

This relates to my first point about dichotomous thinking.

But knowing there are no good or bad foods is one thing, actually allowing yourself to eat that way is a whole other.

In my experience, the lack of permission to eat anything always comes from a place of fear.

And fear is:

False

Expectation

Appearing

Real

Your fear of eating a McDonald’s is that it will lead you to gain body fat. When in truth, it really doesn’t.

A common misconception here is that 3500kcal equals one pound of body fat. In strict terms, it’s actually between 3,436kcal and 3,752kcal.

But if you were to eat 3,500kcals in one sitting then you still wouldn’t gain 1lb of body fat. This is because your metabolism is perpetually working. You have to digest the food, you are likely moving when you eat it and still moving throughout the day, you are breathing, you might be fidgeting and all of this leads to you burning calories.

Therefore the key message here is:

You need to eat 3500kcals MORE than you burn each day to gain 1lb of body fat

One Large McDonalds Big Mac Meal has around 1,320kcals in it. Three of those in one day would be around 3960kcals. So to gain one pound of body fat, to be eating 3500kcals MORE than you burn each day, you need to eat 6 Lagre Big Mac Meals.

Now I am not saying that you have a free pass to eat 5 Big Mac Meals every day. I am simply trying to outline the scientific facts behind body weight and help you to release your false expectations when you engage in eating such food.

Of course, I would always recommend a varied diet, full of nourishment, but never to the detriment of your physical or emotional health.

Balance. Always.

3. Mindful Eating…

In truth, I am not a huge fan of this term, simply because it has been overused and therefore
over complicated.

All mindful eating really is, is the following:

• Be involved in the preparation of your food as much as possible.

• Sit with your food with no distractions other than family and friends, at a table.

• Give thanks for the food you are eating, and the people you are with.

• Give thanks for what the food is doing to help sustain your life.

That’s it.

There’s no need to worry about it above that. The first port of call here is to take away all distractions. Don’t scroll social media when eating dinner. Don’t watch the news when you are eating lunch.

You can then layer in other questions about the food you are eating to help you with this.

• How does the food feel?

• What am I enjoying about eating this food?

• Why am I eating this food?

• What is my emotional state when eating this food?

And so on and so forth.

In Conclusion…

As you work on this process you can begin to look for signs that you are improving your relationship with food and getting a much stronger relationship with it:

• Not feeling guilty about eating food.

• Avoiding restricting certain foods from your diet.

• Feeling less stressed when food choice is out of your control.

• Not feeling the need to burn off calories through exercise.

• Seeing the way you speak about food change.

I really really hope you can start to notice some of these things change in your life as you improve that relationship with food, and allow yourself to heal from emotional eating.

Being a slave to food your whole life, through fear and anxiety, is no way to live, and it is actually getting in the way of you being able to live the life you want.

Work on what is laid out in this article, and i truly hope it brings you the freedom you deserve to enjoy.

What’s Next…

Well, I am an Online Coach who has helped thousands of people work through the challenges in this article.

And it would be my pleasure to help you too.

My program, which is personal one-to-one online training called the Strong & Confident Program.

If you have ever wanted to achieve the following:

✅ Escape the constant dread of dieting?

✅ Release the guilt you attach to eating certain types of food?

✅ Learn to stop worrying about “the pesky last few pounds” and focus on all your body can do?

✅ Become truly happy with what your body is and what is capable of?

✅ Enjoy the feeling of being stronger and fitter as opposed to trying to reduce your size all the time?

✅ Achieve all of this and still lose body fat at the same time without huge restrictions and slavery to a fitness regime?

✅ Do it all on your own schedule, in your own way, with a program specifically designed for you?

Then please click on the button below and fill out an application form to start working with me.

If you feel like you need more help balancing your relationship with food then you can look through the following articles of mine as well:

• How to stop yourself from counting calories obsessively

• How much weight do you gain on vacation?

• The Ultimate Guide: What to eat when working out

Thank you so much for reading my work, and good luck with building a stronger relationship with food.

I cannot wait to see how you go!

Coach Adam

References:

1. Singh M. Mood, food, and obesity. Front Psychol. 2014 Sep 1;5:925. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00925. PMID: 25225489; PMCID: PMC4150387.

2. Palascha A, van Kleef E, van Trijp HC. How does thinking in Black and White terms relate to eating behavior and weight regain? J Health Psychol. 2015 May;20(5):638-48. doi: 10.1177/1359105315573440. PMID: 25903250.

5 Easy and Healthy Eating Habits For Weight Loss

This article will be a number of things:

1. Practical

2. Easy to implement

3. Realistic

4. Balanced

Nutrition is a very complex topic - and within that complexity, someone who is simply searching just to try and make a small change for their health by looking to improve their diet can easily be led off track and left feeling very very confused about all of the conflicting information out there and what it means to “eat healthily” especially when it comes to weight loss.

I will cut through that.

Today, I will tell you easy-to-implement things, to make your diet as simple as possible, and as healthy as possible to help you achieve your goals, leaving you with the knowledge and ability to improve your healthy eating habits.

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I would also love to invite you to join my Free Facebook Group:

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TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR: 5 Easy and Healthy Eating Habits For Weight Loss

1. The Importance Of Healthy Eating Habits?

2. Healthy and Unhealthy Eating Habits

3. What Are 5 Healthy Eating Habits?

   - Structured Eating

   - No Black or White Thinking

   - Increase Protein & Vegetables

   - Healthy Snacks

   - Plenty of Water

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The Importance Of Healthy Eating Habits?

Habits are the building blocks of change and if losing weight is your goal, then change is what is required.

Changing something so integral to your existence like your diet is also a really hard thing to do - and to make sure that change is long-lasting and effective enough to help you reach your goals comes down to your ability to implement habitual change.

The reason “healthy” eating habits are so important isn’t that you should eat “healthy” all the time - in fact, you really shouldn’t do that - its because if you have habitually created the “healthy” eating if it is an automated process in your life, then when you feel like you have “fallen off the wagon” or “skipped on your diet” then getting back on track is the easiest thing possible.

As you know exactly what to do and how to do it.

Another importance of creating and having “healthy” eating habits is that helps you to stop focussing on only the negative aspects of what you are doing. It is so easy to beat yourself up for eating in an “unhealthy” way when you feel like that is all you do.

This creates a negative spin within you that can constantly feel like you will never be able to turn around, and therefore the cycle goes on and on now not only is your physical health decreasing, but so is your mental health.

By having automation in your day, covering your bases if you will, it makes the more enjoyable foods feel less significant, in the bigger picture of your life, and therefore it reduces any guilt you may have from eating the more “unhealthy” foods.

I want to help make sure that you are doing the best you can, with what you have available to you.

I also want to make sure that you have the ability to keep your diet in a place that dones’t swing from one extreme to the other all of the time, because when that happens you actually make no progress at all - my goal is to help you iron out the creases so that progress is achievable for you - and the habits I lay out in this article are important to make sure that is exactly what happens to you.

And then you will make the progress you desire.

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Healthy and Unhealthy Eating Habits

You may have noticed that in this article so far I have put parenthesis around the words healthy and unhealthy.

This is because I never like being dogmatic when it comes to your nutrition - and to simply say that this is healthy and that is unhealthy, with no further context, could be misleading for someone.

I think we can all agree that vegetables are healthy.

Personally, I happen to know that Fruit is also healthy.

But believe me, there are people out there who would happily tell you otherwise.

I would also put forth an argument that a Pizza, a Donut or a Birthday Cake can be healthy when you view it in the correct context.

For example, if you are at a Birthday Party, and they serve your favourite Red Velvet Cake, everyone around you is enjoying it, and you happen to have said “No” because you view cake as unhealthy food, that is going to have an impact on your enjoyment of the occasion.

Food is community.

Food is family.

Food is nourishment.

Food is emotional.

Food is simply not as simple as healthy or unhealthy.

Food is not one thing or the other.

What might be healthy for the soul, might not be healthy for the body and vice versa. I have known many people in my life who have created extremely unhealthy bodies by only eating healthy food.

There will always be debates and arguments around what is healthy to eat and what is unhealthy to eat - and to be quite frank - I just think these waste peoples time.

Arguing over the effect of Gluten, Fructose or how to control your Insulin is actually nutritionists and personal trainers just trying to show off how big their brain is.

Whenever someone I follow or am engaged in conversation with about nutrition starts talking about having an extreme stance on one aspect of their diet, cutting out sugar or carbohydrates, for example, my respect for them dies away immediately.

And yours should too.

Because these people aren’t trying to help you, they are trying to convert you.

They have never walked a day in your shoes, and to simply say that “sugar is killing you” is not going to actually help you resolve what you need to resolve in your diet, as it will just cause more guilt and frustration within you.

I will now share with you 5 things you can do to really improve your eating habits in a healthy way - they may not be what you was expecting to see, but believe me, if your goal is to improve your health and to lose weight, or if your goal is just one of those options…

Continue reading…

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What Are 5 Healthy Eating Habits? - Structured Eating

This is front and centre for a reason.

You probably weren’t expecting the first habit that you need to work on is in fact eating more regularly.

I know I too would be surprised if I Googled “What Are 5 Healthy Eating Habits?” then I would not expect to see this as number one. I would expect it to be something simple like “eat less processed foods”.

However, without structure, everything else falls apart. You cannot build a house on sand, and you equally cannot build healthier eating habits on a poor structure.

Not only will a better structure improve your diet overall, but it will also improve your relationship with food as well.

There is a very common denominator with people I work with online and in person, who have a very keen desire to lose weight, and they very often have no structure in place with what and how they are eating.

They are simply winging it.

This has a couple of knock-on effects:

1. They have absolutely no idea how many calories they are eating - despite saying “I eat really healthy”

2. They react more emotionally to food.

3. They aren’t able to see that their overconsumption of food in isolated moments is related to the constant missing of meals.

4. They end up frustrated and walking down the path of looking for fat burners and other quick fix solutions.

Lets draw a line under it all.

And get you focussed on having a proper structure with your meals.

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READ MORE ON IMPROVING YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FOOD RIGHT HERE:

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The format for structured eating, it could also be described as intuitive eating, is as follows.

Three Meals a day that all fit onto one plate.

Two snacks a day - one of which should be fruit.

If you have an alcoholic beverage the night before - try and take away a snack the next day - but this isn’t essential.

If you can iron out your food intake to more regular moments with food, in a structured manner your body will respond well. It will enjoy the rhythm and pattern of knowing when it is being fed, and your hunger hormones, grehlin and leptin, will respond in a much better way because they will have a structure.

The other thing that is really important in having a better structure with your food, is spending time with it.

Try not to eat on the move, or watch television. Try not to work and eat.

Respect your food, and respect what it is designed to do for your body - without this food so much of your life would be turned upside down - don’t take it for granted.

There are so many people in the world who don’t get the privilege to eat the food that you and I are able to eat - and we should be grateful for that every time we get to sit down to eat.

I’m not saying go all ga-ga, but at least give the moments you have to eat the respect it deserves.

This structure with your diet and respect for your food will improve your relationship with food, and there aren’t many more healthy habits you can deliver to yourself than improving your relationship with food.

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What Are 5 Healthy Eating Habits? - No Black or White Thinking

Call it what you want.

Diachotamus thinking.

Good food.

Bad food.

Black and white thinking.

Basically stop looking at your food in these terms.

Food doesn’t have a moral value. Calling your apple good, and a banana bad is the same as calling your sofa good, or your bed bad. It makes no logical sense.

When you label foods in this way you punch a hole in your ability to find balance and happiness in your diet, and therefore compromise your own happiness.

It also ceases your ability to actually lose weight.

As a study from the Journal of Health Psychology [1] points out:

“Results showed that eating-specific dichotomous thinking (dichotomous beliefs about food and eating) mediates the association between restraint eating and weight regain. We conclude that holding dichotomous beliefs about food and eating may be linked to a rigid dietary restraint, which in turn impedes people’s ability to maintain a healthy weight.”

When you assign morality to food, you are doing a number of things. Firslty you are putting those who eat in a way you view as “good” onto a Moral High Ground that you know you naturally can’t attian. Then when you eat foods you view as “bad” you are not only beneath others in society, you are also putting yourself down and dmagaing your self esteem.

You are also likely to be viewing foods as good and bad through the framing of “Diet Culture”, as in:

“If I eat good foods, I will lose weight”

But as the study above shows, that is actually counter itnuative, as it leads to an over restriction, then an over indulgence - perpetuating binge eating episodes and disorders.

Making the elusive weight loss even more elusive for you.

To help overcome this, there a few things you can do:

1. View your diet as a whole, don’t just focus on one or two aspects - keep a wide angle lens on and give equal respect and objectivity to everything you eat.

2. Listen to your hunger and fullness cues, try to tune into your body more, and question the feelings you have.

3. Ask yourself where your hunger or lack of satisfaction from eating has come from…are you really wanting more food or are you in need of human connection?

4. Look at all foods as nourishing. Nourishing your health and your body, nourishing your emotions, nourishing your mind. Every food can nourish you, and ask yourself what needs nourishing right now…and seek foods to that end.

5. Prioritise non weight loss based goals - like getting stronger and more confident (wink wink nudge nudge: The Strong & Confident Program).

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What Are 5 Healthy Eating Habits? - Increase Protein and Vegetables

This is one of my Five Awesome Rules for Fat Loss Life.

Well the actual rule is “Protein and Veggies at every meal”

But increasing them from where they are right now will more than likely do you no harm at all, and it will indeed increase your likelihood to lose weight.

This occurs for a number of reasons, the first being, that the extra fibre in your system from the Vegetables will indeed keep you fuller for longer. Secondly, you can eat a lot of Vegetables in terms of volume, and take on relatively few calories compared to other foods.

For example, 100g of Carrots has 41 calories in it, compared to 100g of Chicken Breast which contains 165kcal.

My point here is that you will feel more full, and take on fewer calories, allowing you to adhere to your calorie deficit in a much more sustainable way.

Protein is one of the most satiating macronutrients there is.

As a study published in the BioMed Central Journal [2] states:

“The hierarchy for macronutrient-induced satiating efficiency is similar to that observed for diet-induced thermogenesis (DIT): protein is the most satiating macronutrient followed by CHOs and fat, which is least satiating”

Again this will lead you to feel fuller for longer, and more satisfied after eating as well as helping you recover from your exercise sessions in a much more efficient way.

For my clients on the Strong & Confident Program, I work on them increasing Protein to 100g a day if they are a meat-eater, and 80g a day if they are vegetarian - like me!

One of the best ways to implement this piece of advice is by having a DAS.

A “Daily Awesome Salad”

Just get your protein source, add it to some salad bag of food - and the job is done!

If you do this every day you will soon start reaping the benefits in terms of losing weight and building a more healthy eating habit.

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FIND OUT MORE ABOUT STAYING FULLER FOR LONGER BY READING MY BLOG POST THAT HAS

HELPED TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WITH THIS EXACT ISSUE

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What Are 5 Healthy Eating Habits? - Healthy Snacks

If I had a pound or dollar for every time I get asked the following question:

“What healthy snacks can I have?”

And I look at the person who has asked me that question and simply say:

“You know the answer”

They look at me bewildered, and confused - because surely it’s not that simple is it?

And sadly, it is. It really is.

What is wrong with fruit being a snack?

In terms of a “snack” fruit literally ticks all of the boxes. It is convenient, it is cost-effective, it is filling and it is relatively low calorie compared to other kinds of snacks.

I also don’t know anyone who has food guilt over eating a banana. But eating a bag of crisps or a doughnut might trigger you. It doesn’t have to…but it might.

You can snack on vegetables too, however, they take more preparation and have a much higher barrier to entry to execute on.

I know it’s not exciting, I know it’s not sexy and I know when someone asks for a healthy snack they are wanting something like a Bounce Protein Ball or some kind of superior Kale Chip.

But again, they are very expensive and they won’t fill you up as much as an apple or banana.

There are plenty of exciting things you can do with fruit as well - if you have the time.

Other healthy snack ideas could be:

Trail Mix: grab a mix of any nuts, seeds, dried fruits savoury mix-ins like chickpeas, and just put it all together. The combinations here are endless.

Nuts: Be careful with nuts, as they are quite high in calories and may hinder your weight loss if over-consumed - and they are very easy to over-consume, but they do have many other benefits as well.

Seaweed Snacks - my fiancee eats seaweed all the time - and some of them are really tasty, but they don’t fill you up much.

The bottom line with “healthy snacks” is that if you want to avoid the obvious in terms of fruit, the preparation of these snacks can be quite a time-consuming exercise, and that negates the efficacy of the “snack”. Also, just because something is healthy doesn’t always make it the best option for weight loss, so always view these snacks in the realm of your calorie allowances.

Here are some of my favourite snacks from recipe books I send out to my clients:

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What Are 5 Healthy Eating Habits? - Plenty of Water

This again features in my Five Awesome Rules for Fat Loss Life.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people are under-hydrated when they are trying to lose weight.

And it never ceases to amaze me how many people don’t recognise the amazing benefits of water in their ability to eat in a more healthy way for their diet.

I always ask my clients on the Strong & Confident Program to drink around three litres of water a day, which is quite a lot, but there are very few drawbacks to drinking enough water.

And that compared to the drawbacks of being dehydrated makes it well worth focussing on.

Water helps with cognitive function, muscle function, digestive function, complexion, joint function and energy levels throughout the day.

Water also has zero calories in it, therefore in terms of weight loss, it is really useful.

When you are dehydrated you will feel low on energy, might have a headache and generally won’t feel your best, which will lead you to consume more calories.

Don’t go from zero water to three litres immediately, build up slowly, and you may begin to notice the benefits on less water than three litres a day.

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5 Easy and Healthy Eating Habits For Weight Loss

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And that’s it…

Remember, to lose weight, you must be in a Calorie Deficit and to improve your eating habits you need to move away from the thoughts of certain foods being good and others being bad.

Having a “healthy” diet is different to everyone, but balance is the key to all things, and that means something different to all people.

One of the best things you can do to make your eating habits more healthy will be to stop trying to live up to the expectation of healthy eating you see on Social Media, and making sure you work hard on allowing your diet to work in the best way for your life.

And as always if you have any questions you only have to ask me.

To be able to do that don’t forget to send me a Friend Request by filling out the form below, and then you can email me your questions.

It would be my pleasure to answer them.

You will also get my book “27 Ways To Faster Fat Loss” sent to you for free.

I hope you found this article useful and that my tips help you improve your eating habits.

I cannot wait to see you again soon…

Coach Adam

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References:

1. Palascha A, van Kleef E, van Trijp HC. How does thinking in Black and White terms relate to eating behavior and weight regain? J Health Psychol. 2015 May;20(5):638-48. doi: 10.1177/1359105315573440. PMID: 25903250.

2. Pesta DH, Samuel VT. A high-protein diet for reducing body fat: mechanisms and possible caveats. Nutr Metab (Lond). 2014 Nov 19;11(1):53. doi: 10.1186/1743-7075-11-53. PMID: 25489333; PMCID: PMC4258944.

Diet vs Exercise To Lose Weight: What Is More Important?

Sometimes I like to think I have a secret.

A secret that no one else in the world will ever know.

A secret so important for the well-being of mankind that I’m scared to share it because it will just blow the minds of everyone and create a new world order.

This secret might be bigger than Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

It might change the world more than when Sir Isaac Newton discovered Gravity.

Heck, it might just change your life.

This is actually far more important to me than changing the world - which is the premise of this Blog Post. I can’t change the world at once - but I certainly can change the mind of one person at a time through words like these, and slowly over time that might help make a change in the world.

But if it doesn’t - at least we had this moment. You and I. And that means an awful lot to me - so much in fact that I would love to have a few more moments with you.

Without sounding too creepy - I just wanted to ask you to be my friend.

As your friend, I will send you some very important things, like educational material, inspirational material and maybe just some stories from my life which you can enjoy reading with a coffee, beer or glass of wine.

See - I told you we could be friends.

If you would like to send me a friend request then please just fill out the form below and I will be in touch once you have finished this article.

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Table of Contents for:

What's more important Diet vs Exercise vs THIS to lose weight?

1. How does Diet help you lose weight?

2. How does exercise help you lose weight?

3. My secret: How does Imperfect Action help you lose weight?

4. Being Optimal is a privilege

5. To Conclude…

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How does Diet help you lose weight?

