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IIFYM - Common Sense Approach To Weight Loss

It is a little ironic and unfortunate that while the motivation to lose weight may come from wanting to take better care of their health, the average overweight or obese person seems to adopt an unhealthy weight loss strategy more often than not. Usually this means extreme calorie restriction in the form of a crash diet, whether in the form of one of the many popular fad diets, meal replacement products, or just plain old “not eating”.

I would hope that anyone reading this article with an interest in health and fitness would agree that “food avoidance” is never a healthy option, even as a short term measure. Restriction leads to conservation, and it should be common knowledge by now that crash dieting invariable leads to weight gain as soon as the dieter returns to their usual eating habits. Not just gaining back the weight that they lost by starving themselves, but actually ending up heavier and more unhealthy than they started.

Perhaps even more damaging than the physical weight gain though is that each failed attempt to lose weight can reinforce negative and incorrect beliefs such as “I can't lose weight and I'll always be fat”, or even worse “eating makes you fat, not eating makes you lose weight”. Although there is a growing industry in products that take advantage of and propagate these messages, as fitness professionals or enthusiasts and decent human beings I'm sure we can all agree on how important it is that we combat these negative and untrue beliefs with practical, common sense advice on dieting, and the message that all human beings can get into shape and be healthy and happy through appropriate nutrition and exercise.

So that's crash dieting well and truly ruled out, forever!

What are some better options though? Our hypothetical overweight or obese person may be fortunate enough to have a friend or co-worker who knows (or at least, thinks he knows) something about training and nutrition who they can turn to for advice. Or, perhaps they get online and start researching the latest in legitimate dieting strategies as used by fitness models or body builders in contest preparation.

Depending on who's advice they follow, the dieting tips may be some or all of the following:
  • Eat a particular number of meals per day.
  • Eat only at these times of the day.
  • Only eat these types of foods, never eat those types of foods. 
  • Never eat these types of foods at the same time as those types of foods.
  • Only eat these types of foods in the morning, and only eat these types of foods in the afternoon. 
  • Avoid anything with a high glycaemic index.
  • Cut out carbs.
  • Cut out fats.
  • And perhaps my personal favourite; “Just eat clean”.
What's missing from this list?

Let me put it to you another way. Imagine I get an email, or I have a conversation with a member at the gym and they tell me “Dave, why aren't I losing weight? I'm eating 6 small meals a day, nothing after 7pm, I've cut out this, increased that, and I'm eating pretty clean. I should have lost more weight by now. What gives?”

What do you think I am most likely to ask them before I can hazard a guess at why they are not seeing results?

Simply put: How many calories are you getting in a day?

Let me break it down for you this way. There are four ranges of calories that a person could be consuming on average, as follows:
  • Excessive to current requirements, resulting in weight gain through increased body fat.
  • Suitable to maintain current weight. 
  • Suitable to achieve and maintain a healthy goal weight. 
  • Insufficient for good health, with unpredictable results that may include weight gain.
There would be some grey areas in between, but in short “you are either consuming an appropriate amount of calories to maintain your goal weight, or you are NOT consuming an appropriate amount of calories to maintain your goal weight”.

Continue to the next entry on IIFYM For Weight Loss.

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information about burning calories through exercise

There's lots of new reading material over on the Lose Weight, No Bullshit site that you should check out. Start with my Eat More, Do Less; Lose Weight post from earlier in the week if you have not seen it already.

What we talked about in the that instalment was determining our actual requirements, rather than just sticking to the numbers we expect to work based on our mathematical formulas. As I said, in most cases we will get an accurate prediction using the Mifflin - St Joer equation... but if we're not seeing results, we're not using the right targets.

These days the issue often gets further confused by the popular habit of tracking (or attempting to) the amount of calories burned while exercising. I've discussed this already in the Cardio vs Weight Training entry (about half way down) in the Free Weight Loss Education Program. So, what I notice on people's weight loss & exercise blogs is that they seem to be talking about three different sets of calories they need to work to. One being their "base" or minimum requirement, then the amount they have burned off at training, and then a third amount which is the extra they need to "eat back" due to training.

Or something. I can barely follow the logic of it all, to be honest with you. It just seems way over complicated and confusing, and that's never the best strategy for anything in my opinion. I talk about it more in this post about eating back calories burned while exercising.

Over the past few years an idea seems to have spread that "more calories burned" = "a better workout". Well, without getting too pedantic and going into the difference between a workout and training for results, I don't think this is necessarily correct. So in this entry I talk about the difference between training methodically to produce a specific result, and just working out to burn calories.

Plenty of good information! Study up!
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Philosophy and Fitness

OK. A while back I wrote a piece about how a specific result requires a specific course of action. For example if you goal is to compete in a sporting event, you need to train specifically to be fit and prepared for that event. If your goal is to lose a certain amount of weight and create a particular body type or physique, you need to train appropriately towards that goal. This is putting like putting a round peg in a round hole, and a square peg in a square hole.

Quite often however, people will follow a training program suitable to achieve a certain level of sporting performance, when their actual goal is to create a particular body type. The logic is something along the lines of "if I could do that I'd be really fit, and if I was really fit I'd have a great body". This is not always the case. Following a training program designed to deliver one outcome, but expecting it to produce some other result seems a lot like trying to put a square peg in a round hole to me.


The ancient sages saw ego driven desire for more material wealth, power, or anything else to be a distraction on the path to happiness or enlightenment. In modern society, more than ever we tend to be focussed on wealth and material possessions, often while neglecting our physical and mental health. It is interesting that this was seen as an issue even in ancient times.

It was easy for these ancient philosophers to say "all desire is ego driven" and recommend that you just chill out and stop wanting things, and then you'd be happy. The message is true, but these days we have bills to pay. These guys were usually of an age where they had fulfilled their obligations to the state and where able to spend their later years being hermits, or just growing vegetables and meditating and not worrying about too much.

Usually these were gentlemen of a certain age where they had fulfilled all of their duties to the state, and basically where in a position to just chill out and spend their time meditating and contemplating the way of things, and maybe growing some vegetables or something.

Obviously we have bills to pay, we need food on the table and a roof over our heads... and a decent internet connection, but the message from the old masters is to stop working yourself into the ground and stressing out over things that you don't really need for any reason other than that you have decided to.

Picture it this way: "I can't buy last years perfectly good but slightly smaller model at half the price, I have to have the latest most expensive one because that's important to me. But oooooh how am I going to pay for it? I'm already in too much debt! Oh well I guess I'll just have increase the limit of my credit card and hope I can cover the interest somehow... maybe I can do some extra hours at my horrible job." it's a lot like saying "ooooh if I could just force this square peg into that round hole" if the whole idea in the first place was in buying something nice to enjoy in your leisure time. It has already turned into more stress and less leisure time.

Getting back to our usual subject of health and fitness, what do I mean by all this?

It's simple. If your motivation is that you truly want to participate or compete in endurance events, train towards that goal. If your motivation is that you truly want to be a strength athlete you should train towards that goal. If you simply want to first achieve the basic level of human fitness I described in the previous entry (ie normal weight, full range of motion and mobility) and then progress to your ideal body type and composition... then that is what you must train for.


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