Whilst there are a lot of different approaches to achieving your fitness goals, there are certain relatively universal rules that the vast majority of people seeing an online nutrition coach will find apply to them.
Most of them are common sense; it is better to lose weight slowly but consistently than quickly and erratically.
The best ways to improve your diet are to add healthy foods rather than take away unhealthy ones (not least because more of the former means less of the latter), and treat fitness as an ultimately holistic process.
The word diet itself betrays the importance of a whole-body approach to nutrition; it comes from diaita, a Greek word that translates roughly to “way of life” but specifically means a complete healthy lifestyle, from nutrition and exercise to mental health.
This means that the most effective fitness regimes do not just involve calorie restriction, but a nutrient-positive approach combined with exercise.
The latter part is important to stop the biggest reason why people quit their diets.
Why Do People Plateau During Diets?
A lot of people have doubtless heard this one before; a person takes on a diet regime. They make some excellent progress for a few weeks before suddenly their progress slows or even stops.
They will try to keep going or even double their efforts but nothing seems to help. This causes them to lose motivation and abandon their diet entirely.
The reason for this is that losing weight is more than just using up more energy than you consume. If you are building muscle, for example, which is more dense than fat, so you can gain weight in the process.
Another factor that affects a lot of people on diets is the adaptability of the human body. When you diet, your body gets more efficient with how it uses its energy. This is sometimes colloquially known as “starvation mode”, although this is know better known as 'adaptive thermogenesis.'
From an evolutionary psychology perspective, this is an essential survival trait to ensure that you make the most of your energy and live as long as you can in between opportunities to feed.
However, from a fitness standpoint, this can be counterproductive, as it means that the body will reduce it's spontaneous movement and fidgeting, also known as NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis).
NEAT can make up a large portion of how well your metabolism works. High amounts of NEAT is what can differentiate between someone who has a 'high metabolism' and someone who has a low metabolism. The latter person having low NEAT. A drop in NEAT can partially be mitigated with well-intentioned movement.
Another factor that can make weight-loss goals more difficult as time goes on is the Set-Point Theory.
First suggested in 1953, the set point is a genetically predetermined fixed weight that the body will try to maintain through a range of subconscious processes.
For people who are over their set point weight, this means that once they get started with a weight-loss regimen they see results especially quickly, but once they cross over the body’s fixed weight, it becomes harder to lose weight and much easier to gain weight.
The exact mechanics of this are unclear, it is not known how precise the set point is (with some theories suggesting a set range rather than a set point - also known as the Dual Intervention Model. ) and to what extent environmental factors can affect it.
However, by focusing on nutrition and overall fitness rather than a goal weight can lead to greater outcomes and much better overall health.
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