I have failed to see a scientific study that doesn’t look at the topic of weight loss and explains that in order to create weight loss a Calorie Deficit must be achieved.

And I have read a lot of these studies:

• “Health professionals recommend that individuals with overweight and obesity lose weight by reducing energy intake while maintaining a healthful diet” [1]

• “Individuals interested in losing weight should continue to be advised to regularly self-monitor energy intake and expenditure as well as to create a consistent daily energy deficit” [2]

• “Individuals can lose body weight and improve health status on a wide range of energy (calorie)-restricted dietary interventions” [3]

• “With the increasing obesity epidemic comes the search for effective dietary approaches for calorie restriction and weight loss.” [4]

• “Overall, for significant safe weight loss, an energy deficit was required, which was commonly achieved by reduced fat intake” [5]

• “An energy deficit is the most important factor in weight loss” [6]

*She* sadly I don’t get to make sure GIFS are balanced…so please don’t get offended if you are a female reading this.

But I think you get my point when it relates to just how important a Calorie Deficit or Energy Deficit is for losing weight.

Being in Energy Balance you will maintain your weight.

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Learn how to maintain your Calorie Maintenance Level in my blog post that has helped thousands of people so far

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To create a Calorie Deficit you will need to do one of three things:

1. Adjust the energy in (what you consume through diet).

2. Adjust the energy out (what you burn).

3. A combination of both.

When I set a client up, who has a weight loss goal, I will always work on their dietary intake to create the calorie deficit first.

It is incredibly easy to overeat due to a number of factors.

Emotional Overeating:

It is not uncommon for us to use food to soothe our emotional state and thus compulsively overeat without realising it to meet unmet needs from our childhood [7].

Food is Addictive:

This sums me up pretty well, sat here, in a coffee shop, writing this post.

A study called "Food Addiction: Implications for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Overeating” concluded that:

“There is evidence to suggest that, for some individuals, food can induce addictive-type behaviours similar to those seen with other addictive substances” [8]

With this pretty awesome graphic attached:

This graphic also gives us great insight into other reasons we can easily overeat:

• Stress

• Social Difficulty

• Cravings

• Vulnerability

• Impulsivity

• Other emotional responses both positive and negative

You can see the complex web of why, when looking at weight loss as a goal for someone, we must always address Energy Intake.

There are also many studies that advocate for all different types of dietary control to aid weight loss.

Whether that is:

• The Keto Diet (please do not do this and find out why here)

• Intermittent Fasting

• Low Fat, High Carb

• Low Carb, High Fat

• High Protein

• Slimming World and Weight Watchers

• Paleo Diet

• Vegan Diet

• Carnivore Diet

• Vegetarian Diet

• Celery Juicing

Essentially it doesn't matter what diet you do from a purely physiological point of view - if it gets you into a Calorie Deficit it will work.

This does not mean I am advocating for all of those dietary behaviours - I am simply informing you that they are all designed to create a calorie deficit. In fact, of that list, I would probably advocate for only one or two of them in general terms.

cough - I am a vegetarian - cough

But in terms of being able to adhere to it for long enough, to protect your relationship with food, or at the very least rebuild it, many of the diets I have listed will be absolutely damaging to you regardless if you achieve your goal or not.

And this is why diet is so very important in the discussion of weight loss.

You will eat every day, and relatively speaking it is easier for you to manage your food intake throughout the day to create an energy deficit than it would be to exercise.

Let us say you are working on a 500kcal deficit diet each day.

All else remaining equal, that is simply not having the Venti Iced Mocha with Whipped Cream at Starbucks each day which comes in at ~450kcals.

That’s an easier thing to adhere to than getting into the gym each day to try and burn 500kcals.

Its easier to learn an element of portion control and increasing lower calorie foods in your diet than it is to show up to the gym for 75 mins a day to burn calories.

It is better for your overall well-being to increase your vegetable and fruit intake to help create a calorie deficit each day than it is to panic about getting to the Spin Class at 5 am when you have a family at home - or a stressful job to go to.

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How does exercise help you lose weight?

I’m not sitting here, denying science.

Exercise does burn calories.

But it doesn’t burn enough calories for you to get into a deficit each day irrespective of your food intake.

It is also incredibly hard to know how many calories you are burning in a workout. Believe it or not having a watch on, made by a computer company, isn’t that scientifically accurate, in fact, this study [9] found them to be up to 60% inaccurate.

The other issue I have with using the Gym to burn calories is that it creates a hamster wheel scenario.

When you get into the habit of burning calories in the gym, you also get into the habit of demonising food - and you end up on this perpetual path of trying to undo the calories you ate, which destroys your relationship with food and exercise.

In an average strength session, you will be lucky to burn 300kcals.

On a Cardio Machine you will burn more in the moment, but less over time - and the more you eat the more time you have to spend burning calories.

Which only damages how you feel both on the inside and the outside.

This is why it is incredibly important to separate the two.

Allow your diet to dictate your Caloric Deficit and make sure you exercise to get strong.

Not just in the body, but in your heart, in your mind, in your soul.

When working out, ask yourself:

• Does this exercise make me feel stronger?

• Do I feel accomplished for completing it?

• Do I want to get that feeling again?

And if the answer is yes, regardless of calories burned, then you are exercising in a way that will make you feel good.

And that is what is most important in this scenario.

Exercise can help you lose weight in other ways too...but these take time.

Preservation of Muscle Mass

By lifting weights, you will preserve or potentially increase your muscle mass. Which over time will increase your metabolism because muscle is more efficient at burning calories than adipose tissue (fat).

When you only diet and eat fewer calories to lose weight, without exercise you will lower your metabolism by up to 20% [10].

As you lower your calories to lose weight, you need to work against this as a lower metabolism will not help you in the long run - and the best way to prevent this lowering from occurring is by lifting weights.

Regulation of Hunger Hormones

Our two friends: Leptin and Grehlin.

Grehlin is like a little gremlin that sits in your stomach and whinges at you telling you that you’re hungry - even when you aren’t.

Grehlin = Gremlin.

And in people with higher-weight bodies, their ability to control the production of grehlin is reduced - and their sensitivity to listening to it is increased.

This study called: “Acute Exercise and Appetite-Regulating Hormones in Overweight and Obese Individuals: A Meta-Analysis” [11] concluded:

“An evidence synthesis of the six studies on overweight/obese individuals indicated that a moderate reduction in acylated ghrelin occurs after acute exercise”

By exercising, the effects of grehlin are reduced and therefore over time will help you achieve a calorie deficit.

Now onto Leptin.

Leptin is the hormone that tells you you're full.

And its tricky. The more Adipose Tissue we have, the higher levels of Leptin in the body - but when levels are increased for so long, we develop a resistance to it.

Creating a “Leptin Resistance”.

This resistance is more prevalent in Obese Individuals and inherently runs through families [12].

And as you can expect…Exercise might be one of the best ways to combat Leptin Resistance as this study from the University of Oslo confirms [13]:

“Long-term changes in lifestyle consisting of decreased intake of dietary fat and increased physical activity reduced plasma leptin concentrations in humans beyond the reduction expected as a result of changes in fat mass.”

Which is a conclusion I love for two main reasons.

1. “Long Term Changes in lifestyle” is something I am on board with. There’s little point, to try and change things quickly for a short period of time hoping those changes will last a lifetime.

2. Engaging in long-term physical activity and reducing your dietary fat in the long term has better results for your Leptin Resistance, and probably your overall health (a fair inference) than just losing weight.

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How I Like To View Exercise For Weight Loss

Use it as your guiding light, as a signal for you to stay on track with your diet.

I used to play badminton with my best friend - and after every session, he would want to go for a beer - which made no sense to me.

Yes. I enjoy Beer like the best of them.

But, I used to think to myself what was the point of slogging it out on a court for 90 minutes to then harm all of your recovery efforts with a couple of Beers.

I used the movement as a way of improving my willpower and my desire to keep my diet in better place.

And if you can do that over time - you will then see the effects and benefits of weight loss as a result of your movement.

Because it will lead to better dietary choices.

It will reduce stress which will lead to better dietary choices.

It will help your Mental Health which will lead to better dietary choices.

But either way, you are looking to use exercise to improve your dietary choices and create a better balance in your life in favour of your goals.

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My secret: How does Imperfect Action help you lose weight?

This secret is the greatest superpower you will need in this whole “weight loss thing”

It is understanding the concept of imperfect action.

I think, it is fair to conclude that to lose weight you need to combine both Diet and Exercise to help you.

But knowing this doesn’t necessarily help.

Because as you can see, the complex hormonal balance in your body just from Leptin and Grehlin is a hard thing to control, combined with the fact that not everyone finds the ability to, or the enjoyment out of exercising in a manner that might be “optimal”.

I was on a call with one of my online Clients on the Strong & Confident Program the other day and I was explaining this concept to him.

He is a very high Politician in the UK - and as you can imagine he, therefore, has a very crazy life. He also sits on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee - and at the time of writing this - Europe is at War.

Nonetheless, he has big goals and wonderful aspirations and it is my pleasure to help him.

And at the moment, helping him the most is putting the brakes on him.

Telling him not to work out, rather than do more.

He wants to try and aim for four workouts a week - and I am having to tell him not to. I am a fan of four workouts a week, truly I am, but not when it means that you will only be able to do it for a few weeks, and missing workouts will have a bigger negative effect on your feelings of accomplishment and strength than only doing three workouts a week.

But no one needs perfection. You need consistency and setting up a system that
will inspire consistency over perfection is imperfect action at work.

I know one thing to be true for him, if he gives up, nothing will change - and therefore making sure that he is set up in a way that will not make him feel like he can’t stay on top of everything will lower the likelihood of him giving up.

There is a point of diminishing returns in all things we do.

When doing more, is actually counterproductive.

MRV stand for Maximal Recoverable Volume.

You want to get the best bang for your buck - especially if you struggle with adherence over time. Therefore staying where the curve is steepest is best.

Doing more isn’t worth it - and what determines what is recoverable is dominated by one thing: Stress. The more stressed you are, the lower the amount of maximal recoverable volume you will be able to take on.

And how much exercise do we know to be too much?

That’s determined by time - not necessarily the amount of workouts.

Previously I stated that I like clients to do 4 workouts a week - Upper, Lower, Upper, Lower.

However when I program this, I don’t program four hours of workouts.

I try to keep my workouts to 30mins of working to intensity for my clients. This would be the time outside of a warm-up and a cool-down, but from the load, they will really need to recover.

You need to keep between two and three hours a week.

That’s all you need to do.

Examples of Imperfect Action

Can’t get to the gym for an hour? Go for 30 minutes.

Can’t get to the gym for 30 minutes? Go for 20 minutes.

Want to have pizza for dinner? Order a massive salad with it too.

Have a night out? Maybe substitute Pints for halves. Mixers for Soda Water. Large Glasses of wine for Smaller ones.

When I was at Drama School we had to write our own film - and they bought in two professional writers to help us learn how to do it.

The very first thing, and most useful thing that these two writers told us was:

“Don’t get it right, get it written”

— Two Writers

And that is the best way I can sum up Imperfect Action.

Nothing needs to be perfect or exact. Nothing needs to be optimal.

It just needs to be done.

If getting it done means it might not be perfect….then get it done anyway.

Do you know how many of these blogs I have written with spelling errors in them?

A fair few.

Because if I fretted over getting everything right all the time, I just wouldn’t get as much work done as I need to and I comprehend that the quality of what I write and how I help people is more important than the odd spelling error.

Over time, all of these imperfect actions add up. They compound within you, inspiring more action, more results and more motivation.

You see, no one gains weight from missing one workout, no one gains weight from eating one McDonald’s.

It is the build-up of these behaviours over very long periods of time that creates weight gain.

And therefore the reverse is true.

It is the opposite of the all-or-nothing mindset you need to approach this with, because all-or-nothing mindsets always lead to nothing - if that wasn’t true - you wouldn’t be sitting here reading this.

Tick off and sweat the small stuff more.

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Being Optimal Is A Privilege

Privilege is a word that is banded around a lot these days. I do feel that sometimes it’s on the verge of being overused.

However, this concept is very important to understand when it comes to imperfect action.

In fact, privilege is important to understand full stop. I remember when I first grappled with this idea during the Black Lives Matter protests and it took a lot of interesting and eye-opening conversations to understand the concepts set behind my privilege.

I also remember my birthday in 2021 was almost ruined by being attacked online for “not understanding my privilege” when I commented on a post about how progressive overload works.

I was described as an “SIS White Man, who has a genetic advantage over the rest of the world and has never had to worry about his health and therefore has no right to comment or to help those who have had struggles I would never understand”.

I have a 7-inch scar down my chest, which I have had my entire life because I have to worry about my health each and every day. In fact, I was born with a condition that means I will have had to have gone through open-heart surgery twice in my lifetime - and at the moment, I am just waiting for the day I am told “let’s go in again”.

Never judge a book by its cover.

When you are on the Socials seeing people “succeed” you have no idea what privilege is afforded to them that isn’t afforded to you:

• Genetic

• Societal

• Family

• Occupational

• Health - Mental and Physical

• Financial

I used to struggle with this.

I honestly used to believe that if Chris Pratt could change his body the way he did, then I should be able to too.

But what that doesn’t take into account is the fact that I have a very different life to him.

He has chefs who manage his food each and every day.

He has Personal Trainers paid for by Hollywood Studios in order to make sure he changes the way he needs to.

He also has the allure of being able to put in the work because at the end of it is a $3m bonus, on top of actually being contractually paid to workout and change his body.

I do not.

He has a significantly greater privilege than me to help him manage his change.

And that’s not his fault, that’s not my fault.

Its just fact.

You may not have the ability to execute what is optimal - and understanding the concept of Imperfect Action is a release from the pressure of making sure you are “doing everything right”.

You need to do what you enjoy.

And setting yourself up for an optimal diet, an optimal workout plan and an optimal weight loss journey is more than likely setting you up for failure.

Because you simply do not have the privilege that is required for an optimal environment.

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To Conclude…

To lose weight your diet is the driving force.

To help make that process easier. and more maintainable exercise is the driving force.

To make the journey as easy as possible with self-compassion and taking pressure off of your shoulders…

To allow you to coach yourself through the journey and to talk to yourself with self-love…

To keep your mindset in the place that will help you most…

Imperfect Action is the driving force for long-term sustainable habits that will build up over time and make it easier as you go.

The National Weight Loss Registry [14] is a database of over 10,000 members that have lost over 30 pounds and maintained that for one year or more.

They conclude:

• 98% of Registry participants report that they modified their food intake in some way to lose weight.

• 94% increased their physical activity, with the most frequently reported form of activity being walking.

• There is variety in how NWCR members keep the weight off. Most report continuing to maintain a low-calorie, low-fat diet and doing high levels of activity.

• 78% eat breakfast every day.

• 75% weigh themselves at least once a week.

• 62% watch less than 10 hours of TV per week.

• 90% exercise, on average, about 1 hour per day.

If you want to lose weight, I urge you to not look at the picture of one vs the other.

Diet vs Exercises.

This isn’t a competition.

It’s a blend of behaviours that create a bigger picture over time.

Balance everything always.

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What’s Next?

I hope you found this article useful, and that you feel a lot better about your struggles at the moment.

If you would like to join my free Facebook group: Straightforward Fat Loss then click below:

Added to all of that, if you would like a Free Calorie and Macro Calculator then just put your email here:

References:

1. Tatiana Andreyeva, Michael W. Long, Kathryn E. Henderson, Gabrielle M. Grode, Trying to Lose Weight: Diet Strategies among Americans with Overweight or Obesity in 1996 and 2003, Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Volume 110, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 535-542, ISSN 0002-8223,

2. Robert A. Carels, Kathleen M. Young, Carissa Coit, Anna Marie Clayton, Alexis Spencer, Marissa Hobbs, Can following the caloric restriction recommendations from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans help individuals lose weight?, Eating Behaviors, Volume 9, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 328-335, ISSN 1471-0153, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eatbeh.2007.12.003.

3. Thom G, Lean M. Is There an Optimal Diet for Weight Management and Metabolic Health? Gastroenterology. 2017 May;152(7):1739-1751. doi: 10.1053/j.gastro.2017.01.056. Epub 2017 Feb 15. PMID: 28214525.

4. Johnstone A. Fasting for weight loss: an effective strategy or latest dieting trend? Int J Obes (Lond). 2015 May;39(5):727-33. doi: 10.1038/ijo.2014.214. Epub 2014 Dec 26. PMID: 25540982.

5. Ramage S, Farmer A, Eccles KA, McCargar L. Healthy strategies for successful weight loss and weight maintenance: a systematic review. Appl Physiol Nutr Metab. 2014 Jan;39(1):1-20. doi: 10.1139/apnm-2013-0026. Epub 2013 Nov 4. PMID: 24383502.

6. Kim JY. Optimal Diet Strategies for Weight Loss and Weight Loss Maintenance. J Obes Metab Syndr. 2021 Mar 30;30(1):20-31. doi: 10.7570/jomes20065. PMID: 33107442; PMCID: PMC8017325.

7. Miller KD. Compulsive overeating. Nurs Clin North Am. 1991 Sep;26(3):699-705. PMID: 1891402.

8. Adams RC, Sedgmond J, Maizey L, Chambers CD, Lawrence NS. Food Addiction: Implications for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Overeating. Nutrients. 2019 Sep 4;11(9):2086. doi: 10.3390/nu11092086. PMID: 31487791; PMCID: PMC6770567.

9. News.iastate.edu. 2020. Activity Trackers Not As Accurate For Some Activities, ISU Study Finds • News Service • Iowa State University. [online] Available at: <https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2015/08/19/activitytrackers> [Accessed 22 June 2020].

10. Fat facts. (n.d.). Retrieved March 18, 2022, from http://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/fatfacts.html

11. Douglas JA, Deighton K, Atkinson JM, Sari-Sarraf V, Stensel DJ, Atkinson G. Acute Exercise and Appetite-Regulating Hormones in Overweight and Obese Individuals: A Meta-Analysis. J Obes. 2016;2016:2643625. doi: 10.1155/2016/2643625. Epub 2016 Dec 27. PMID: 28116150; PMCID: PMC5223036.

12. Lee, J., Reed, D. & Price, R. Leptin resistance is associated with extreme obesity and aggregates in families. Int J Obes 25, 1471–1473 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.ijo.0801736

13. Reseland JE, Anderssen SA, Solvoll K, Hjermann I, Urdal P, Holme I, Drevon CA. Effect of long-term changes in diet and exercise on plasma leptin concentrations. Am J Clin Nutr. 2001 Feb;73(2):240-5. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/73.2.240. PMID: 11157319.

14. “National Weight Control Registry.” Nwcr.ws, nwcr.ws/default.html
    

The Ultimate Guide: What To Eat When Working Out

I went back and forth on the image I was going to use for this article.

I had the classic “woman in the Gym drinking a protein shake” and then I went completley to the other side and considered a lovely image of someone eating Pizza.

But the issue with both of these images is they promote one extreme and then the other.

They don’t promote balanace - and I am all about balance!

The reason balance is so critical - is that the fulcrum can always move as you change and grow through your fitness journey - and that is a beautiful thing.

This is a tough article to write because the reasons that someone is working out is always very different:

• Mental Health

• To Lose Weight

• To Build Muscle

• To be part of a community

• To enjoy yourself

• To develop a skill

• To train for a challenege

Therefore what I am going to do is stick to principles that will work across the board for you.

There are principles that can fit into the scope of any of these outcomes the only difference is the energy balance equation.

To build muscle you need to be in a caloric surplus of about 110% of your TDEE.

For more information on that head here: How To Gain Weight

To lose weight you need to be in a calorie deficit which is a window between your BMR and your Goal Bodyweight in LBS multiplied by 12.

For more information on that head here: What is a Calorie Deficit Diet Plan?

For your mental health having balanced nutrition is also critical. Having a varied colourful healthful diet with balance and flexibility is important. But then again that’s important for life.

As the study Food and Mood [1] in the British Medical Journal states:

“This message supports the idea that creating environments and developing measures that promote healthy, nutritious diets, while decreasing the consumption of highly processed and refined “junk” foods may provide benefits even beyond the well-known effects on physical health, including improved psychological wellbeing.”

In this article, I am going to take you through all three Macronutrients and how much of them you should eat and why. In each section, I will point to you about your workouts and managing nutrition around that, but in truth, the differences aren’t that huge.

