Why You're Not Making Progress

http://www.fooducate.com/blog/wp-content/media/weight_scale.jpg

When people begin their approach to weight loss I assume the majority of the population out there will do one of the following: eat less food or exercise more, or both. While this isn't necessarily incorrect, it's not the entire story. Over the few years I've been working out I've probably seen hundreds of people in numerous gyms, and since I've been mainly working out at my school gym over the past two to three years, there are people I've come to see on a daily basis. What I've unfortunately noticed is that these people are in there day after day working their butts off and somehow they never seem to make any progress to their general 'physique'. They look exactly the same week after week, month after month.

You would think with the amount of effort those guys put into their curls and leg extensions they'd show at least some signs of muscle growth or fat loss. Same goes for those girls that run a total of probably a million miles or something ridiculous like that on the treadmill in a year, yet never seem to look any slimmer. If you ask me, something must be wrong, and I'm willing to bet it's their diet.

From the questions people have asked me over time I've begun to realize that generally people don't seem to understand the importance of their diet in the context of weight loss (or weight gain). That's not to say that exercise isn't important, it definitely plays it's part, but in my opinion I'd give diet 60-70% and exercise 30-40% in terms of overall importance to their goals.

It's great that people begin to watch what they eat when exercising and trying to lose weight, but sticking to a generic 'low fat, low cal, low this low that' diet won't necessarily do it for you; especially once your body has adjusted to the initial weight loss (which is mainly water) and you hit a plateau. This is when you need to re-think your diet, or maybe you should have analyzed it better from the beginning.

I'll leave you with a bit of helpful information that will at least let you see where you stand right now in terms of your body's needs. Everybody's body uses a standard amount of energy to function on a day to day basis. This is called you Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR). A standard equation is used to determine this and from there you adjust your daily calorie intake and expenditure depending on your goals. The website conveniently gives you an estimate of the calories you should consume depending on whether you want to lose or gain weight. It takes some effort and lots of label-reading to really figure out how much of what you're consuming but this formula (I'll link it at the end) makes it a lot easier. Studies have shown that people generally tend to underestimate their calorie intake so again, this likely explains why people don't seem to make progress.

http://faculty.insead.edu/chandon/personal_page/Documents/Article_Nature%20Clinical%20Practice%20Endocrinology%20&%20Metabolism.pdf

For all you know you've been eating much more than you thought you were and didn't realize it, and so you have the most likely explanation for why you don't see the scale moving anymore.

Enough rambling, here's the formula provided by and fully credited to www.freedieting.com. Enjoy.

http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calorie_calculator.htm