Today I'm going to give you the very simple reason why you haven't been able to lose weight despite being on a low calorie diet and exercising multiple days a week. Now, I'm getting messages about this every single day where people will asked for advice because they say that they're eating clean and they're in the calorie deficit but they're either losing a minimal amount of fat or they aren't seeing any results at all, and they'll wonder if the problem is genetic, you know, maybe they just have a really slow metabolism, maybe they're eating the wrong types of foods or maybe they need to change something with their workout plan. There are always exceptions, obviously, things like metabolic adaptation are possible.
But if you're trying to lose body fat and you aren't seeing your results, the answer is almost always the simplest and most obvious one, and that is that your overall daily calorie intake is not as low as you think it is. You might think you're eating 1,400 calories a day or 1,800 calories a day, but there's a very good chance that you're actually taking in quite a bit more than that without even realizing it. Now, I've been doing fitness coaching in some form or another for over a decade now and I can say that in almost every case when someone says that they can't lose fat even though they're on the low calorie diet, when you actually sit down with that person and you break everything down step-by-step throughout your day it turns out that they're not actually on a low calorie diet and they're actually eating closer to their maintenance level without realizing it.
There's actually a decent amount of research on this as well, which I'll link in the description box which basically shows that people on a weight loss diet are generally pretty bad when it comes to caloric(?) reporting, and they very often under report their calories and by a very big margin. This happens either because they're not really tracking their food intake very closely, you know maybe they have come sort of rough eating plan and they're just trying to estimate it throughout the day but they're going overboard on portion sizes and they're adding in little extra food items here and there, or they are tracking it but they're just making errors with their measurements. When you consider that a typical calorie deficit for fat loss would usually be somewhere around 500 calories below maintenance, all it takes is a few mistakes throughout your day and your calorie deficit can be pretty easily erased or at least it can be hugely minimize. For example; if what you think is one tablespoon of peanut butter is actually two tablespoons and that's a very common measuring error, that's a hundred extra calories right there. Or an extra glass of fruit juice, a handful of almonds, the cream and sugar that you put in your coffee, cooking oils, small high calories snacks that you add in here and there. Or just being overly generous with your portion sizes but thinking that they're clean foods so it really doesn't matter, all of this stuff adds up during the course of a day and it's really not hard for it to equal out to several hundred calories or more.
Another very common thing that you see are people who do stick to their diet pretty closely during the week, and so they think it's okay to have these full-on cheat days where they basically eat anything they want and in whatever amount and they end up off setting a very good portion of the calorie deficit that they're created throughout the week. Now there's nothing wrong whatsoever with what you'd call “cheat foodsâ€, and I do encourage people to work them into their diet in moderation but calories are still calories, and it still all boils down to your overall calorie intake in the big picture and one or two days of bingeing on the weekend that can have a pretty significant effect on that. So bottom line, if you're trying to lose body fat but you aren't seeing any results with the exception of rare situations where other factors can come into play, you just have to be honest with yourself and recognize that you're probably just overeating. If you have a true calorie deficit in place then you will lose body fat, guaranteed. So if you're not losing fat, you're not actually in the deficit. So you just need to sit down and honestly look at what you're eating throughout the day and in what amounts, and then add things up to find out how many calories you're actually taking in. Now, you might think counting calories is tedious or it's too obsessive but it's actually not that hard once you get the hang of it and if you're serious about losing the fat it really just comes down to your overall calorie intake versus your overall calorie expenditure, and so it's just something that you need to do at least in the beginning stages just to get yourself on the right track, and you'll probably find that you're either eating a lot more than you thought you were or you are eating what you thought you were, in which case your actual calorie target is just too high and you need to reduce it slightly.
So, know your daily calorie target for fat loss, make sure you're hitting it with reasonable accuracy and if the fat isn't coming off gradually reduce it until you're landing in that standard range of about one to two pounds loss per week. It's really that simple. It's just a matter of being more discipline with tracking your food intake. If you want to get a complete step-by-step plan that outlines all the nutritional principles that you need to maximize fat loss, a huge collection of step-by-step meal plans that you can follow as well as the weight training and cardio workouts that you need then you can head over