In actual fact, “what to eat when working out” isn’t really that different to what you should be doing with your nutrition towards your goals anyway. There are some timing and optimal things you can do around your diet and training, but this is about 10% of the work you actually need to do to achieve your goals. I will take you through supplementation too - but this is really a plan for anyone who is now wanting to engage in and live an active lifestyle.

I love educating and informing people just like you in this way all about fitness. In fact, I love it so much, it would be awesome if you wanted to become my friend. You got this far…so it would be remiss of me to not extend an invitation out.

Now if you do decide to become my buddy, I do have a warning for you…I will send you things:

• Helpful things (Blog Posts, Workout Manuals, Calorie Calculators)

• Insightful things (New Research, thoughts of the day, stuff about my life)

• Educational things (much of the above fits into this category)

and

• Some inappropriate things (I better not list them here as Google might get suspicious)

But that’s what being friends is all about right? And I fully expect you to do the same back to me…

Therefore if you would like to send me a friend request then just fill out this form:

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Table of Contents: The Ultimate Guide: What To Eat When Working Out

1. What Protein to eat when working out?

   - How much Protein do you need? | Protein and Workouts | High Protein Meals

2. What Carbohydrates to eat when working out?

   - How many Carbohydrates do you need? | Carbs and Workouts | Are Carbs Good? Bad? Or just Misunderstood?

3. What Fats to eat when working out?

   - A Final Word on Fats…

4. What Supplements to have when working out?

5. How To Structure Your Diet

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What Protein to eat when working out?

Here is the good news - you DO NOT NEED TO BE DOING WHAT THIS MAN IS DOING.

I don’t even know why he would do that himself? Maybe he thinks he is Gaston from Beauty and the Beast?

Who knows?

Protein.

Is it important? Yes.

Why is it important? It is the main building block of your body.

Other key features of Protein are:

• It keeps you fuller for longer

• It takes longer to digest - hence increasing your Thermic Effect of Food (basically increases metabolism)

• It builds muscles, tendons, organs and skin.

How Much Protein do you need?

This is a debate that rages and rages.

And honestly, we could get very technical. But I am going to assume you are at least semi-interested in being active and fitness, like most of my clients, and therefore because of the complexity on this topic, over the years I have had to simplify my view on Protein significantly.

One key feature with protein, which I have noticed working with hundreds of people throughout my career, is that they think they are eating more than they actually are.

And eating “enough” is really bloody hard for most people.

Science states lots of different things on this topic.

I have always maintained you need: 0.8-1.1g of protein a day per KG of total body weight.

When I weighed 82.8kg I had 71kg of Lean Body Mass - which meant I “needed” 91.8g of protein as I was calculating it on my LBM in KGs.

But there is great variance in the best suggestion here. Some sources say 2g/kg of bodyweight. Others say 1g per pound of bodyweight.

This means I either need to eat:

91.8g of protein a day, 165g of protein a day or 182g of protein a day.

Now others will ask you to base it on your Lean Body Mass or Fat-Free Mass.

These figures are given as: 1.1g per LB of Lean Body Mass

This changes the numbers again…meaning I would need to eat:

171g of protein a day.

It is confusing. But don’t worry. I do have a very simple solution to the question of how much protein you need to eat a day.

It’s important to remember that everybody is different and not everyone has the luxury of knowing their Lean Body Mass either - and you don’t need to have that information to get this right.

When I weighed 82.8kgs, I don’t think I ever hit numbers like 170g of protein a day - and I still managed to build muscle, get to my goals and achieve what I wanted to achieve.

Like with most things in fitness - you must always balance what is optimal with what is possible.

I did try to actively increase my protein, but not to the detriment or worry of anything else. Added to that I’m a Vegetarian, so I was already aiming a little lower. I’m under no illusions, I know I’m not the bulkiest, most muscly person - I’m not ever going to be a bodybuilder and nor do I want to be - I work out for many reasons that are not aesthetics - but this photo shows that by trying to increase protein consistently - you can still make really good progress.

This is also the most “Daniel Craig” I think I will ever look…

PHOWAAAARRRRRRRR

So here is my simple solution to protein:

Work towards 100g a day and if you are a Vegetarian 80g a day will suffice

There is little negative effect to having more protein in your diet. If you can get more in then great, but you don’t necessarily have to.

In terms of weight loss, and weight gain. This study [2] found that:

“Thermogenesis at 2.5 hours post-meal averaged about twofold higher on the high protein diet versus the high carbohydrate diet, and differences were significant after the breakfast and the dinner meals (p < 0.05)”

and concluded:

“These data indicate an added energy-cost associated with high-protein, low-fat diets and may help explain the efficacy of such diets for weight loss”

Therefore not only is protein awesome for building your body, it’s also awesome at helping you maintain and work on weight loss too.

100g a day is also the system I implement with most of my clients - and it seems to be a good figure for them to aim for regardless of their composition.

It’s pretty incredible.

And working towards 100g means you don’t have to be there every day - again it’s that word: balance.

Protein and Workouts…

Speak to most “personal trainers” and they will tell you to eat post-workout a combination of “protein and carbs”. This is to maximise something called muscle protein synthesis. This is known as the “Anabolic Window”.

Which to you and I basically means refill your muscles with protein so they grow.

There is a modicum of truth to this.

But…and it is a big but…

Don’t sweat it.

The advantages to maximising muscle protein syntheses in comparison to just hitting your protein target each day is insignificant.

The most important thing you can do is just hit your numbers over a day as this study [3] concludes:

“With respect to hypertrophy, total protein intake was the strongest predictor of Exercise Strength magnitude. These results refute the commonly held belief that the timing of protein intake in and around a training session is critical to muscular adaptations and indicate that consuming adequate protein in combination with resistance exercise is the key factor for maximizing muscle protein accretion.”

I think this is also where I pitch my coaching services which involve “resistance exercise” and is called The Strong and Confident Program

All of this being said…I personally do consume a protein shake after each and every workout - for the simple reason that it's a good moment to get some protein in, quell my hunger and rehydrate me.

My workout is almost a reminder to keep working on this part of my nutrition, and I enjoy having it post-workout - usually when I am swimming.

One thing with nutrition is that habit can be your best friend and your worst enemy. In this instance, I use it to my advantage - and it could be a strategy for you as well to get a nice helping of ~20g protein in throughout your day.

Some High Protein Meals:

Now I am a Vegetarian, so what I am sharing with you here are not necessarily the foods I eat - but they are from the Recipe Books that I give to my clients - because not all my clients are Vegetarian (in fact I think none of them is).

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What Carbohydrates to eat when working out?

The more I write these Blogs the more I begin to realise that Schitt’s Creek literally knows everything about life.

Now please repeat these two sentences after me:

Carbohydrates do not make you fat….

No one gained weight from eating too many fruits and vegetables…

In fact, Carbohydrates and protein have the exact same calories per gram in them - 4kcal per gram.

Therefore the very oversimplified premise that carbs make you fat is just a downright lie, and I would be very wary of anyone who says that to you - simply because it so much more complex than that.

How many Carbohydrates Do You Need?

The biggest issue with carbohydrates is that we can eat an awful lot of them in one go. It’s not uncommon to eat three servings of rice at dinner, or have four portions of oven chips without realising.

Do you know how many oven chips one serving actually is?

Please sit down for this…the results are that shocking.

And within that portion is 154 calories. Now, quite rightly, I do not know a single human being on the planet that will only eat 7 chips with their dinner.

Chips are yummy. They should be enjoyed properly (with ketchup), and I fully expect a person to not have one portion of them. But you can begin to see, how one portion can become three portions when you serve dinner.

Many people who say to me “I’ve gone low carb and feel great” upon further examination have actually just bought their Carb intake into line with the amounts outlined below.

They aren’t “Low-Carb” they are simply eating an accurate amount for their individual body - as opposed to overeating them.

The amount you need is dependent on your goals - like with all food - it all has to be viewed within the context of calories.

• To Lose Weight: 0.5g - 2g per pound of body weight per day

• To Gain Weight: 1g - 3g per pound of body weight per day

If we take 82kg me again…this means I should have been eating around: 330g of Carbohydrates a day as I was trying to lose weight at that time. This is 1323kcal/day from Carbohydrates.

There is no one size fits all, because guess what…we are all different.

But a good rule to go by, which the CDC suggest is that you should aim for about 50% of your daily calories to come from Carbohydrates. Other sources say between 45% and 65% of your daily calories should come from Carbohydrates.

So ~50% of your Calories seems like a good place to start to me.

This doesn’t mean if you eat more than 50% you are failing. Like with most things “calories” working in flexible windows is always a good idea.

There is also a study [5] that backs this up. Published in the Lancet in 2018 it was a Meta-Analysis of 420,000 people in 20 countries and found the following:

“a percentage of 50–55% energy from carbohydrate was associated with the lowest risk of mortality.”

And interestingly went on to conclude:

“Our findings suggest a negative long-term association between life expectancy and both low carbohydrate and high carbohydrate diets when food sources are not taken into account. These data also provide further evidence that animal-based low carbohydrate diets should be discouraged. Alternatively, when restricting carbohydrate intake, replacement of carbohydrates with predominantly plant-based fats and proteins could be considered as a long-term approach to promote healthy ageing”

Carbs and Workouts

Carbohydrates are essential for your ability to work out.

Your muscles use the glucose from Carbohydrates to move - and as you move, the tank of energy you have gets depleted.

As this study states:

“During short, heavy exercise it may be the only energy source for the working muscle and may be derived exclusively from the glycogen stores within the muscle fibres themselves”

This is why, very often, when you workout and haven’t fuelled your workout correctly, you can just run out of energy, experience unusual fatigue or feel shaky - it is not because you have done something wrong - its simply because your body is running on empty of Carbohydrate.

This is also why, when looking into what you “should” eat after a workout many people will say a combination of Protein and Carbs.

As the study: International Society of Sports Nutrition position stand: nutrient timing [4] states:

“Post-exercise (within 30 minutes) consumption of CHO at high dosages (8 - 10 g CHO/kg/day) have been shown to stimulate muscle glycogen re-synthesis, while adding PRO (0.2 g - 0.5 g PRO/kg/day) to CHO at a ratio of 3 - 4:1 (CHO: PRO) may further enhance glycogen re-synthesis.”

So you need carbohydrates post-exercise - with some protein too. You need to restock your energy in your muscles - otherwise, you will grind to a halt.

Remember what I said about protein muscle synthesis? Well, that’s true of glycogen (Carbohydrate) too.

This is one reason that when you are in a Calorie Deficit and training properly, but not eating enough, your Metabolism can drop so much. You stop moving as much throughout that day because your muscles aren’t filled with the ability to move your body.

This can slow your metabolism down by up to 15% [5].

The frequency of your training will dictate how much attention you need to pay to all of this. The more you train, the more you might need to make sure that you are being sensitive to these needs, the less you train, the less sensitive you need to be.

If you workout most days - then give this a little more attention. If you workout 1-2/week then it is far less important.

This is all in relation to an ideal world - and having worked with many people - an ideal world is far from how you actually live. Now that you know the why’s and wherefore’s how would this look practically?

For example, the only time you have to get to the gym is at around 6 am - your stomach doesn’t do too well eating very early - but you want to get the most out of your workout knowing that you need that glucose in your muscles, because the last thing you ate was at 6 pm the night before…

What on earth do you do?

With most of my clients, I will simply ask them to eat some fruit.

It’s that simple. A banana, an apple, some grapes. Whatever takes their fancy - but some fruit should be more than enough for a 30-60min session - even if you are on an empty stomach.

If they have a little more time and don’t need to worry about driving and eating, then I might suggest some Greek Yoghurt with the fruit.

Are Carbs Good? Bad? Or just Misunderstood?

Carbs…are classy. They are a treasure trove of healthful nutrients - but sadly they have been let down by fad diets and society at large.

All Fruits (with the exception of an Avocado) and all Vegetables are Carbohydrates - and if you are willing to sit there and tell me that these are damaging to your health, then I am afraid that you are on the wrong Blog.

I do think that the demonisation of Carbs in our Society is wildly correlated with how much more sedentary we are as well. Simply put, the more muscle you have on your body, the more carbohydrates you can eat - because you have more room for it to be stored in your muscles to be used up as energy, as opposed to it having to be stored as fat in the body.

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READ MY BLOG POST WHICH IS HELPING HUNDREDS OF OFFICE WORKERS GET MORE HEALTHY

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As a Vegetarian, I know this to be true. My Diet had to go from a bigger protein base to a bigger Carbohydrate base, but my physique didn’t change that much for two reasons:

1. I had an awful lot of muscle on my body (72kg of muscle on an 82kg body)

2. I remained active

No food is good or bad. They can contain more calories or fewer calories. They can affect your body in a different way depending on who you are - but this does not denote their moral value.

And by attaching moral values to food - you are attaching judgement to the foods you eat - that will erode your relationship with food over time. I understand it’s almost common to describe a doughnut as bad, and an apple as good. But neither is true - and the more you learn to frame it as just food, which has an energy value contained within it - the better everything will become for you.

Why do we misunderstand Carbs?

There is no denying it.

If you want to lose just Scale Weight quickly - reduce your Carb intake. This will without a doubt bring the scale down, as every time we eat 1g of Carbs we retain 3g of Water.

As this study [6] from 2015 confirms:

“Our findings agree with the long held notion that each gram of glycogen is stored in human muscle with at least 3 g of water. Higher ratios are possible (e.g., during REHFULL) likely due to water storage not bound to glycogen.”

When you go “low-carb” the scale weight you see drop is just water leaving your muscles - its not body fat dropping. This also goes a long way to explaining why the scale goes up after you have had a night out on Italian Food!

The other great misunderstanding about Carbs is whether you are actually overeating eating them or not. Oftentimes its not the Carbohydrate content in a food that makes it scrummy and delicious - its the combination between Carbs and Fats.

These are the greatest flavoured crisps that have ever come into existence.

And when you look at them - you probably think - its a big old bag of Carbs.

But when you break it down to its nutritional caloric values - its actually predominately a bag of dietary fat.

This bag per serve has:

123kcals, 6.5g of Fat which is 58.5kcal and 14.3g of carbohydrate which is 57.2kcal.

Let’s look at a “more sugary” piece of food = the greatest donut of all time:

The Krispy Kreme Original Glazed.

190kcals, 11g of Fat which is 99kcals, 22g of carbohydrates which is 88kcals.

The reason these foods are so damn tasty isn’t because they have Carbs in them. Instead, it is the potent combination of Carbohydrate AND Dietary Fat.

All of these years you have been slamming yourself for eating Carbs…when the truth is…you have been eating more Dietary Fat than you actually realised - which, if you are considering going “low-carb” to lose weight - think again - you actually need to cut down

Now, why might this be an issue…

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What Fats to eat when working out?

Fats have 9kcal per gram within them. This means calorically they are worth more than double Carbohydrates and Protein.

Now, this is a real friend when trying to gain weight or maintain your weight - but when trying to lose weight, this can be a big reason that success eludes you.

Similar to Carbohydrate this is why it is very important to manage your portion sizes well.

Fats are very good for you - despite their Caloric density - we do need them in our diet for a whole multitude of reasons.

The World Health Organization states that total fat intake needs to be around 20-35% of total caloric intake [7] - and other Health Bodies say similar.

Dietary Fat allows our body to absorb the essential ADEK Vitamins into our system - they are Fat-Soluble Vitamins - whereas all other Vitamins are Water Soluble.

Now Fats can get very confusing because there are so many sub-categories of them…but I am going to try and make it as simple as possible for you.

Fats that are to be limited:

Saturated Fat - often found in things like Butter, Cakes, Sausages, Bacon and Cheese - can have a negative outcome on health if eaten to excess. Think Animal Fats, whole Fat Diary and Coconut and Palm Oil.

Trans Fat - this is nearly the only category of food I will allow people to discuss in a negative manner. These are foods with hydrogenated oil in them. Usually your fried foods, fast foods, margarine, pastries and processed snacks.

All other Fats are to be enjoyed moderately within your goals.

Poly Unsaturated Fats: Fish, because they contain two types of Fatty Acid - Omega 3 and Omega 6 which are great for heart and brain health. Tofu also contains these fats as well as, soybeans and pumpkin seeds.

Mono Unsaturated Fats: Nuts, Olive Oil and Avocado.

In terms of strictly speaking for your workouts, I would say prioritise Poly Unsaturated Fats as the Omega 3s and 6s are very good for your joint health.

As these studies [8, 9] show when it looked at the role of Poly Unsaturated Fatty Acids (PUFA) and the effect on Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) prevention it found that:

“Growing evidence demonstrates a role of PUFAs in chronic inflammation of RA and this is well established in many types of animal models of inflammatory arthritis” [8]

“The results suggest that omega-3 PUFAs are an attractive adjunctive treatment for joint pain associated with rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and dysmenorrhea” [9]

A final word on Fats…

Olive Oil could be regarded as the “Healthiest Fat” on the planet.

It is probably the most powerfully healthy food we have available to us. The supreme benefits of Olive Oil are thus:

1. Rich in Mono Saturated Fat

2. Large Amounts of Antioxidants [10]

3. Reduces Inflammation due to its Oelic Acid content [11]

4. Helps prevent strokes [12]

5. Reduces Heart Disease by reducing Cholesterol [13] and Blood Pressure [14]

6. Helps you Maintain Bodyweight when calories are controlled the same [15]

7. Helps with Insulin Sensitivity [16]

8. Can reduce Cancer risk [17]

Now I am not expecting you, nor do I want you, drinking Olive Oil like it is water. Try to make sure you get Extra Virgin Olive Oil. The best way in which to ingest Olive Oil is in its uncooked form, so maybe drizzle it on your salads and vegetables.

Although the benefits are impressive, you need to make sure that you aren’t having more than what meets the recommended intake of between 20-35% of your total caloric intake for the day.

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What Supplements To Have When Working Out?

Supplements not to have…

Supplements are a very intriguing world that is highly unregulated. Supplement companies sell you the quick fix and the shortcut to your results…and 95% of them are just rubbish - and are just designed to take your money and exploit your insecurities.

Remember if it is a shortcut to success, it wouldn’t be a shortcut - it would simple be known as the way to do things.

To create a supplement you do not need any approval from a governing body - which is a little terrifying. There was a fantastic documentary on this called “Bigger, Stronger, Faster*” where they looked into the world of steroid use and dietary supplements. This is how easy it is to make a supplement:

Terrifying right?

Supplements you don’t need are:

• BCAAs

• Pre-Workouts

• Ketones

• Apple Cider Vinegar

• Laxatives

• Diuretics

• Fat Burning Pills

• Detoxes

• Cleanses

• Slimming Teas

• Any MLM Products

And a quick note on Branch Chain Amino Acids or BCAAs as they are getting more and more popular as a supplement.

This systematic review of 12 studies found that:

“BCAA supplementation seems not to improve performance and gain of strength and muscle mass.”

Therefore it would appear that so long as you are getting a well-balanced diet - as outlined in the rest of this article - you are not “losing gains on the Gym floor” by not drinking BCAAs.

What about Multivitamins?

In terms of Multivitamins and Vitamin Supplementation, I am not an expert - and many people enjoy having these in their nutrition. On occasion when I lived in the UK I did take Vitamin D3, and in the Winter here in Australia I do have a multivitamin during winter. But with regards to this - you do you - it’s not my remit and I’m not here to judge what you are supplementing yourself with in terms of vitamins.

Many people need many different things for many different reasons.

And that is going to have little or no effect on your ability to workout.

Supplements that are useful…

Whey or Vegan Protein Powder: Getting in your 100g+ of Protein can be quite hard sometimes and this is where Whey Protein or any other kind of Protein Powder can come in handy. It’s a simple, quick hit of protein that will help you get those numbers up as you need. As I alluded to earlier I have my Protein Shake after each workout or run - because I often need something to eat, and I really enjoy having it at that time. There is no magic effect of having it immediately after - it’s just a good moment to make sure that you are getting your protein in each day.

Creatine Monohydrate: The benefits of Creatine Monohydrate are slowly being more and more realised by science. It is widely considered the best supplement out there to help build muscle and strength and is one of the most researched and studied supplements of all time. It is also naturally found in the body already,

It’s also incredibly affordable and lasts a long time because you only need 3g of it a day.

I just put it in my protein shake - and you don’t even know it is there.

The benefits of Creatine Monohydrate almost can’t be overstated. It helps with muscle development of sedentary people, elderly people [18] and elite athletes. It also helps with brain function and potentially could help slow down the onset of Parkinsons’ Disease [19] and a whole host of other brain conditions.

Creatine is also very useful if you are like me, a vegetarian.

If you are going to buy some Creatine Monohydrate make sure that you read the label, and follow the dosage requirements.

Caffeine: This will boost your performance in the Gym [20] and is equally pretty safe to use. I always enjoy a coffee before I work out. You must be careful though, especially if you are working out in the evenings. Caffeine stays in your system for a long time, and it will inhibit your ability to get deep REM sleep - whether you have worked out or not. Therefore the benefit of what you gained from your workout from having caffeine will be negated the next day due to inadequate sleep.

You can find out more about it right here: Why Does Sleep Affect Your Weight Loss?

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What’s Next?

I really hope you found this article useful, and you feel a lot more comfortable about your diet and nutrition when ity comes to your workouts.

I also have some other articles you might find useful to help you navigate your nturitona lot more on your Fitness Journey:

1. How To Stay Full In A Calorie Deficit Without Being Hungry

2. The Best Meal Plan For Female Weight Loss

3. Does Counting or Tracking Your Calories Help You Lose Weight?

Added to all of that, if you would like a Free Calorie and Macro Calculator then just put your email in here:

You are also more than welcome to join my Free Facebook Group:

Thank you so much for being here - it means an awful lot to me.

Have a great day…

Coach Adam

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References:

1. Food and mood: how do diet and nutrition affect mental wellbeing BMJ2020;369doi:https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m2382(Published 29 June 2020)Cite this as:BMJ2020;369:m2382

2. Johnston CS, Day CS, Swan PD. Postprandial thermogenesis is increased 100% on a high-protein, low-fat diet versus a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet in healthy, young women. J Am Coll Nutr. 2002 Feb;21(1):55-61. doi: 10.1080/07315724.2002.10719194. PMID: 11838888.

3. Schoenfeld BJ, Aragon AA, Krieger JW. The effect of protein timing on muscle strength and hypertrophy: a meta-analysis. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2013 Dec 3;10(1):53. doi: 10.1186/1550-2783-10-53. PMID: 24299050; PMCID: PMC3879660.

4. Levine JA. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). Best Pract Res Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2002 Dec;16(4):679-702. doi: 10.1053/beem.2002.0227. PMID: 12468415.

5. Seidelmann SB, Claggett B, Cheng S, Henglin M, Shah A, Steffen LM, Folsom AR, Rimm EB, Willett WC, Solomon SD. Dietary carbohydrate intake and mortality: a prospective cohort study and meta-analysis. Lancet Public Health. 2018 Sep;3(9):e419-e428. doi: 10.1016/S2468-2667(18)30135-X. Epub 2018 Aug 17. PMID: 30122560; PMCID: PMC6339822.

6. Fernández-Elías VE, Ortega JF, Nelson RK, Mora-Rodriguez R. Relationship between muscle water and glycogen recovery after prolonged exercise in the heat in humans. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2015 Sep;115(9):1919-26. doi: 10.1007/s00421-015-3175-z. Epub 2015 Apr 25. PMID: 25911631.

7. Liu AG, Ford NA, Hu FB, Zelman KM, Mozaffarian D, Kris-Etherton PM. A healthy approach to dietary fats: understanding the science and taking action to reduce consumer confusion. Nutr J. 2017 Aug 30;16(1):53. doi: 10.1186/s12937-017-0271-4. PMID: 28854932; PMCID: PMC5577766.

8. Navarini L, Afeltra A, Gallo Afflitto G, Margiotta DPE. Polyunsaturated fatty acids: any role in rheumatoid arthritis? Lipids Health Dis. 2017 Oct 10;16(1):197. doi: 10.1186/s12944-017-0586-3. PMID: 29017507; PMCID: PMC5634864.

9. Goldberg RJ, Katz J. A meta-analysis of the analgesic effects of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid supplementation for inflammatory joint pain. Pain. 2007 May;129(1-2):210-23. doi: 10.1016/j.pain.2007.01.020. Epub 2007 Mar 1. PMID: 17335973.

10. Tuck KL, Hayball PJ. Major phenolic compounds in olive oil: metabolism and health effects. J Nutr Biochem. 2002 Nov;13(11):636-644. doi: 10.1016/s0955-2863(02)00229-2. PMID: 12550060.

11. Yoneyama S, Miura K, Sasaki S, Yoshita K, Morikawa Y, Ishizaki M, Kido T, Naruse Y, Nakagawa H. Dietary intake of fatty acids and serum C-reactive protein in Japanese. J Epidemiol. 2007 May;17(3):86-92. doi: 10.2188/jea.17.86. PMID: 17545695; PMCID: PMC7058455.

12. Martínez-González MA, Dominguez LJ, Delgado-Rodríguez M. Olive oil consumption and risk of CHD and/or stroke: a meta-analysis of case-control, cohort and intervention studies. Br J Nutr. 2014 Jul 28;112(2):248-59. doi: 10.1017/S0007114514000713. Epub 2014 Apr 28. PMID: 24775425.

13. Patrick L, Uzick M. Cardiovascular disease: C-reactive protein and the inflammatory disease paradigm: HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors, alpha-tocopherol, red yeast rice, and olive oil polyphenols. A review of the literature. Altern Med Rev. 2001 Jun;6(3):248-71. PMID: 11410071.

14. Psaltopoulou T, Naska A, Orfanos P, Trichopoulos D, Mountokalakis T, Trichopoulou A. Olive oil, the Mediterranean diet, and arterial blood pressure: the Greek European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC) study. Am J Clin Nutr. 2004 Oct;80(4):1012-8. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/80.4.1012. Erratum in: Am J Clin Nutr. 2005 May;81(5):1181. PMID: 15447913.

15. Bes-Rastrollo M, Sánchez-Villegas A, de la Fuente C, de Irala J, Martinez JA, Martínez-González MA. Olive oil consumption and weight change: the SUN prospective cohort study. Lipids. 2006 Mar;41(3):249-56. doi: 10.1007/s11745-006-5094-6. PMID: 16711599

16. Kastorini CM, Panagiotakos DB. Dietary patterns and prevention of type 2 diabetes: from research to clinical practice; a systematic review. Curr Diabetes Rev. 2009 Nov;5(4):221-7. doi: 10.2174/157339909789804341. PMID: 19531025.

17. Trichopoulou A, Lagiou P, Kuper H, Trichopoulos D. Cancer and Mediterranean dietary traditions. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2000 Sep;9(9):869-73. PMID: 11008902.

18. Brose A, Parise G, Tarnopolsky MA. Creatine supplementation enhances isometric strength and body composition improvements following strength exercise training in older adults. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2003 Jan;58(1):11-9. doi: 10.1093/gerona/58.1.b11. PMID: 12560406.

19. Matthews RT, Ferrante RJ, Klivenyi P, Yang L, Klein AM, Mueller G, Kaddurah-Daouk R, Beal MF. Creatine and cyclocreatine attenuate MPTP neurotoxicity. Exp Neurol. 1999 May;157(1):142-9. doi: 10.1006/exnr.1999.7049. PMID: 10222117.

20. Hodgson AB, Randell RK, Jeukendrup AE. The metabolic and performance effects of caffeine compared to coffee during endurance exercise. PLoS One. 2013;8(4):e59561. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0059561. Epub 2013 Apr 3. PMID: 23573201; PMCID: PMC3616086.

7 Practical Tips To Make Counting Calories Easier

One of the most frequent complaints I get from clients on the Strong & Confident Program is that they just don’t have the time to track their food.

Once they have cooked the dinner, eaten the dinner and then washed up after - its either their bedtime or their children’s bedtime…and the act of meticulously going through what they ate that day, and most importantly trying to remember everything they ate that day, is obviously going to be the last thing on their mind - whether they want to achieve their goals or not.

And I get it.

80% of my clients, throughout my career have been busy parents, and realistically you have to look at their lives and question whether tracking their calories is really going to add stress or take the stress away from their life.

And much of the time it will add stress - which will have far more negative repercussions on their fitness than whether they choose to track calories.

About a month ago, I did a Seminar here on the Gold Coast, Australia, all about Tracking your calories, and I wanted to share with you what we all went through on that day.

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Table of contents for: 7 Practical Tips To Make Counting Calories Easier

1. Does Calorie Counting work?

2. Why should you track your food?

3. Informed Consent on tracking your calories

4. 7 Tips to make Counting Calories Easier

5. How To Be In A Calorie Deficit Without Logging Your Food

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There is a quick summary of my 7 Practical Tips on YouTube. But to understand the principles and the whys and wherefores behind counting calories - keep reading!

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Does Calorie Counting work?

This is a very hotly debated topic.

There are people out there…on the internet…who will tell you that tracking your calories simply doesn’t work…simply because the calorie amounts on packages aren’t accurate.

This study [1] called ‘Food Label Accuracy of Common Snack Foods’ found that:

“Measured energy values exceeded label statements by 8% on average in pre-packaged convenience meals (12), which is slightly higher but consistent with the label disparity of 4.3% in packaged snack foods. Also consistent with this study, most products in our sample fell within the allowable limit of 20% over the label calories per Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations”

This is a shocking revelation, but it’s still only 8% out.

The last time I checked, 8% was a pretty small amount. Let me put it to you thus, if I gave you 92% success in your Goals…would you take it?

Exactly.

So let me ask again; Does Calorie Counting Work?

And it’s a resounding yes provided you have never had an Eating Disorder.

If you have ever had an Eating Disorder then please don’t engage in Calorie Counting. And if you need help with that please contact the Charity BEAT here [2].

There are issues relating to Calorie Counting, and I go into those later in the article. But the main answer to this question is the following:

Yes. Calorie Counting does work.

This study [3] took participants over one year, and depending on their consistency with dietary tracking, split them into three Groups.

1. Rare Trackers equalling <33% days tracked (114 days out of 343)

2. Inconsistent Trackers 33-66% days tracked

3. Consistent Trackers >66% days tracked (228 days out opf 343)

Please note that consistent trackers qualify at just two-thirds of the time available to them - not 100% of the time available to them.

All participants were asked to:

• Maintain daily food journals and physical activity records;

• Reduce portion sizes;

• Reduce foods high in calories, fat, and simple sugar;

• Increase consumption of fruits, vegetables, and low-fat dairy products;

and

• Weigh themselves frequently and at least weekly (more on this here)

They each worked with a Health Coach, and attended interactive sessions designed to educate them on nutrition and exercise adherence.

The results were:

“Only consistent trackers had significant weight loss (-9.99 pounds), following a linear relationship with consistent loss throughout the year. In addition, the weight loss trend for the rare and inconsistent trackers followed a nonlinear path, with the holidays slowing weight loss and the onset of summer increasing weight loss. These results show the importance of frequent dietary tracking for consistent long-term weight loss success”

It also concluded the following:

“Early in the program weight change of consistent trackers did not differ from rare or inconsistent dietary trackers. However, rare or inconsistent trackers gained weight during the holidays but the consistent trackers' rate of weight loss did not change as they sustained their rate of weight loss from the first quarter. Hence, successful behavioural interventions should emphasize the benefits of consistent dietary tracking for participants, motivating individuals to track for at least 5 days of each week for sustained and clinically significant weight loss"

This study teaches us a lot about weight loss.

The first lesson is that consistency is what matters, and consistency doesn’t mean as much as you think it does. It is simply just two-thirds of your time.

The second lesson is that tracking is a behaviour that supports other behaviours like having a Coach, reducing portion sizes, and eating more fruits and vegetables.

The third lesson is that scientifically 10lbs is a significant amount of weight to lose in a year.

As a coach, my point here is you need to stop comparing yourself to people on Social Media. What you see on there, compared to what real world results truly look like vary greatly.

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Why Should You Track Your Food?

One of the most common occurrences in people who are trying to lose weight and getting frustrated with the outcomes in terms of weight loss is that they often overestimate the calories they are burning and underestimate the calories they are consuming.

As this study concludes:

“The failure of some obese subjects to lose weight while eating a diet they report as low in calories is due to an energy intake substantially higher than reported and an overestimation of physical activity, not to an abnormality in thermogenesis.”

This basically means that it comes down to your Calorie Deficit, rather than there being an issue in the way your body metabolises food.

The hypothesis has been tested in two other ways as well. This study pipped Dieticians against Non-Dieticians and found that even dieticians under-report their energy intake somewhere between 223 and 116 kcal/day, compared with the non-dieticians who underreported between 429 and 142kcal/day.

This just goes to show…that even those who are really well educated on food and nutrition still underestimate the calories they are consuming.

This doesn’t mean that learning about nutrition and your food isn’t worthwhile. The dieticians were still better with an average over-reporting of 169.5kcal/day compared to the non-dieticians which averaged 285.5kcal/day.

And finally,

This study actually paid people to be accurate. They were giving out $50 bonuses to be accurate with their diet recall on four occasions. One group had to be accurate the first two times, the second group accurate the second two times, and one group received no bonus at all.

And guess what happened:

“Energy intake did not differ within or between groups at any time, and the number of under reporters was not associated with group at any time. Overall, the incentive was ineffective.”

So by tracking your food, you reduce the risk of being inaccurate. In fact, tracking your food is the most accurate way to tell if you are or are not in a calorie deficit for that day. We have no other way of knowing this information, and if you want instant feedback about your weight loss day on day - then tracking your food is the best way to go about it.

In terms of overestimating the number of calories, you are burning this comes down to many things. The main one is that we trust our smartwatches to be accurate with this information when this study [5] demonstrates.

It found that Smartwatches at their most accurate, in terms of judging energy expenditure are off by between 27% and 93%.

The study also found that they are better at reading heart rates.

Personally, as a Coach, I don’t like clients on my Strong & Confident Program to focus on Calories burned from exercise - because that can destroy your relationship with exercise and create very extreme behaviour that will only lead to failure.

You should focus on eating to your deficit - and exercising to get strong enough to fight a bear in the woods.

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Informed Consent when tracking your food

As I mentioned above, you should not track your food if you are recovering from any form of Eating Disorder.

But I also take my responsibility for your Mental Health very seriously so I want to let you know about the drawbacks of tracking your food, before I give you the 7 Practical Tips To Make Counting Calories Easier.

Then you can decide whether or not it is a behaviour you are safe to engage with.

This study [6] analysed 5.5k posts on Community Forums, like MyFitness Pal, and discovered what the practical difficulties are with tracking food.

• Success is attributed to a “goal weight achievement”

• Of 94 people, only 22 thought they were empowered enough to no longer need to track their food

• Can be a tedious practice

• Not knowing how much of a food to enter

• Not being able to find foods in the database

• How do you track restaurants and eating at a friends house?

• When asked to rate difficulty by meal type, respondents rated packaged food (average: 6.5) and fast food (6.3) as significantly easier to journal than home-cooked meals (4.6), buffet meals (3.7), ethnic food (3.7), restaurant meals (3.6), foods served by friends (3.2), and foods consumed at parties (2.9)

I’d just like to highlight a few points here:

“Success is attributed to a “goal weight achievement” - this is always going to be an issue on an App like MyFitness Pal - because it keeps reminding you how much you will weigh in x amount of days, if you keep up the behaviour you set that day. Although some will find this motivating I am here to tell you that your success is not defined by hitting a weight on the scale. Your success is determined by engaging in behaviours over a consistent period of time. If you set these behaviours and execute you will gain confidence and strength - as a consequence of that you might lose weight.

I think I summed this up best when I said on Instagram:

“How do you track restaurants and eating at a friends house?” - there are two schools of thought here:

1. If you don’t eat out too often - mainly if it’s just a special occasion - then you shouldn’t be tracking in the first place, you should be enjoying the moment.

2. If you eat out more and are worried about the calories, do your best at figuring out what you had when you get home…then add 30% to account for factors of food that are out of your control - like the amount of oil used by the Chef.

The same study [6] then also analysed Mental Health outcomes relating to tracking food and it found:

• Food journalers report feelings of shame, judgement, or obsession associated with current designs. P6 reported journaling “made me feel guilty sometimes”, while P27 noted a lack of positive feedback: “I always felt guilty when I ate too much, and there wasn't that much pride when I was under my goal.”

• “Sometimes I feel like not logging things because I know it’s really unhealthy.

• “It made me too focused and obsessive about what I was eating”

• “It was more of an on the way to an eating disorder thing than anything else (tried to keep calories extremely low)”

• “I think I was hesitant to do the logging if not alone”

• “I had more of a problem with eating out at a friend’s house because I didn’t want to ask for ingredients or mention that I was logging calories”

You should never feel shame around a behaviour you are engaging in and if you are feeling that way then please do not operate in that behaviour.

If what you are doing is not making you feel strong and empowered - then why o why are you doing it?

You shouldn’t have to suffer - and I don’t want you to suffer at all.

In terms of going over your calories sometimes - and that leading to a feeling of failure - please remember that no matter what you do - you can’t fuck this up - because when you engage in a fitness journey - it shouldn’t be defined by an endpoint, it should be a move to building an active lifestyle and pulling yourself into balance.

Therefore, all you have to do is get back on track the very next day.

The human body doesn’t gain weight that quickly, so there really isn’t a need to panic when you go over.

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1. Don’t try to be perfect in an imperfect system

The whole system around calories is flawed.

When we establish someone’s Basal Metabolic Rate which is the point upon which we begin to figure out their deficit calories we are making it our “best guess”. This guess is based on years and years of study across millions of people, but it is still a guess.

And the food industry does the same. In 1991 the Australian Food Standards Code used to state:

“That the value shown in a Nutrition Information Panel was deemed to comply if these values (of energy, carbohydrate, starch or fibre) did not vary by more than 20% from those values actually present and 10% variation was permitted for other nutrients”

And although these figures are no longer part of Law they are still regarded as acceptable folklore in the Food Industry.

The current Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code does not permit or mandate any limits on accuracy of the levels of nutrients expressed in Nutrition Information Panels but only requires that these values be ‘average’ values. Maximum and minimum quantities are required in regard to claims for polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fatty acid contents of food.

And in the US a study called “Food Label Accuracy of Common Snack Foods” [7] we have already seen that calories in published are not that reliable.

Being consistent with tracking your food, to get a best guess is good enough, and by doing that you still get results as you will be holding yourself accountable and over time will improve your choices to help you get to your goals.

2. It’s Not A Life Sentence; its a Period of Education

When you approach anything in life with the view of “What can I learn about this?” as opposed to “Can I pass or fail this?” you will automatically improve your relationship with that behaviour.

Tracking your food is no different. You should do it to learn about the energy in food, to learn about how your choices over a day impact your energy and ability to control your stress. Its a way of finding out if your weekends are destroying your progress and what eating in balance really looks like.

You get to decide when that period of education is over and when you feel empowered enough to move away from tracking your calories - because that is the goal here. The goal isn’t to be tied to MyFitness Pal for the rest of your life.

You should want to be educated enough about nutrition so that you never have to open an app ever again.

3. There is no right or wrong, just exploration

One of these days I’m going to get this printed on a t-shirt. It’s true of exercise, and it’s true of nutrition.

If you go over your calories, the only person judging you is you.

If you don’t hit your protein target, the only person judging you is you.

Every time something sub-optimal occurs the good news is that you have the opportunity to learn from it, grow from it, and ultimately succeed from those lessons.

You are only every investigating, course correcting and developing - you are not passing or failing.

4. If it’s in a packet: Track it!

This is so simple it hurts. MyFitness Pal and any other tracking app you might use will have what’s called a Barcode Scanner. It will literally take you a matter of seconds to get all of the nutritional information you need about that food by scanning the barcode.

Therefore if you eat something with a barcode. on the packet - which will be a fair 75% of the food you eat - just track it.

5 . Set Up generic value amounts for Fruits and Veggies

Let’s be very clear - no one ever gained weight from eating too many fruits and veggies. Even if you are a Vegetarian, I promise you fruits and vegetables in your diet are not the problem here.

And when it comes to tracking them, they can be really annoying to put into an app accurately.

Therefore you should just set up a generic value for Fruits and Vegetables, save that into your App and just use those every time you have your Veggies at dinner.

Personally I just scan a bag of frozen vegetables set it to 100g and use that every time I have dinner - irrespective of what the Vegetables actually are.

6. Eating Out? Add 30% to your meal

I alluded to this earlier in the article - but it’s a strategy that makes everything. more accurate for you when you are trying to track your food.

The best way to track your food when eating out would be the following:

1.  See online if the restaurant publishes their calories

2. In the restaurant take a photo.

3. When at home, best guess the amounts.

4. Add 30% to every amount even if the restaurant does publish their calories

That way you have the bases covered.

And remember if you are out celebrating - celebrate. Don’t worry about the calories on special occasions - just worry about getting back on track the next day.

7. Cook Meals that are already Calorie Tracked

This is the one that perplexes me the most when it comes to people who are trying to lose weight and using calorie tracking as a solution to that.

It also perplexes me with clients on my Strong and Confident Program - who are tracking - as they have access to over 250 recipes all with calorie tracked barcodes including vegetarian and vegan options - yet they still say that tracking is too hard for them.

All the hard work has been done for you.

In fact, if you Google “MyFitness Pal Dinner Recipes” you get 688,000 results and the top one is all with the Macros and Calories already figured out for you.

So use that resource.

I guarantee you will be able to find a version of your favourite meal that is now Barcode Scannable or has all of the nutritional information figured out for you. Then you just have to copy and paste.

The brass tax is if you can’t be bothered to copy and paste some information or spend ten minutes finding the information on the internet to be able to track your calories - then engaging in a fitness journey will always be a slog for you.

How To Be In A Calorie Deficit Without Logging Your Food

There are other things you can do to keep your calories in check without necessarily logging your food.

But bear in mind, the only way to truly know if you are in a deficit each day - is to log your foods.

I have two strategies for this.

The first is a three meals, two snacks which I outline here:

This is very simple.

• Each day you are allowed three meals.

• Each meal must fit on one plate.

• Between breakfast and lunch and lunch and dinner you can have a snack.

I have found applying this structure is incredibly effective.

The second strategy is called The Five Awesome Rules For Fat Loss Life.

This is a list of 5 things you need in order to lose weight:

1. Be in a Calorie Deficit

2. Three Litres of Water A Day

3. Protein and Veggies at every meal

4. 8-10k Steps A Day

5. 7-8 hours of sleep a night

And if you want help figuring this out then watch this:

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Did You Find This Useful?

Across this website, I have other Articles all about Tracking your Calories and managing your Calorie Deficit:

• How To Stay Full In A Calorie Deficit Without Being Hungry

• Does Counting or Tracking Your Calories Help You Lose Weight?

• How To Count Calories

Added to that it would be AMAZING if you wanted to become my friend.

As my friend, I will send you some amazing help, like a book called 27 Ways to Faster Fat Loss, workout plans for both the Gym and home workouts, and much more. Just put your email in below:

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References:

1. Jumpertz R, Venti CA, Le DS, et al. Food label accuracy of common snack foods. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2013;21(1):164-169. doi:10.1002/oby.20185

2. Beat. 2021. The UK's Eating Disorder Charity - Beat. [online] Available at: <https://www.beateatingdisorders.org.uk/> [Accessed 15 September 2021].

3. Ingels JS, Misra R, Stewart J, Lucke-Wold B, Shawley-Brzoska S. The Effect of Adherence to Dietary Tracking on Weight Loss: Using HLM to Model Weight Loss over Time. J Diabetes Res. 2017;2017:6951495. doi: 10.1155/2017/6951495. Epub 2017 Aug 9. PMID: 28852651; PMCID: PMC5568610.

4. Lichtman SW, Pisarska K, Berman ER, Pestone M, Dowling H, Offenbacher E, Weisel H, Heshka S, Matthews DE, Heymsfield SB. Discrepancy between self-reported and actual caloric intake and exercise in obese subjects. N Engl J Med. 1992 Dec 31;327(27):1893-8. doi: 10.1056/NEJM199212313272701. PMID: 1454084.

5. Shcherbina, A.; Mattsson, C.M.; Waggott, D.; Salisbury, H.; Christle, J.W.; Hastie, T.; Wheeler, M.T.; Ashley, E.A. Accuracy in Wrist-Worn, Sensor-Based Measurements of Heart Rate and Energy Expenditure in a Diverse Cohort. J. Pers. Med. 2017, 7, 3. https://doi.org/10.3390/jpm7020003

6. Cordeiro F, Epstein DA, Thomaz E, Bales E, Jagannathan AK, Abowd GD, Fogarty J. Barriers and Negative Nudges: Exploring Challenges in Food Journaling. Proc SIGCHI Conf Hum Factor Comput Syst. 2015 Apr;2015:1159-1162. doi: 10.1145/2702123.2702155. PMID: 26894233; PMCID: PMC4755274.

7. Jumpertz R, Venti CA, Le DS, Michaels J, Parrington S, Krakoff J, Votruba S. Food label accuracy of common snack foods. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2013 Jan;21(1):164-9. doi: 10.1002/oby.20185. PMID: 23505182; PMCID: PMC3605747.

Why Can't I Lose Weight No Matter What I Do?

Choose a Lego Head above.

Any Lego Head.

And I imagine its pretty close to how you are feeling about your weight loss efforts…and how you happened to end up here…reading this Article.

And if you have been trying to lose weight for a while now…and you have ended up here, reading this, then I am sure you probably feel more like this:

To find the images of the Lego Heads I used two words:

“Angry” and “Frustrated”

This gives me one sole goal for this article - as your Coach - to remove your frustration and your anger about your inability to lose weight no matter what you do - and be able to set you up on a path to success.

Just like my friend Jenny who lost over 7kgs working with me online on the Strong and Confident Program.

She came to me at her whits end - having spent hours on the Gym floor, following every single piece of advice they gave her on diet and exercise. Sometimes she would exercise twice a day just to try and achieve a change on the scale, in her clothes or how she felt about herself.

And still couldn’t crack the “secret code” to weight loss.

Then we spoke on a video chat, she was very emotional and I held out my hand, told her to stop worrying, and together….we’ve got this.

She achieved this by just doing 10mins a day every day for 3 months.

Because she had a process that she could trust.

And that is what I am going to share with you today in order to make you feel empowered, strong and confident to finally Google the term:

“How to get strong enough to wrestle a bear in the woods”

Please remember this article is not from a Medical Perspective - it is a Coach’s perspective on why you aren’t losing weight no matter what you do.

I am presuming you have been to the Doctor, and got the all-clear from any severe Metabolic conditions, I am also going out on a limb and saying that if you have Hypothyroidism, PCOS, or are currently struggling with the symptoms of Menopause what I am going to share with you is still relevant, and will still work - it just is that much harder.

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If you need help with PCOS and Weight Loss then read this:

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The structure of this article is a little different from my “normal” ones. For each header, I am going to pose you a question for you to answer - from there I will hope to establish some holes in your approach to losing weight - and I will tell you the science-backed solution to fixing that hole in your approach.

By the end of this article, you will be able to reset, reapproach and feel reinvigorated to help make the changes you need.

All I ask from you, as you read this, is that you are honest with yourself in how you respond to these questions.

If you are able, to be honest, then I will be able to help you…and we can make you feel more like a Super Hero in your weight loss journey. We can literally get you eating ice cream and losing weight….

Which in truth is the ultimate goal anyway isn’t it?

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Table of Contents for “I Can’t Lose Weight No Matter What I Do”

1. Are you in a Calorie Deficit?

2. Are you sleeping enough?

3. Are you blaming your Metabolism?

4. Are you making the most of your Metabolism?

5. Are you restricting your diet too much?

6. Are you being consistent?

7. Are you expecting your movement to do the job for you?

8. Are you on a plan that is making you unhappy?

9. Are you too stressed?

10. Are your expectations too great?

11. Are you comparing yourself to others?

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Question 1: Are you in a Calorie Deficit?

If you have read any of my work before then you will know that a Calorie Deficit is the only way you can lose weight.

As in you need to burn more calories from your body than you are putting into it - and this is what a Calorie Deficit is.

Very simple to understand - but not easy to implement.

If you have found this article, and you have never heard the term Calorie Deficit before then this is the reason you are not losing weight no matter what you do.

You should probably watch this for further context on what a Calorie Deficit truly is and how to set yourself up in a Deficit:

If you have heard the term before, and believe it is what you have tried to implement - then keep reading because every single point I am going to explore in this article is literally going to be the best Coaching advice I have for you to investigate WHY you aren’t in a Calorie Deficit DESPITE your best efforts.

So lets get into it…

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Question 2: Are you Sleeping enough?

I have laid out the correlation between sleep and weight loss in one of my more recent Blog Posts: Why Does Sleep Affect Your Weight Loss?

In writing that Blog, I came to the realization that Sleep is probably more important to a human in order to lose weight than a Calorie Deficit.

Because…

Without enough sleep, you simply will not be able to get into a Calorie Deficit.

In a nutshell…sleep helps you process your emotions like stress and anxiety. When we are deprived of sleep, there is greater activity in the part of the brain known as the Amygdala [1].

The Amygdala is responsible for your emotional responses to what is happening to you during the day.

In subjects who are more sleep deprived, the Amygdala is buzzing with activity, and therefore the sleep-deprived person is responding more emotionally than if they had their 8 hours a night.

And if your emotions are high and negative, your Caloric intake increases.

As the study ‘Modeling the Effects of Positive and Negative Mood on the Ability to Resist Eating in Obese and Non-obese Individuals’ [2] states:

“We also demonstrated strong associations between food craving and these eating behaviours, particularly after following a negative mood induction in obese individuals”

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Question 3: Are you blaming your Metabolism?

Throughout life, you may have heard lots of different theories on your Metabolism. The two main ones are:

• Your Metabolism slows down as you age

• Your Metabolism is broken or Starvation Mode

Let’s deal with your slowing Metabolism first.

A new study called: Daily energy expenditure through the human life course [3] has found that your Metabolism is stable throughout your adult life from the age of 20 all the way up to the age of 60.

This is despite going through Menopause and Pregnancy.

This is good news. As it now clearly shows us that assigning blame when it comes to weight to something that is “out of your control”, ie; your Metabolism, is not a useful strategy.

You can now look past this, and start investigating other reasons you may be unable to lose weight - more than likely one of the other points in this blog.

And as for your Metabolism being broken from a history of eating too little…that is also not relevant.

You can’t break your Metabolism.

The thoughts on this stem down into something known as Starvation Mode; the idea that if you eat too little over your life then your body goes into a “survival mode” or a “starvation mode”.

This does not exist.

Your body metabolically adapts but does not stop as the study Metabolic slowing with massive weight loss despite preservation of fat-free mass [3] concluded:

“RMR declined out of proportion to the decrease in body mass, demonstrating a substantial metabolic adaptation” .

in 1944 the University of Minnesota wanted to find out what extreme Famine does to a population and crucially how to rehabilitate people out of extreme famine in the wake of World War 2.

The study [4] started with, starving people. For real. In study conditions.

36 participants were recruited and were put into Prisoner of War conditions. Made to do manual labour, walk 22 miles a week and were fed 50% of their caloric needs.

Oh, it gets worse…

They did this for 6 months.

One participant cut off his fingers just to get out of the study early…

And as you can imagine it got pretty rough for them. On average each participant lost 25% of their body weight. Here is a photo from the experiment:

But crucially what happened to their Metabolism?

Their metabolisms were performing about 20% lower than predicted after losing weight - their metabolisms adapted.

But this was a two-fold experiment. Participants were put into a “recovery diet” to help them regain the weight they had lost, and after 12 weeks their metabolisms were re-assessed. In 12 weeks their metabolisms were only underperforming by 10%. And in some cases - there was no Metabolic damage at all.

So after being put into Prisoner of War Camp-like conditions, given just 5o% of their caloric needs each day and being forced to do what can only be described as a fuck tonne of exercise, their Metabolisms were not “broken”.

And if you look at this study it would suggest that if you followed the recovery of the subjects in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment for longer than 12 weeks - their Metabolism made a full recovery.

And…

Each participant continued to lose weight throughout the whole experiment.

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Question 4: Are you making the most of your Metabolism?

Your metabolism (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) is made up of four components.

As you can see in the chart above, your Basal Metabolic Rate which is 70% of your Metabolism is the largest portion of your Metabolism. But it is also largely out of your control. This 70% is determined by your Sex, Height, and Weight. It's how your body just keeps your body functioning to get the most out of your Metabolism, as in, to burn the most amount of Calories each and every day, you should focus on your NEAT.

This makes up 15% of your Daily Caloric burn.

It outranks your time in the Gym by 10% and outranks the food you eat by 5%.

So how do you increase your Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis?

• Aim for 8-10k steps a day

• Stand up when on the phone

• Stand up when at work

• Have walking meetings/social events

• Park further away from the shops

• Fidget more

• Stand up on Public Transport

• Use the upstairs toilet, not the downstairs toilet

• Stand when you brush your teeth

Many people when they want to begin to lose weight will prioritize in this order:

1. Exercise in the Gym

2. Nutrition

3. Daily Movement

Even to the point that 2 and 3 sometimes don’t even get thought of.

But in truth it should look like this:

1. Nutrition

2. Daily Movement

3. Exercise in the Gym

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Question 5: Are you restricting your Diet too much?

Restriction of calories can lead to weight loss.

That’s basically what a Calorie Deficit is.

But there is a dark side to this as well - and this dark side is probably the number one reason people yo-yo diet AND just can’t seem to lose weight no matter what they do.

This is what occurs:

1. You decide to lose weight

2. You jump onto a Calorie Calculator and get an arbitrary number of calories to lose say 1kg a week

3. That number is a very low amount of calories

4. You manage to stick to this very low number for a brief period

5. The hunger and the restriction gets too much

6. You stop restricting but you don’t go into a balance

7. You go into a Binge

8. This binge lasts two months because now you feel like you failed

9. You gain weight again

10. You repeat the cycle

And what happens is you spend more time out of a deficit than in one which will lead to short and sharp results with the weight loss - but ultimately you will feel like you are constantly failing and unable to ever lose weight because it’s just too damn difficult to do.

This is what I describe as a classic Binge and Restrict Cycle.

You blame yourself for not being able to stick to it.

When in truth you were always set up to fail from the start.

When you over restrict - you have to compensate for that at some point down the line and this creates a swing of too much restriction and too much indulgence.

Then over a year, you have spent more time out of a deficit than in one - which is why you seem to never be able to lose weight.

It always comes down to sustainability and giving yourself a much longer-term view of your goals rather than trying to achieve what you want in a couple of months.

You need what I call…a wide angle lens….

@thegymstarter

When really you just need to be more level with everything to begin with. Drop your expectations of losing weight on a set schedule, because scale weight doesn’t work on a schedule, and give yourself a smaller deficit - which is wholly more sustainable.

To figure that out you can download my Free Fitness Goodies which includes a personalized calorie calculator which makes sure you set yourself up for success with sustainable methods.

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Question 6: Are you being consistent?

It’s an infamous word, isn’t it? Consistency. I feel we all know what it means - and we all believe we are executing on it.

But much like the binge and restrict cycle outlined previously, when it comes to consistency what occurs is perfection and abstention - and often the perfection part of the pendulum is confused for consistency.

Many many many people tell me they are being consistent:

• By going to the gym every day

• By avoiding processed foods every day

• By cutting out sugar all the time

• By tracking their food every day

Whenever you use the words “every day” or “all the time” you are not being consistent.

You are striving for perfection. And perfection is impossible.

And then when you can’t keep up the perfect routine you are excusing for consistency the feelings of failure begin again…and you eventually give up.

You don’t need to do it every day. You don’t need to work out every day. You don’t need to track your calories every day. You don’t need to eat salads every day to have success.

You do need to do it consistently - a good guide for this is the 80/20 rule which would dictate that in a month you need to be hitting your goals around 25 days of the month.

As the study “The Effect of Adherence to Dietary Tracking on Weight Loss: Using HLM to Model Weight Loss over Time” [6] states:

“Successful behavioural interventions should emphasize the benefits of consistent dietary tracking for participants, motivating individuals to track for at least 5 days of each week for sustained and clinically significant weight loss"

Not 7 days, not even 6. At least 5 days.

That sounds like an 80/20 rule to me.

To find out more about how to implement consistency in your fitness journey head here: How To Stay Consistent With Your Fitness

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Question 7: Are you expecting your movement to do the job for you?

Now I am sure you have heard the old saying:

"You can’t out-train a bad diet”

And this is pretty much true - although I detest over simplifications and cliches like this.

On an average strength training workout, you are burning maybe 300 calories.

At a real push.

You could try and get a bigger calorie burn in by doing some cardio or HIIT but these exercises increase your appetite - so any gains you might make in the Calorie burning department are going to be negated by your hunger increasing.

And for women, that increase in hunger can occur 3-5 days after you have actually worked out meaning it can become really unclear on what the root cause of that increased diet is.

You may well be reading this section and thinking:

“When I work out my watch tells me that I burn 600kcal a workout”

Well, again, your watch is lying to you. There are many studies like this one [7] that shows a wristwatch can be up to 25% inaccurate when looking at calories burned from exercise.

This isn’t to say that being in the Gym isn’t useful for your health and wellbeing - especially when you are wanting to lose weight - it is vitally important to help you get a sense of wellbeing, of strength and achievement.

But you need to get into the mindset of going to the Gym to “get strong enough to fight a bear in the woods” and you need to get into the mindset of your controlling your calories to try and help you lose weight.

The gym isn’t for burning calories, its for getting strong and proving to yourself that you can do hard things and repeat behaviours over time that will lead to your long term success elsewhere in your life.

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Question 8: Are you on a plan that is making you unhappy?

This again is a very common behaviour and it doesn’t matter how great the plan is in terms of results, you will never be able to do it for long enough to actually see these results if you aren’t enjoying what you are doing.

I can think of many examples of Exercise regimens and Diets that do not prioritise balance and enjoyment - and sadly they are the ones that have a lot of marketing behind them and promise “fast results”.

When it comes to diet and exercise - enjoyment is the sole driver of success.

If you don’t enjoy what it is you are doing, but do see results, that’s great. But it just will not last. The results will be temporary and the inevitable weight regain will occur on the back end.

Now sure, we would all enjoy eating doughnuts all day long…

But that too would soon become unenjoyable, just like it did with Homer.

The key to successful weight loss is getting into a process.

The last thing you want is to reach a goal and realise it was all about the process in the beginning.

By focussing on the process, you also focus on the behaviours that will change your life - and get you to your goals.

If those behaviours don’t inspire you, don’t excite you and don’t drive you to take action each and every day then you will never be able to sustain what you are doing.

If you can learn to focus on the process of looking after yourself in this manner, then my friend, you have already won.

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Question 9: Are you too stressed?

Stress is very underrated in terms of how it affects your ability to lose weight.

A point beautifully demonstrated by Homer. Again.

Stress will create two behaviors in your life that make a Calorie Deficit very hard to stick to.

The first is that it will disrupt sleep - now I covered that in Question 2, however, you cannot be reminded enough that you need a better sleep regimen to be able to stay in a Calorie Deficit.

The other role stress plays is its link to emotional eating.

Now firstly we all emotionally eat - please do not think that you are “broken” because you respond to emotions with food. We all do it. The biggest difference here might be the quantity or frequency upon which we do it.

Personally, my emotional eating reveals itself in chugging a beer or two.

For others, it can be hours of eating Haribos or hours upon hours of drinking alcohol - my emotional eating binges last for the duration of the food I am consuming - whereas, for other people, it can last whole evenings, possibly three to four times a week.

Often when it comes to emotional eating, we try to fix the emotions with food - however in truth, the only thing that will fix the emotional eating is learning to process the emotions correctly - and dealing with that head-on.

Stress is proven to cause an increase in caloric intake in someone’s life.

As the study: “Stress-induced obesity and the emotional nervous system [8] concludes:

“Stress also induces secretion of glucocorticoids, which increases motivation for food, and insulin, which promotes food intake and obesity. Pleasurable feeding then reduces activity in the stress–response network, reinforcing the feeding habit. These effects of stressors emphasize the importance of teaching mental reappraisal techniques to restore responses from habitual to thoughtful, thus battling stress-induced obesity”

As you can see there is a need to help reduce your stress in the best way possible.

These are my top recommendations to help you reduce stress:

1. Get enough sleep regularly. If you need help with that listen to my Sleep Stories here: Three Medatitive Sleep Stories by Adam Berry

2. Exercise regularly. Exercise has been proven to reduce stress and help you sleep, as well as process your emotions.

3. Eat more nutritiously - make choices that align with your goals and you will feel like you are achieving as opposed to constantly failing.

4. Meditate. I don’t mean sit on the floor humming, I mean take time to connect to your breath and actively relax - that’s all meditation is. To get some free meditations from me head here: Centering The Breath: A YouTube Playlist

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Question 10: Are your expectations too great?

I’ll let you in on a little secret:

Expectations are the number one reason people fail in fitness.

Forget everything else.

The issue is without a doubt expectation.

Many people start with an expectation that is wholly unrealistic - and usually based on an arbitrary human they have seen on Social Media as opposed to what is realistic for them, in their given circumstances.

And then when these expectations are seldom met, you start to feel like a failure….which inevitably results in giving up.

Let’s say you set up a goal to lose 5kgs. You aim for 0.5kgs a week and expect this to take 10 weeks.

Seems reasonable enough.

But over a 10-week period…you will inevitably have a few nights out….maybe a weekend away with your partner and let’s face it, a few missed Gym sessions.

You decide to weigh yourself weekly (more on why this is not a good idea here) and let’s say you only lose 200g one week….you have fallen behind your expectations, and go into “catch up mode”

The more this happens, the more drastic the behaviours come for you to get back on track.

The more drastic the behaviour the more unsustainable the whole thing becomes.

The only expectation you should have when it comes to your Fitness Journey is to simply try your best, do your damnedest, and get your strongest.

These are goals within your control, and they will result in your success becoming inevitable.

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Question 11: Are you comparing yourself to others?

Ever heard the phrase “comparison is the thief of joy”?

Well, it’s true. By trying to live up to what someone else has achieved will only result in you not enjoying what it is you are doing.

You aren’t them. You don’t live their life. You don’t have the same abilities, genetics, finances, health, and support they have.

You are simply yourself.

You are simply only ever in competition with yourself. When you can try to just be better than you were yesterday you will build momentum, and momentum can be very very powerful.

But if you compare yourself to others, your momentum will stop immediately because you will only ever compare yourself to someone who is doing better than you - because that is all you will see.

The brain finds what we focus on. If you only want to focus on people who are thinner than you, lighter than you or more confident than you….then that is all you will ever see.

Nay.

That is all you will ever compare yourself to. When in actuality you have done better today than you did yesterday.

This is the last question in this Article. But I want to truly leave you with one thought.

One thought that will be the biggest game-changer you can imagine - an attitude that if you can adopt will allow you to stay focussed on what you are trying to accomplish and will allow the results you crave so much to come.

And it is this:

Adopt this singular thought - and your confidence will soar.

If we all just realized that nothing compares to ourselves…we will all become superheroes.

And being a superhero for yourself is what you should want to become.

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Did You Find This Useful?

Thank you so much for reading my article - I really hope you found it helpful.

As I mentioned earlier in the article, I would love to work with you if you need help with any of the above.

If you would like to apply to work with me then just click here:

Thank you so much for being here.

Speak to you again soon.

Coach Adam

References:

1. Walker, M. P., & van der Helm, E. (2009). Overnight therapy? The role of sleep in emotional brain processing. Psychological bulletin, 135(5), 731–748.https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016570

2. Udo T, Grilo CM, Brownell KD, Weinberger AH, Dileone RJ, McKee SA. Modeling the effects of positive and negative mood on the ability to resist eating in obese and non-obese individuals. Eat Behav. 2013;14(1):40-46. doi:10.1016/j.eatbeh.2012.10.010

3. Johannsen DL, Knuth ND, Huizenga R, Rood JC, Ravussin E, Hall KD. Metabolic slowing with massive weight loss despite preservation of fat-free mass. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2012 Jul;97(7):2489-96. doi: 10.1210/jc.2012-1444. Epub 2012 Apr 24. Erratum in: J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2016 May;101(5):2266. PMID: 22535969; PMCID: PMC3387402.

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment

5. Zinchenko, Anastasia & Henselmans, Menno. (2016). Metabolic Damage: do Negative Metabolic Adaptations During Underfeeding Persist After Refeeding in Non-Obese Populations?. Medical Research Archives. 4. 10.18103/mra.v4i8.908.

6. Ingels JS, Misra R, Stewart J, Lucke-Wold B, Shawley-Brzoska S. The Effect of Adherence to Dietary Tracking on Weight Loss: Using HLM to Model Weight Loss over Time. J Diabetes Res. 2017;2017:6951495. doi: 10.1155/2017/6951495. Epub 2017 Aug 9. PMID: 28852651; PMCID: PMC5568610.

7. Shcherbina A, Mattsson CM, Waggott D, Salisbury H, Christle JW, Hastie T, Wheeler MT, Ashley EA. Accuracy in Wrist-Worn, Sensor-Based Measurements of Heart Rate and Energy Expenditure in a Diverse Cohort. Journal of Personalized Medicine. 2017; 7(2):3. https://doi.org/10.3390/jpm7020003

8. Mary F. Dallman, Stress-induced obesity and the emotional nervous system, Trends in Endocrinology & Metabolism, Volume 21, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 159-165, ISSN 1043-2760, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tem.2009.10.004

6 Strategies To Help Stop Late Night Eating and Food Cravings

We have all been there.

it’s dark outside, it’s been a stressful day, and you’re lying in bed listening to one thing.

The rumble in your tum tum.

And as you pay more attention to it, the louder it gets. You then get up and head towards the light.

Like a person possessed. Your brain is screaming: “NO”. But your legs are just walking slowly but surely down the stairs, and towards the light.

You almost try to convince yourself that you will choose something “good” as with each step you justify your legs moving you towards the light.

You get there.

Your arm is on auto-pilot.

The hum is almost soothing, and the light is not too bright….and not too dark. It’s as mesmerising as a flame to a moth.

And before you made a single conscious decision you have already eaten the Milkybar Yoghurt that was just calling your name less than 20 seconds ago.

And as your scrape your tongue on the bottom of the plastic tub, making sure that you do not want to waste a single drop of that Milklybar goodness…the guilt, fear, and worry start to set in:

“Oh my god I’ve totally screwed up”

“Why am I a total failure?”

“I have no self-control”

“I’m never going to conquer this”

“Why am I such a slob?”

“What is wrong with me?”

And the blame game with the self sets in, and then the whole process is repeated.

So here are my top 6 Strategies to help you stop late-night eating and food cravings!

Briefly, before I begin I want to address the issue of “Does Late Night Snacking Lead To Weight Gain?”.

No. It doesn’t from a purely scientific and objective point of view.

The Calories in a Banana do not change between 18:58 and 19:02 on a Wednesday night.

Calories are Calories are Calories.

As this Instagram Post on my Page, points out:

But from a Human Perspective…ask yourself what kind of foods are you eating late at night? I’m pretty sure it’s not Apples and Oranges.

As this Instagram Post explains:

When Calories are controlled, timings of food make no difference to your overall success or not in Weight Loss.

There are arguments to be made for how eating later at night might affect your circadian rhythm, stress resistance and Gut Health. But this doesn’t change the caloric make up of the food and how your body processes the energy from food at night as opposed to during the day, it just influences your ability to stick to a Calorie Deficit over time.

However, late at night, staring into the fridge, you are less likely to be making decisions that are congruent to your Calorie Window and therefore congruent to your goals.

So bear that in mind. Please.

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Table of Contents for: “6 Strategies To Help Stop Late Night Eating and Food Cravings”

1. Eat More Calories

2. Eat more protein

3. Eat more Fibre and Drink More Water

4. Get More Sleep

5. Lower Stress and Anxiety and Boredom

6. Stop restricting yourself to lose weight

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1. Eat More Calories

Yup. I said it. You need to eat more.

That might be a little too much….but the image will stick in your head for sure!

According to a paper called The Biology of Binge Eating, 2010, Food Deprivation is a key indicator of Binge Eating Disorder.

The 2010 paper wanted “to examine the literature on binge eating to gain a better understanding of its biological foundations and their role in the eating disorders” [1]

And in the section relating to Food Deprivation it concluded:

“Rats maintained on a restricted feeding schedule, during which they receive 66% of the amount of food that free eating rats consume, increase their caloric intake by 42% compared with sated rats when allowed ad lib access to food. Increased consumption is evident within 2 hours of the return of the food and persists for up to 4 hours (Hagan et al., 2003). This increased consumption over a discrete period of time mirrors behaviors seen in humans who binge eat.” [1]

Ergo, just a 44% reduction in your calories, can lead to a 42% increase in caloric intake.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to renege on my stance of a Calorie Deficit being required to lose weight, but I am going to hammer home the point, your Calorie Deficit must be built on certain foundations to make sure that you can adhere to it in the long term, and not feel overly restricted, leading to a Binge Episode further down the track.

These principles are outlined by my Five Awesome Rules For Fat Loss Life:

And many of these will re-occur in this article. But the most important one is to make sure your Deficit is not too aggressive.

It is far far better to have slow sustainable progress that gives you flexibility and doesn’t lead you on a path to undercutting your psychological progress by falling into a trap of Binge Eating at night than to get aggressive results that you know are not sustainable.

Your Calorie Deficit should at a minimum be set to your Basal Metabolic Rate, and at a maximum at your Goal Bodyweight in LBS multiplied by 12.

To make sure you get that in place - download my Free Calorie Calculator right here.

Yes, by eating more, your weight loss will happen at a reduced rate. But this reduced rate will also allow for:

• The flexibility you need as a human being who has emotions.

• You to build muscle and improve your Basal Metabolic Rate whilst still in deficit

• Greater adherence to actually being in a Calorie Deficit

Late-night snacking so very often comes from a place of restriction throughout the day - and this wouldn’t be so bad if, at night you ate foods congruent to your goals. However quite often late at night…you aren’t snacking on Apples and Broccolli. Due to the restriction throughout the day, you get cravings for foods that are a lot more palatable - and often a lot higher in calories.

This is due to a number of factors, but one obvious one is, come to the end of the day, you are out of energy - and therefore convenience becomes king. Convenient foods are far higher in calories - and far tastier.

Which then puts you into a cycle of craving said foods more the following day…and so it continues.

This study found when they took 20 weight-stable adults and split them into two groups. One group was given an ultra-processed diet and the other an unprocessed diet for 2 weeks. Subjects were told to consume as much or as little as desired. Rather unsurprisingly, the Group that was given the Ultra Processed DIet consumed on average 508kcal/day more with increased consumption of carbohydrates and fat, but not Protein. [2]

This brings me nicely to my next Strategy for you:

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2. Eat more Protein

In terms of quelling hunger and regulating appetite, Protein has two main roles.

1. It makes you feel fuller for longer

2. It lowers your desire to eat late at night

In this study from 2011, the researchers took 27 overweight or obese men, split them into two groups. Group One was given a Higher Protein (HP) Diet at 25% of energy as Protein, and Group 2 was given a Normal Protein (NP) Diet at 14% of energy as Protein.

The study concluded the following:

“When compared to NP, the HP group experienced lower late-night desire to eat and preoccupation with thoughts of food”

and,

“Collectively, this data supports the consumption of HP intake, but not greater eating frequency, for improved appetite control and satiety in overweight/obese men during energy restriction-induced weight loss” [3]

I often feel that when we discuss eating more protein, you think it has to be the dominant component of your diet. This isn’t true. As you can see from the study above Protein consumption was still only a quarter of dietary intake and garnered great results for halting late-night snacking.

To figure out your Protein Intake I would recommend you download my Calorie and Macro Calculator here: Free Macro Calculator

However, if you want to know the numbers without doing that they are as follows:

Eat 0.8g-1.1g of Protein each day per LB of Lean Body Mass.

However those numbers can be quite hard to achieve, and thus if you start by aiming for just 100g a day if you eat meat, and 80g a day if you don’t then you should be in a pretty good place.

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If you would like some more help with your diet and your training then get my Ultimate Guide to your Diet when Working Out:

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3. Eat more Fibre and Drink More Water

If you have read a number of my Blogs you will know that I discuss this a lot.

And the prevalence of it is extremely important. Not just if you are wanting to lose weight, but to also curb those late-night snacks.

In terms of Fibre, you want to be keeping this as a key feature of your diet - think of it as the “other Macro-Nutrient”.

Research in Fibre is ever-evolving, and I have it on good authority that what we thought we knew about Fibre may well develop deeper very soon.

Fibre has the ability to do two things that will help curb your hunger:

1. High Fibre intake stretches the stomach and slows its emptying rate - therefore making you feel fuller for longer

2. Fibre also ferments in the Bowel, which is thought to increase feelings of fullness as it releases short-chain fatty acids.

Then if we look at this in the context of your goal to lose weight, being fuller for longer throughout the day is an awesome win for you…and if it is going to help you stop eating high-calorie snacks late at night then that too will help you keep your calories down over time.

Added to everything else…

You will be increasing your Vegetable intake - and no bad can come from that can it?

Now onto Water…

Water is filling, and can very much reduce appetite, especially when consumed before you eat.

This study titled: “Association between water consumption and body weight outcomes: a systematic review”

It found:

“Of 4963 retrieved records, 11 original studies and 2 systematic reviews were included. In participants dieting for weight loss or maintenance, a randomized controlled trial, a nonrandomized controlled trial, and an observational longitudinal study showed that increased water consumption, in addition to a program for weight loss or maintenance, reduced body weight after 3-12 mo compared with such a program alone” [4]

Hunger and thirst are interlinked also. When I am working with a friend who I coach online, and their calorie consumption is where it needs to be, but they are still feeling hungry, I will point them towards their water bottle, and remind them of my Five Awesome Rules For Fat Loss Life or the blog post below.

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GET A FREE MONTH OF COACHING WITH ME; JUST CLICK BELOW TO FIND OUT HOW TO APPLY

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Back to water…

I will always ask them to aim for 3 liters a day.

And they react like this:

This is a lofty goal.

But I found that setting this goal higher, as it is a behaviour that can be very easily done, means that my clients would be more than likely to hit an amount appropriate for them and their goals.

Thus, lowering their hunger, and therefore their caloric intake.

So, if it’s late at night, and you know that going to the fridge for that snack is an option that isn’t going to make you feel your best, then you should probably think about reaching for the water bottle first.

Establish if you are hungry or thirsty.

And I reckon about 80% of the time, the water will do the trick.

If you have some water, wait 15mins, and still think you are hungry…then consider having some food….but my best advice in this situation would be:

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4. Get More Sleep

The Blog Post I published before this one is all about “How Sleep Affects Your Weight”.

But in terms of more sleep leading to less late-night snacking, I think the point is rather obvious. If you are in bed asleep, you’re not in the kitchen eating food.

Then the benefit of being in bed earlier will help reduce your calorie intake the following day. Added to that, improved sleep, helps you regulate your emotional responses the next day, and if emotional eating is a reason for your late-night snacking then a great strategy against that will be getting those extra hours of zzzz’s.

For optimal sleep, you want to plan for about 8 hours of sleep a night. One thing that always perplexes me about the way you manage sleep is this:

You rely on your wake-up time being the marker of your total time sleep.

But your wake-up time is out of your control pretty much. You could be woken up early, which frequently happens, by some traffic, a bird, a child, needing a wee.

Suddenly you have had a bad night’s sleep because you went to bed at 11:00 pm hoping you would get your 7 hours in and suddenly woke up at 5 am.

Plan better.

If you went to bed at 10:00 pm suddenly 5 am isn’t such a bad wake-up time.

Sleep is the foundation that your appetite control is built on. This study found a correlation between lack of sleep in duration and increased Grehlin and lack of sleep in duration and decreased Leptin.

Grehlin is a hormone that is responsible for how hungry you get. Leptin is the hormone responsible for how full you feel.

So yeah. Poor sleep leads to these two hormones very much working against your ability to curb that late-night eating.

Other strategies to improve your sleep are:

1. Exercise Regularly

2. Sleep with your Circadian Rhythm

3. Listen to Sleep Stories (link to my YouTube Sleep Stories)

4. Listen to Sleep Meditations (link to my YouTube Sleep Meditations)

5. Stop Drinking Caffeine from 11:00 am

6. Reduce Alcohol Intake

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And Brush Your Teeth…

This is anecdotal evidence, as is in there is ZERO Science to actually back this up, but brushing your teeth has been reported to stop people snacking.

And it makes sense right?

Have you ever had Orange Juice straight after you brushed your teeth?

The combination of tastes, the effort of going to all that trouble to have to brush your teeth again, or if there is some psychological thing about the act of brushing your teeth priming your mind for sleep as opposed to food…but…whatever works.

Maybe try it next time your legs are walking to the fridge and the brain is saying “NOOOOOOOO”. See if it helps.

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5. Lower Your Stress, Anxiety and Boredom

I know that this is easier said than done. But if you can at least practice some behaviors that will help you lower these two things, then you are going to put yourself into a better position when it comes to these food cravings, especially late at night.

Of these 7 strategies, there are 2 that most people will ignore.

Get More Sleep and Lower Stress, Anxiety and Boredom (especially Stress and Boredom)

Personally, I believe them to be the most important two on the list, for the exact same reason - they are mostly overlooked.

We seem to be happy to live in the two states of being Stressed and being Bored quite a lot in this day and age. It's almost a Social Norm for us, to just accept that we will be stressed and that boredom is one of those things.

However, when you accept living this way, as opposed to learning to control it, you pay the consequences for it as well.

And the consequences of chronic stress, and Emotional Eating manifesting itself as Boredom Eating are indeed not fun things to be faced with.

So let me show you the link between these emotions and how that is impacting your Fitness Goals.

Does Stress Lead To Increased Food Intake?

This study [6] called “Stress and Eating Behaviours”

“Repeated bouts of minor daily stressors that keep the stress system in a chronically activated state may alter brain reward/motivation pathways involved in wanting and seeking hyper-palatable foods and induce metabolic changes that promote weight and body fat mass”

The part of this that I find correlates majorly to late-night eating is the term “hyper-palatable foods”. When you are stressed you aren’t eating apples and oranges. You’re eating Apple Pies and Terry’s Chocolate Orange.

Does Anxiety Lead To Increased Food Intake?

This study [7] from 2017 is called “Effects of anxiety on caloric intake and satiety-related brain activation in women and men”.

It took twenty-nine twin pairs (58 individuals) and asked them to fill out a questionnaire about their tendency to be anxious. Participants had to answer questions like:

“I worry too much over something that really doesn’t matter”

“I am content; I am a steady person”

and questions like:

“I am tense; I am worried” and “I feel calm; I feel secure”.

All items are rated on a 4-point scale (e.g., from “Almost Never” to “Almost Always”)

Participants were then given an all-you-can-eat buffet, as a thank you for filling out the questionnaire, and were not told their intake was being recorded.

And those that scored a higher rating of anxious feelings on the questionnaire also ate more food at the buffet (Fig A)

As you can see from the graphs. The Twin that scored higher on the Trait Anxiety Scale also ate more food at the Buffet, independent of BMI (Fig B)

The study concluded the following:

“In conclusion, the current findings suggest that anxiety promotes caloric consumption and consumption of high-fat foods in women. We also provide evidence that anxiety alters brain responses to satiety such that the normal reduction in activation by high-calorie food cues induced by a meal does not occur in highly anxious women, suggesting a disruption in neural circuitry that could promote overeating. Anxiety may be a risk factor for obesity, but we show this risk is likely limited to people with a genetic susceptibility to weight gain”

So this gets more complex than just…you’re anxious so you increase your calories.

It also means that if you are anxious, you might show signs of Leptin Resistance which therefore means you won’t know if you are full or not.

Does Boredom Lead To Increased Food Intake?

I think we all know this to be true colloquially.

However, this study from 2012 [8] by the University of Limerick, proves it to be true.

Researchers wanted to establish whether or not Boredom eating is a distinct construct away from other negative emotions by revising the Emotional Eating Scale.

Results found were: “On the open-ended items, participants more often reported eating in response to boredom than the other emotions”

They also stated: “boredom leads to unhealthy eating, as it helps to distract from the unpleasant boredom experience.”

Added to that, a study in 2016 by the University of Central Lancashire ran a couple of tests to measure this also.

The first test asked 52 people to fill out a questionnaire about their food preferences, then complete a task of copying the same group of letters over and over again. They then filled out the questionnaire again.

The second test was 45 participants and they got to watch either a funny video or a boring video. As they watched bowls of snacks were left out for the participants for them to eat ad libitum.

They found that:

“From the first study showed people were more likely to express a preference for unhealthy foods like crisps, sweets and fast food after completing the boring task.

The results from the second study showed that the participants who had watched the boring video ate significantly more unhealthy food.” [9]

How To Lower Stress, Anxiety, and Boredom

You will start to see a pattern emerging in all of these Strategies and the positive behaviors that will help you stop those late-night food cravings.

Some of these will help all three categories, some of them will only help one emotion, however, all of them will go some way to helping you stop those late-night cravings for food:

1. Exercise Regularly (again)

2. Improve Your Sleep (again) by not staying up late mindlessly watching tv and playing video games - get to bed earlier and turn off the electronics

3. Eat more nutritious food

4. Meditate

5. Reduce Caffeine intake

6. Journal Daily

7. Communicate your feelings

8. Manage your to-do list to avoid procrastination

9. Get focused on what you want from life

10. Pick Up A Hobby

Pick a few from the list, the ones that excite you the most and have the lowest barrier of entry for you, and see if that helps you with those late-night munchies.

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6. Stop Restricting Food

I would say that food avoidance is one of the biggest reasons that people crave food.

Pink Elephant syndrome.

You know, if I’m telling you not think of that big, round, funny-looking Pink Elephant…

You’re going to think of it.

Put into the mix that we have a sensual relationship with food, and if I tell you not to eat something….you are going to crave it more and more.

And the cravings ALWAYS WIN.

Because they rear their head, at night, when you are stressed, anxious, and bored.

Are you starting to see a theme here?

This is also a key construct in why Diets Fail - because many Diets require you to give up foods you enjoy. But the cravings will always win because your willpower is finite - and then the feelings of guilt and failure set in, perpetuating the cycle that has led you to look for a solution in the first place.

This study [10] from 2005, is called “The Effect of Deprivation on Food Cravings” and for one week they took 103 Female Undergraduates and deprived them of Chocolate, Vanilla or not deprivation at all.

The result was:

“Chocolate-deprived restrained eaters consumed more chocolate food than did any other group. Restrained eaters experienced more food cravings than did unrestrained eaters and were more likely to eat the craved food”

But for me the most interesting conclusion was this:

“Moreover, restrained eaters deprived of chocolate spent the least time doing an anagram task before a "taste-rating task" in which they expected that chocolate foods might be available”

So if you are deprived, not only will you actually end up eating more, but you will also rush through life at times where you think the food that you are deprived from is on the other side of the task - and as we know from other studies when you are in a state of stress, you will indeed consume more food.

The final conclusion from this study was the following:

“Converging measures of craving indicate that deprivation causes craving and overeating, but primarily in restrained eaters.”

Which draws a direct correlation between deprivation - and overeating especially in those who are abstaining from certain foods.

Ergo, to conquer those cravings, give yourself permission to eat the foods you enjoy the most.

Remember, if it is within your Calorie Window it won’t halt your progress. Added to that…even if it is outside your Calorie Window, having it might still do less damage to your overall goals than not having it at all.

Remember…CRAVINGS ALWAYS WIN because WILLPOWER IS FINITE.

And by giving yourself permission to eat these foods you will eradicate many negative feelings you attach to “indulging”.

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Bottom Line

These strategies are here to help you understand why you might be behaving in a certain way. All 6 might work a treat for you, you might only need one or two of them to find success.

As I have been writing this article, someone has reached out to me on Instagram discussing her past trauma and how that effects her eating, especially late at night. Emotional Eating is a whole other topic, and although some of what I have shared in this article might be helpful to you, if you are dealing with something a lot deeper then I urge you to get the proper help needed for that.

In our conversations, this person explained to me that as part of dealing with the trauma it leads her to eat foods that she is craving, foods that she also knows work against her fitness goals.

But in this instance, working on the trauma and resolving what happened is much more important. If eating choclate after a therpay session helps you cope with the therapy and is a part of the process of your healing, then you have to understand that is going to be better for your long term success as a person, as opposed to your short term success for your fitness goals.

To be hungry is normal.

To have cravings is normal.

To have an appetite is normal.

To have reduced willpower in the evenings is normal.

I don’t want you to have read this article and then thought that because you can’t seem to avoid late-night snacking, even when you implement some of the things in this article you are in some way “broken”.

We all need to stop trying to find ways of erasing our human self, in the pursuit of fitness.

You don’t need appetite suppressants, you don’t need bio hacks and you don’t need to just “have more willpower”.

You more than likely need to have more self-empathy and understanding for your own human condition.

And you probably need to:

• Exercise some more to reduce your stress

• Get to Bed earlier to help reduce your stress

• Stop restricting yourself away from foods you love….to reduce your stress.

Your cravings come from too much stress and drained willpower at the end of the day.

Luckily, that’s far easier worked upon than trying to “fix” what isn’t broken in the first place.

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Did You Find This Useful?

Thank you so much for reading my article - I really hope you found it helpful.

I work with clients all over the world in my One on One Coaching Program called The Strong & Confident Program.

My aim with the friends I work with is to give them so much more out of their fitness by focussing them on the process of getting stronger and therefore making them more confident.

Just like with this article - where I like to give as much help to you as I can.

My approach to online training is no different. The whole program is about you - how best can I serve you, and therefore help you in the best way possible.

If you want to find out more about how the Strong & Confident Program works, and get a free month of coaching from me, then please fill out the application form below…and I will get back to you within 48 hours.

Please remember to check your Junk Folder for my reply - or when you submit an application send me an email (prompted in the application confirmation) and then my reply should appear in your Inbox.

I can’t wait to hear from you!

Also, if you would like to keep up to date with me, and get some free fitness goodies from me…just fill in the form below and I will send you a free calorie calculator, my book “27 Ways To Faster Fat Loss”, and two workout manuals to help you get your fitness started…

Thank you so much for reading my work.

Speak again soon,

Coach Adam

References:

1. Mathes, W. F., Brownley, K. A., Mo, X., & Bulik, C. M. (2009). The biology of binge eating. Appetite, 52(3), 545–553. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2009.03.005

2. Hall KD, Ayuketah A, Brychta R, Cai H, Cassimatis T, Chen KY, Chung ST, Costa E, Courville A, Darcey V, Fletcher LA, Forde CG, Gharib AM, Guo J, Howard R, Joseph PV, McGehee S, Ouwerkerk R, Raisinger K, Rozga I, Stagliano M, Walter M, Walter PJ, Yang S, Zhou M. Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake. Cell Metab. 2019 Jul 2;30(1):67-77.e3. doi: 10.1016/j.cmet.2019.05.008. Epub 2019 May 16. Erratum in: Cell Metab. 2019 Jul 2;30(1):226. Erratum in: Cell Metab. 2020 Oct 6;32(4):690. PMID: 31105044; PMCID: PMC7946062.

3. Leidy HJ, Tang M, Armstrong CL, Martin CB, Campbell WW. The effects of consuming frequent, higher protein meals on appetite and satiety during weight loss in overweight/obese men. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2011 Apr;19(4):818-24. doi: 10.1038/oby.2010.203. Epub 2010 Sep 16. PMID: 20847729; PMCID: PMC4564867.

4. Muckelbauer R, Sarganas G, Grüneis A, Müller-Nordhorn J. Association between water consumption and body weight outcomes: a systematic review. Am J Clin Nutr. 2013 Aug;98(2):282-99. doi: 10.3945/ajcn.112.055061. Epub 2013 Jun 26. PMID: 23803882.

5. Taheri S, Lin L, Austin D, Young T, Mignot E. Short sleep duration is associated with reduced leptin, elevated ghrelin, and increased body mass index. PLoS Med. 2004 Dec;1(3):e62. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0010062. Epub 2004 Dec 7. PMID: 15602591; PMCID: PMC535701.

6. Yau, Y. H., & Potenza, M. N. (2013). Stress and eating behaviors. Minerva endocrinologica, 38(3), 255–267.

7. Mestre, Z. L., Melhorn, S. J., Askren, M. K., Tyagi, V., Gatenby, C., Young, L., Mehta, S., Webb, M. F., Grabowski, T. J., & Schur, E. A. (2016). Effects of Anxiety on Caloric Intake and Satiety-Related Brain Activation in Women and Men. Psychosomatic medicine, 78(4), 454–464. https://doi.org/10.1097/PSY.0000000000000299

8. Koball AM, Meers MR, Storfer-Isser A, Domoff SE, Musher-Eizenman DR. Eating when bored: revision of the emotional eating scale with a focus on boredom. Health Psychol. 2012 Jul;31(4):521-4. doi: 10.1037/a0025893. Epub 2011 Oct 17. PMID: 22004466.

9. British Psychological Society (BPS). "Bored people reach for the chips." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 27 April 2016. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160427081756.htm>.

   
   

How To Stay Full In A Calorie Deficit Without Being Hungry

The Calorie Deficit is an incredible tool when it comes to weight loss.

In fact…it’s the only tool.

So if you want to lose weight…you need to understand how to make a calorie deficit as easy as possible for you.

That being said…it isn’t an easy thing to do.

One of the quandaries that dieters are in is how to eat fewer calories overall….and not get stupendously hungry in the process.

And that is the aim of this article. To teach you how to figure out this conundrum - to keep hunger low and intake as high as possible - whilst still being in a Calorie Deficit.

Added to that I am going to share some recipes with you that are from the Recipe Manuals I give to, my clients on the Strong & Confident Program

The recipes are all:

• As much food volume for as few calories as possible

• Have MyFitness Pal Barcodes for you to track

• Tasty as hell

For example…one thing that directly affects your caloric expenditure is indeed your caloric intake.

The simple adage: “Eat Less, Move More” is not only stupid but more and more it’s becoming clearer that you just can’t simplify the energy balance equation to something so base.

Firstly, let me say thank you to you for being here. What I am hoping by the end of this article is that you comprehend more about what a Calorie Deficit looks like in terms of the foods that will make it as easy as possible for you and help reduce your hunger.

Secondly, it would be awesome if we became friends by way of you joining my mailing list.

I will, of course, email you things. Sometimes they will be educational, sometimes they will be inappropriate, and sometimes I might just want to know how you are; either way…it would be delightful to connect with you more.

Just send me a friend request by filling out the form below…

Thirdly, please bear in mind that the body is clever…and it has what we call a “Set Point”. This Set Point in terms of your weight is where your body is happiest, and it’s very hard to change….but it can be changed.

Your body loves to be exactly where it is….and moving it away from that point, whether you want to gain weight or lose weight, the body will fight you.

Fight you every step of the way.

(Side Note: Sir Ian McKellen is actually one of the nicest actors I have ever met)

The body won’t fight you because it hates you, or because you are broken.

Your Metabolism is not broken (unless diagnosed by a Doctor and even then…it can still be affected to work for your Fat Loss in nearly all situations)

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Don’t believe me? Read this:

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Your body fights you, and everybody’s body fights them because of something called Homeostasis - which is your body being in balance hormonally. It likes who you are. Your body just loves being cosy and warm and loves to snuggle you exactly where you are.

Personally, I have been trying to gain weight for about six months now. My body is comfortable and really happy at 80kgs - it’s where I feel best. I feel strong, I feel happy in my clothes and my belly feels normal.

In February I weighed in at 83.5kg. I remember going to a Birthday Party for a 1-year-old and I felt so out of sorts. My body didn’t feel right, my belly felt bloated and although I was at 83.5kg it felt like I was a lot higher weight than that.

It was an abnormal spike, I weigh myself every day, and I knew it was a spike. But I personally felt very uncomfortable. I was bloated and I felt awful for the whole day.

But if I look at my average weight over the last 90 days it is 82kgs - and I feel exactly the same now as I did at 80kgs.

I don’t feel bloated and uncomfortable. I feel exactly the same. I have changed my Set-Point. My Metabolism, Muscle Mass and Diet have all fallen into line with where I am at the moment.

And this happens both in weight gain and weight loss.

It takes time.

It’s not easy.

And there are ups and downs.

BUT

You can change that set point.

This is why Dieting is hard. This is why you might feel incredibly hungry when you are in a Calorie Deficit.

And this is why I have written this article.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR: How To Stay Full In A Calorie Deficit Without Being Hungry

1. How Much Food You Should Eat in a Calorie Deficit to help with Hunger?

2. What Foods should you eat to help with hunger?

3. Other Foods That Will help with hunger.

4. Other Tips and Tricks to help with hunger.

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You can listen to the audio version of this Blog Post on my Podcast: The Fitness Solution

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How Much Food Should You Eat In A Calorie Deficit?

This is a crucial question.

Now I am sure you are reading this because you have an understanding of a Calorie Deficit and you probably know the numbers you are trying to work towards.

However, if that isn’t you…before you read this article please head here:

1. What Is A Calorie Deficit Diet?

Now. personally, I get all of my clients to set their Deficit into a Caloric Window.

This window is between their Basal Metabolic Rate (70% of their Metabolism) and Goal Body Weight in LBS x 12.

(Provided they have given me a realistic Goal Body Weight - that’s a WHOLE other topic)

Then I encourage them to EAT MORE FOOD.

Many of them, when they start working with me will go for the lowest number…their BMR, because they believe that will give them their results the quickest.

But what you must always remember is:

“If the methods are unsustainable the results are unsustainable”

— Jordan Syatt

Therefore I encourage them wholeheartedly to eat more. Eat more food. Higher Volume food so that being in a deficit is as easy as possible for them.

If you want to learn how to lose weight and keep it off forever, then you need to do this too.

Sacrifice quick results.

For lasting results.

By eating more food than you ever have before.

The ultimate goal for your Calorie Deficit is to eat as much as you can within your numbers - that is the aim.

Not to eat as little to survive.

This comes down to the whole thrive or survive mindset - and like always I want you to be your absolute best….not just cling on for dear life.

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What Foods should you eat to help with hunger?

Rather oddly.

Over the last couple of days, I have had a TikTok post go very viral.

All on this topic.

The aim of what you are going to eat should be quite clear to you now….

MORE FOOD!

But the question remains…how do you do that without increasing Calories outside your Window?

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Don’t Forget To Follow Me On Instagram:

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Protein - The Weight Loss SuperFood

The first place to look is here - under this Macro Nutrient.

I’m sure you are aware that Protein is a very important aspect of your diet.

I think the world is coming around to how advantageous Protein is when dieting. But many people do still underestimate how useful it really can be.

It can also be one of the hardest things to increase to adequate amounts. (about 1.8-2g/kg of Lean Body Mass)

It has only 4kcal/g and has a multitude of other benefits when dieting:

1. Helps maintain muscle when losing weight (i like to think of this as eating muscle to get muscle).

2. Keeps you fuller for longer - as it takes longer to digest.

3. Reduces Appetite and Hunger Levels - as it reduces the hunger hormone Grehlin in your body.

My Favourite Sources of Protein (PRO):

Meat per 100g serving:

• Chicken Breast: ~30g Pro / 6g Fat / 0g Cho / 165kcal

• Turkey Breast: ~28g Pro / 7g Fat / 0g Cho / 189kcal

• Steak: ~26g Pro / 19g Fat / 0g Cho / 276kcal

• Kangaroo: ~20g Pro / 1.3g Fat / 0g Cho / 102 kcal

Fish per 100g serving:

• Tuna Steak: ~29g Pro / 1.3g Fat / 0g Cho / 132 kcal

• Salmon: ~22g Pro / 13g Fat / 0g Cho / 208kcal

• Dover Sole: ~18g Pro / 1g Fat / 0g Cho / 89kcal

• Halibut: ~22g Pro / 2.5g Fat / 0g Cho / 115kcal

Dairy per 100g serving:

• Eggs: ~12g Pro / 11g Fat / 1.1g Cho / 155kcal

• Greek Yoghurt: ~10g Pro / 0.4.g Fat / 3.6g Cho / 59kcal

• Whole Milk: ~3g Pro / 3.4g Fat / 4.8g Cho / 63kcal

Some people find Milk filling, and others don’t. I quite often when I am trying to lose weight am able to survive all morning on two medium Coffees.

• YoPro Plain Yoghurt: ~10.6g / 0.3g Fat / 4.4g Cho / 64kcal

• Cottage Cheese: ~11g Pro / 6g Fat / 1.9g Cho / 127kcal

Many of my clients really don’t like Cottage Cheese, so I tell them my strategy. Use it instead of Butter in your Sandwiches and Rolls and you won’t even notice it is in there.

Vegetarian Options per 100g:

• Tofu: ~11.9g Pro / 7.5g Fat / 0g Cho / 127kcal

• Tempeh: ~12.4g Pro / 5g Fat / 0.5g Cho / 112kcal

• Seitan: ~25g Pro / 0.6g Fat / 5.3g Cho / 126kcal

• Lentils: ~9g Pro / 0.4g Fat / 20g Cho / 116kcal

Supplementation of Protein per 100g:

• Isolate Whey Protein: ~ 84g Pro / 3.9g Fat / 1.22g Cho / 380kcal

• Quest Protein Bars ~ 35g Pro / 10g Fat / 7g Cho / 302kcal

My Favourite High Protein Meals:

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Carbohydrates - The Demonised Food

Let me take a moment to be abundantly clear here.

Carbohydrates do not make you fat.

Sugar does not make you fat.

Carbs are literally a third of your diet and they are mightily important.

That being said some Carbohydrates have this annoying trifecta effect.

1. They are so damn tasty.

2. They are can be very high in calories

3. You don’t get to eat a lot of food for that calorie amount

And remember we are trying to make sure you feel full after eating - not empty. So your best Carbohydrate options will be the ones that are Lower Calorie, Higher Volume and will fill you up for longer as they contain more Fibre too.

I always advise the friends I coach online to lean into their Carbohydrate intake. If Calories are hard to keep down…then changing up your Carbohydrate source is the most powerful thing you can do.

Carbohydrates have exactly the same energy in them as Protein.

Please read that again.

Protein has 4kcal per gram and Carbohydrate has 4kcal per gram.

Irrespective of if you are eating sugar as your Carbohydrate or a Vegetable.

The issue arises when we eat sugar we normally eat an awful lot of it at once, and it makes us want more….which is why we begin to gain weight when we eat it.

My Favourite Sources of Carbohydrate (CHO):

Vegetables per 100g serving:

• Sweet Potato: ~20g of Cho / 1.6g Pro / 0.1g Fat / 86kcal

• Potato: ~17g of Cho / 2g Pro / 0.1g Fat / 77kcal

• Carrots: ~9.6g of Cho / 0.9g Pro / 0.2g Fat / 41kcal

• Broccoli: ~7g of Cho / 2.8g Pro / 0.4g Fat / 34kcal

• Tomatoes: ~4g of Cho / 0.9g Pro / 0.2g Fat / 18kcal

• Bell Pepper: ~6g of Cho / 1g Pro / 0.3g Fat / 31kcal

Interestingly Potatoes rank as the highest satiating food on the planet….according to the Satiety Index - and you can see the difference between Potato and Sweet Potato is negligible - both have their individual benefits.

My other fun fact about Vegetables is that this rule generally rings true: If it grows under the ground it will be slightly higher in calories than if it grows above the ground.

Fruits per 100g serving:

• Strawberries: ~8g of Cho / 0.7g Pro / 0.3g Fat / 32kcal

• Blueberries: ~15g of Cho / 0.7g Pro / 0.3g Fat / 57kcal

• Blackberries: ~10g of Cho / 1.4g Pro / 0.5g Fat / 43kcal

• Banana: ~23g of Cho / 1.1g Pro / 0.3g Fat / 89kcal

• Apples: 14g of Cho / 0.3g Pro / 0.2g Fat / 52kcal

• Watermelon: 8g of Cho / 0.6g Pro / 0.2g Fat / 30kcal

Fruits are incredibly powerful in filling you out and being able to fuel your workouts. I have a Banana before every strength session I do and start most days with fruit and a protein yogurt. Many fruits are so incredibly low in calories which means you can eat an awful lot of them if you need to cure hunger.

Whole Grains per 100g serving:

• Oats: ~12g Cho / 2.4g Pro / 1.4g Fat / 68kcal

• Brown Rice: ~23g Cho / 2.3g Pro / 0.9g Fat / 111kcal

• White Rice: ~28g of Cho / 2.7g Pro / 0.3g Fat / 130kcal

• Bulgur Wheat: ~76g Cho / 12g Pro / 1.3g Fat / 342kcal

• Quinoa: ~21g Cho / 4.4g Pro / 1.9g / 120kcal

• Cous Cous: ~23g Cho / 3.8g Pro / 0.2g Fat / 112kcal

Beans and Legumes per 100g serving:

• Legumes: ~14g Cho / 5g Pro / 0.4 Fat / 81kcal

• Tinned Mixed Beans: ~22.8g Cho / 8.7g Pro / 0.5g Fat / 127kcal

My Favourite High Carb/Low-Calorie Meals:

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Dietary Fats

As we are here let me know touch on Fats.

Fats in and of themselves might not be the satiating for you. It’s quite a personal thing.

Some foods high in Fats like nuts, also contain Fibre just like many of the carbohydrates foods I have outlined above.

However, Fats carry a whopping 9kcal per gram and so when you start to increase these in your diet…you also increase your Calories.

Fats play an essential role in our health - they help the absorption of the ADEK Vitamins. Fats are also very useful for our cognitive function and helping to regulate our Hormones.

Don’t avoid them. But when focussing on Fat Loss make sure that you use them wisely.

I always like to add a portion of Nuts to my Salads and I usually have an Avocado with Salads and whenever I have Beans on Toast.

It seems to keep me going just fine.

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Other Foods That Will Help You:

High Protein Bread per 100g:

• My personal favourite is Burgen Soy and Linseed Bread: 15.2g protein/287kcal

• Helga’s Soy and Toasted Sesame Bread: 15.8g protein/280kcal

These are both great options - as they rank high in the Fibre department too.

Many people believe that “bread is bad” and actually, come to think of it when I first started as a Personal Trainer nearly 7 years ago….I used to say this too.

But I got educated, and am happy to admit that I am on a journey of growth as much as anyone else.

I love these two loaves of bread because, well, it gives you an opportunity to make a more informed choice that will help you. You are always going to eat the bread…so how do you affect the quality of that bread? Well, I think these two do that just brilliantly.

Zero Calorie or Very Low-Calorie Sparkling Water per 100ml:

• Plain and simple Carbonated Water is 0kcal per 100ml.

  or

• Mount Franklin Lightly Sparkling Raspberry Flavour: 2kcal/100ml

I use Sparkling Water all of the time. I use it late at night to help me avoid going for Beer when I am just sick of drinking water - and it’s really effective, it’s really refreshing and I can’t recommend it enough.

Low-Calorie Pasta Alternatives per 100g:

• Slendier Spaghetti: 3.9g Fibre/8kcal

The whole Slendier Range is just simply magnificent. The amount of Volume of food you can eat for such little calories - I wouldn’t be surprised if they put conventional out of business very soon.

My fiancee and I use this whenever we make Spaghetti Bolognaise, and honestly…I notice no difference at all.

Low-Calorie Ice Cream per 100g:

• Strawberry Cheesecake Halo Top: 5g protein, 15g carbohydrate/132kcal

My Favourite Desserts:

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Other Tips and Tricks to Help with Hunger

Brush Your Teeth

It’s odd how brushing your teeth kills your appetite. But apparently, it’s because removing the small food particles in your mouth it stops them from playing tricks with your brain about how hungry you are.

I think there’s also something nice about it that prepares you for bed and you are aware you don’t want to be eating too close to when you sleep.

Mindful Eating

That rage. That rage you feel when you are hungry….

I know you know it well. Because we all experience it.

And then you eat something….

And the rage seems to still be there.

Oh.

Maybe you weren’t hungry, to begin with, hey? (sorry….Australia is starting to get to me).

Being truly mindful in these situations is really helpful. I do think Mindfulness and the whole chat around it at the moment is just vogue…and it’s not really a term I truly enjoy using. But it does seem to sum this up quite well.

When you feel hungry ask yourself: “Am I actually hungry or just a bit bored?”

Boredom eating is a form of emotional eating combined with stress eating - something which I think we all do in truth.

What is really going on here is your inability to work with and process the emotions you are feeling.

It might not be as cut and dry as “hungry vs bored”. You could be anxious, depressed, upset, feeling lonely, or vulnerable.

When you feel “hungry” it’s really important you begin to ask yourself what is truly going on. Have an important and difficult conversation with yourself and see if there are other emotions at play that you need to process.

Slow The F-Down

I’m terrible at this too. I eat far too quickly - and whenever I do I am always a touch more unsatisfied than when I just take my time.

There is also Science associated with taking your time when you eat.

There’s a hormone in your belly called Leptin - and this Hormone tells your brain when you are full.

But Leptin isn’t quick - it takes 20mins for that signal to be sent, and twenty minutes is more than enough time to absolutely eat many many more calories.

Some key strategies to slow you down would be:

• Put your fork down between each mouthful.

• Don’t watch TV or Sport when you are eating.

• Engage in conversation with your family at the Dinner Table.

• Don’t “work on your lunch break”

Try it. See how it feels.

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Did You Find This Useful?

Thank you so much for reading my article - I really hope you found it helpful.

I work with clients all over the world in my One on One Coaching Program called The Strong & Confident Program.

A New Program Designed To Get You Stronger, Healthier & more confident than ever before.

My aim with the friends I work with is to give them so much more out of their fitness by focussing them on the process of getting stronger and therefore making them more confident.

Just like with this article - where I like to give as much help to you as I can

My approach to online training is no different. The whole program is about you - how best can I serve you, and therefore help you in the best way possible.

If you have enjoyed this article and want to see if a Free Month of Coaching would suit you then please click on the Learn More Button below:

I also have a couple of other articles that might help you navigate your Calorie Deficit:

• How To Stop Counting Calories

• 7 Tips to Make Counting Calories Easier

• How Long Will It Take To Lose A Stone?

Again, I hope you enjoy them.

Speak again soon,

Coach Adam

The Best Meal Plan For Female Weight Loss

Welcome! I’m Adam and today I am going to give you the best meal plan for female weight loss.

In all honesty, I was really surprised when researching this article that Females are looking for Meal Plans just for “female weight loss”.

Ladies, what's so bad about the way men eat?

If you happen to be Male and have come across this article, then you are more than welcome here too. The Meal Plan that I will outline will 100% work for you, regardless of your sex.

There is nothing in this article that can’t be utilised by a man, to get just as incredible results in your Weight Loss Journey.

My friends…you are all welcome!

I promise you, at the end of this article, everything will be really clear, you will have a plan and be inspired with the knowledge you need to conquer your female weight loss conundrum.

In this article, I will give you the best meal plan for female weight loss and solve all of your problems and you are going to build your “healthy” meal plan in a really simple step-by-step way.

But before we get started I would like to invite you to become my friend by getting on my list.

I’ll email you things. Sometimes they will be educational, sometimes they will be inappropriate, and sometimes I might just want to know how the hell you are; either way…it means we can be friends.

Oh, and I will also send you some free fitness goodies too, like a free calorie calculator, a month of in-home and Gym Workouts and much more…but only when you send me your friend request:

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TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR “THE BEST MEAL PLAN FOR FEMALE WEIGHT LOSS”

Step 1: Calories For Female Weight Loss

Step 2: Foods You Can and Can’t Eat in your Meal Plan

Step 3: Weight Loss Meal Plan Timing

Step 4: Conclusion

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Let me show you why and how I know this Meal Plan will work for you.

This is me. The photo on the left is from 2017 and the one on the right is from 2020:

As you can see…what I eat keeps me pretty lean. In fact, the heaviest I have ever been was 82kgs and the lightest 78kgs. My body doesn’t change much, because I follow the exact meal plan that you will follow come the end of this article.

But wait…

I’m a Man. And I’m writing about Female Weight Loss…

So let me show you my friend Jennifer. Or Jenny as her friends call her.

Jenny is a wonderful human. I’ve known her a long time from when she used to work out 5–6 times a week where I used to work. She works in TV and Film which is of great interest to me, because of my background in acting, and on top of all of that, she trusted me to coach her daughter too.

Jenny joined my Strong and Confident Program. She had previously tried all kinds of diets. She splashed money on Ketones, on Slimming World and she still struggled to make it “stick”. She has put in so much hard work over the last three months.

But what I am most proud of with her is that she has just kept working. Ticking off the days, and understanding the nature of what and when to eat.

Well, this is Jenny from the 20th March 2020 to the 28th May 2020:

How amazing is that?

Or there is Aisling. Aisling is a little pocket rocket. She is small in stature but huge in personality and so full of life. She is so much fun to train and always gives as much as she can.

But she also loves to party, drink and socialize. She can drink more Ciders than I can even count on a night out. She too fell foul to the Diet Business of Slimming World, but she too has put in the hard work and learned how to create balance in her meal plan for her own success.

These two ladies…and if you go right here you will see female after female conquering their weight loss following my meal plans. I’m not here to WOW you.

All I am trying to do is keep you interested enough to find out what all of my friends who work with me online can and have achieved so that you can believe it is possible for you as well.

Because you are about to learn what the best meal plan for female weight loss really is.

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Step 1: Calories For Female Weight Loss

Every meal plan should start with knowing your calorie targets. So the first part is setting you up with what is known as a “Calorie Deficit Meal Plan” or a “Calorie Deficit Diet Plan”.

You could have the tastiest meals, with the best macronutrient split there ever was.

But if your Energy Balance isn’t tilted towards a Calorie Deficit, then you will not create weight loss.

800 calories a day? 1000 calories a day? 1200 calories a day?

Is probably what you are thinking…but I need you to forget about these arbitrary numbers.

Women of the World:

To what I am about to say.

Everybody's calorie needs are different.

Lumping you on some number that is quite honestly just plucked out of thin air isn’t going to help for two reasons:

1. It could be too few calories leading to over restriction, then failure to adhere, then you eventually giving up on your diet altogether

It could be too many calories, you aren’t in a Calorie Deficit for weight loss and you end up getting no results, which then means you give up because it isn’t working.

How Many Calories Do You Really Need?

Personally, I use the principle of a Calorie Window which I outline in this YouTube Video:

You have an upper guideline and a lower limit. Your upper guideline will be:

“Goal Bodyweight in LBS x 12”

Your lower limit will be aligned to what is known as your Basal Metabolic Rate which you can find out by heading here and downloading my Free Calorie Calculator (many other calculators are available on the Internet too).

Now…this is the important part. 

All you have to do is get your calories between these two numbers each and every day. There is an upper guideline because you can go over it from time to time — that’s perfectly understandable.

There is a lower limit because your Calories each day should never EVER drop below your BMR in fact, I would prefer you never tried to just get to this number at all.

And your goal for your meal plan is this: 

Eat as much food as you can eat to get as close to the upper guideline as possible..and you will still lose weight.

If you are now saying this to me, I totally understand why:

You will design your meal plans calories to a window because there will be times that sticking to your calories will be just too damn difficult. Times of high socializing for example, or Christmas as another. But I don’t want you to miss out on spending time with your friends and being social.

Coz not being able to do that in the name of dieting will suck.

The closer to your lower limit you get…the harder it will become to do.

And the words “hard” and “diet” never go well together.

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Step 2: Foods You Can and Can’t Eat In Your Meal Plan

There are lots of examples of people losing weight by eating all kinds of stuff.

In fact, one of my coaches and friends Jordan Syatt lost weight by eating a Big Mac every day.

He lost 7lbs.

Eating a Big Mac every day.

In your life. I bet there are examples of people you know that have been able to lose weight seemingly eating “whatever the hell they want”.

There are other examples of people eating nothing but McDonald's creating weight loss (this is not what Jordan did by the way).

Is it a good idea? To only eat McDonald's?

Well, I’m not sitting here telling you to go and eat McDonald’s as the staple of your Meal Plan for Weight Loss.

What I am saying is that you need a balance.

The McDonald’s examples are one end of the extremity. The other is trying to “give up sugar”, “eat clean” or “give up carbs”.

Neither option gives you balance.

You want to thrive, not feel deprived. The answer to this lies in the balance.

Therefore your Weight Loss Meal Plan for Females will not list any foods as:

• Off Limits

• Good

• Bad

Instead, every time you sit down to eat, ask yourself this one question:

“Will this food nourish me right now?”

Answering this will always drive you to balance.

Because nourishment means one thing: “The food necessary for growth, health, and good condition” [1]

This means that having a Pizza when you are craving a Pizza and you can’t do anything but think about Pizza…is nourishing you because it is causing you to mentally have a “good condition” and you are looking after your short-term and long-term mental “health”.

Of course, if all you do is eat Fast Food you are going to be neglecting a huge part of your growth, health, and good condition. But we are talking about balance here.

Will this nourish me? This will very often be answered with foods that are more congruent to your goals than against your goals. Foods that are full of nutrients and conform to what you probably think your Weight Loss Meal Plan should consist of.

But it does also mean, sometimes, you are going to need a Glass of Wine and a few crisps.

And that is perfectly ok.

As long as you balance it into your Calorie Deficit as outlined above.

So basically, within reason, there are no foods that are off-limits.

But there are foods that you should put well within your limits, and build your Meal Plan around as much as possible.

Protein — The Weight Loss Super Food

It’s no more a Super Food than anything else. But second to calories, it really is very important in your Meal Plan.

Protein is the most filling of foods you will eat.

Of all of the macronutrients, it will take the longest time to be digested by the body. Which means it keeps you fuller for longer. Which in turn will help you lose weight by bringing down how much you eat.

Protein will also complement your physical training really well. It will help your recovery from strength training and help you build and maintain muscle.

Protein will help your metabolism to burn calories as it has a very high Thermic Effect of Food (TEF).

Sources of Protein

Here is a good list to get started with and some of my favourite options [2]:

Meat per 100g serving (% of protein per kcal):

• Chicken Breast: ~30g of protein/165kcal (18%)

• Turkey Breast: ~28g of protein/189kcal (14%)

• Steak: ~26g of protein/276kcal (9%)

• Kangaroo: ~26g or protein/147.5kcal (17%)

Fish per 100g (% of protein per kcal):

• Tuna Steak: ~29g of protein/129kcal (22%)

• Salmon: ~22g of protein/210kcal (10%)

• Dover Sole: ~15g of protein/87kcal (17%)

• Halibut: ~~22g of protein/109kcal (20%)

Dairy per 100g (% of protein per kcal):

• Eggs: ~12g of protein/144kcal (8%)

• Greek Yoghurt: ~10g of protein/58kcal (17%)

• Feta Cheese: ~10g of protein/96kcal (10%)

• Whole Milk: ~3g of protein/61kcal (4%)

Vegetarian Options per 100g (% of protein per kcal):

• Tofu: ~10g of protein/83kcal (12%)

• Tempeh: ~20g of protein/194kcal (10%)

• Seitan: ~25g of protein/127kcal (19%)

• Lentils: ~9g of protein/112kcal (8%)

Fruits and Vegetables

These should be high up in your meal plan. Simply because they are very economic in their calories.

You can eat a lot of food…for not a lot of calories.

With both fruits and vegetables.

Do you remember when I said, you need to:

“Eat as much food as you can eat to get as close to the upper guideline as possible”

Fruits and Vegetables will be one of your biggest weapons in being able to achieve that goal.

Leafy Greens like, Spinach, Chard, Lettuce, Kale, and Romaine Hearts will all become some of your best friends.

Fruits like Berries (all varieties), Apples, Oranges, Watermelon, Peaches, and Pineapple.

I am only listing suggestions here. Filling your Weight Loss Meal Plan with any kinds of fruits and vegetables is going to serve you very well indeed due to the high fibre content they will keep you fuller for longer, helping you to avoid snacking elsewhere in your diet.

Water and other Zero Calorie Drinks

I love water. Sparkling, Still, it doesn’t matter and you need to learn to love drinking water too.

I advise most people to aim for three litres of water a day.

This is literally just their water intake. Try not to include teas, coffee, juice, and anything else you might drink in this total.

Filling up on calorie-free liquid is again going to help do a number of things.

1. Being well hydrated you will gain energy.

2. It fills your stomach up and will help reduce cravings.

Step 3: Weight Loss Meal Plan Timing

Do you know what time I eat my lunch each day?

I’m sure you don’t because it is impossible to say. All you have done is read my article, you have never met me, you don’t know my schedule, you don’t know my caloric needs or the goals for my physique.

And because you don’t know that about me, I clearly don’t know that about you.

Therefore anyone who is giving you a Weight Loss Meal Plan based on when to eat your food is not understanding who you are as a human.

You have a family. You may be on a date. You might be eating a friend’s house. You could be working a different shift pattern

There are so many variables that go into when you actually eat. It would be extremely foolish of me, your online coach, to sit here and tell you when to eat your foods.

All you need to remember is this: Eat foods that nourish you at that moment in time and fits into your lifestyle and your caloric allowances.

That’s it. It really truly is that simple.

This way you will feel less stressed, you will be in your own rhythm and will make your meal plan for weight loss work in the best way possible for you.

And that is what it is all about.

I would like to end on one last note about structure. The timing of your food doesn’t matter that much, but the structure with which you eat really does. If you can make sure you are eating breakfast, lunch and dinner each and every day this will really help you with your weight loss.

And if you want to take that one step further, a new study [3] has just been published by the University of Aberdeen which showed that eating a bigger breakfast compared to dinner each day actually reduced cravings and hunger throughout the day, and participants lost weight as their calories were controlled into a deficit.

With all of my clients on the Strong & Confident Program to work on their structured eating as much as possible - and not only do they lose weight, but they also improve their relationships with food as well.

Conclusion

That is it. That is your step-by-step guide to creating The Best Meal Plan for Female Weight Loss.

Step 1: Set Your Calories For Weight Loss

Step 2: Chose foods that ask the question “Will this Nourish Me?”

Step 3: Fit it into your lifestyle with structure in place.

Step 4: Execute the plan

You see, a lot of people would love for me to write a whole bunch of recipes, a whole bunch of macro-calculated foods and tell you when to eat them.

But Meal Plans like this very very very rarely work.

Especially when your goal is to lose weight.

If I sat here and was told you when and what to eat.

You would feel a lot more short-changed and less motivated to actually follow that plan.

Instead, I am telling you how and why you need to find the foods that will work best for you, in your life, with your personal balance within the guidelines of a Calorie Deficit.

That is it.

You can eat doughnuts.

If it fits into your calories.

You can drink Cocktails

If it fits into your calories.

You can eat Pizza

If it fits into your calories.

In fact, even if it pushes you over your calories, and you are having these foods in balance with your goals…then you can eat doughnuts, drink cocktails, and have pizza whenever you feel like it is answering this one question:

“Will it nourish me?”

The more you find ways of fitting in your favorite foods, and being able to live a life congruent to your goals, the more consistent you will be, the more regular your results will become, and the more nourished you will feel.

What’s Next?

Well, I am an Online Coach who has helped thousands of people work through the challenges in this article.

And it would be my pleasure to help you too.

My program is personal one-to-one online training called the Strong & Confident Program.

If you have ever wanted to achieve the following:

✅ Escape the constant dread of dieting?

✅ Release the guilt you attach to eating certain types of food?

✅ Learn to stop worrying about “the pesky last few pounds” and focus on all your body can do?

✅ Become truly happy with what your body is and what is capable of?

✅ Enjoy the feeling of being stronger and fitter as opposed to trying to reduce your size all the time?

✅ Achieve all of this and still lose body fat at the same time without huge restrictions and slavery to a fitness regime?

✅ Do it all on your own schedule, in your own way, with a program specifically designed for you?

Then please click on the button below and fill out an application form to start working with me.

Thank you so much for reading my work, and good luck with your weight loss journey!

I cannot wait to see how you go!

Coach Adam

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References for the article: The Best Meal Plan for Female Weight Loss

1. Google.com. 2020. Dictionary — Google Search. [online] Available at: <https://www.google.com/search?q=Dictionary&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAONQesSoyi3w8sc9YSmZSWtOXmMU4-LzL0jNc8lMLsnMz0ssqrRiUWJKzeNZxMqFEAMA7_QXqzcAAAA&zx=1600528087652#dobs=nourishment> [Accessed 19 September 2020].

2. Nutritionix.com. 2020. {{Metatags.Title || ‘Nutritionix’}}. [online] Available at: <https://www.nutritionix.com/> [Accessed 19 September 2020].

3. Leonie C. Ruddick-Collins, Peter J. Morgan, Claire L. Fyfe, Joao A.N. Filipe, Graham W. Horgan, Klaas R. Westerterp, Jonathan D. Johnston, Alexandra M. Johnstone, Timing of daily calorie loading affects appetite and hunger responses without changes in energy metabolism in healthy subjects with obesity, Cell Metabolism, 2022.