120. 4 huge weight loss mistakes I made

In this podcast, I'm sharing four of the many mistakes I've made over the last 20ish years, as I began my first diet at 16 years old (sad, I know!). I've invested a LOT of time and energy into learning how our bodies really work with fat loss & what truly matters, so I hope this saves you so much time and energy in the end. Let me know what mistakes you've made or if you're currently making any of the ones I've mentioned! We're in this together:)

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Four big mistakes that I made when trying to get leaner. A lot of these occurred back in the day when I had an unhealthy relationship with food, which is really an unhealthy relationship with myself, with my body, with life as a whole, my self worth was in the toilet. So that absolutely played a part with some of these, but some of them were just due to simple misinformation.

And I'd like to save you from the time and energy and frustration that I did. So let's get into it. 

Number one is thinking that carbs were the key to everything. Now, I grew up in the Atkins era. I started my first diet at the age of 16, which is tragic. I know. And at the time the rhetoric, the belief systems really, to my knowledge. There wasn't any science to support this. Of course there isn't because turns out it's not true at all.

Was that insulin is the source of all evil that you cannot gain weight without carbohydrates. And the key to losing them is to eat low carbs. So eventually I developed an obsession with low carb dieting. I would tell everyone and their mom who listened to me about low carb dieting, but here's the thing.

I didn't [00:01:00] understand the difference between correlation and causation. So with my first diet, Did I reduce my carbs? Yes. And did I lose weight? I sure did. And I lost weight very rapidly. So in my mind I said, okay, carbs are the reason I lost weight. And then. Because the diet was restrictive when I would add carbohydrates back into my diet, I would gain weight further ingraining this belief that carbs are the reason you gain weight as well.

When in reality, the reason I gained weight was because I increased my calorie intake. The reason I lost weight was because I reduced my calorie intake. So it does come down to energy balance. Now, the further I went with this, the more obsessed I became with, it's all about carbohydrates. The more I restricted, the more fat I was actually eating is at the time.

And we see this a lot right now with biohacking with keto that eat fat to burn fat. Right. People think that they can outsmart their metabolism. And the key is mainstream has it wrong. You just need to eat more healthy fats and that's what will lead to fat loss. So I ate a lot of fat while lowering my [00:02:00] carbohydrate intake and fat is the most calorically dense of all macronutrients.

So the foods I was eating, I was drinking butter in my coffee for God's sakes. Okay. So of course I put on weight, I actually gained weight. I put myself into a calorie surplus further. The more restrictive I was, the more I ended up overeating again, going back to unhealthy relationship with food. And because I was overeating so often, even though I was restricting a lot mentally.

by and large on an average weekly calorie intake, I was actually overeating, putting me into a calorie surplus. So those two things combined the higher fat intake, just overeating a lot more in general from being so restrictive led to me gaining weight and feeling really, really fat. unhealthy. I felt unwell despite doing a lot of high intensity exercise, which as you may know, may or may not, but a lot of forms of high intensity exercise require carbohydrates for that fuel.

So it ended up being a disaster. I lost a lot of trust in my body. I thought that I was the problem all because of this one firmly held belief that carbs were the root of all evil. Don't make the same mistake that I did. [00:03:00] Second fat loss mistake I made was having zero concept of maintenance. Honestly, never even thought about it. No one talked about it. All anyone cared about was lose weight, lose weight, lose weight, lose weight. Never. Okay. But what do you do after that? What's the plan after that? And there's two different phases.

So there's the lifestyle phase where this needs to be forever thing. You change your lifestyle. If you're coming from a place of eating a lot of ultra processed foods, overeating all the time, you're really detached from your hunger and fullness cues, you're drinking a lot of alcohol, you're not moving your body.

Once you overhaul those components, that is your new baseline, okay? So that's going to need to remain forever unless you want to gain all the weight back, typically. So that is phase one. Then phase two, you're going into a more phasic nutrition approach, advanced fat loss. And this is what I teach inside of sustainably lean academy.

And here you're deliberately getting yourself into a calorie deficit. And so you're going from your current maintenance. Let's say you weigh 200 pounds and then you lose, let's say 30 pounds. Okay. So now you're 170 pounds. Your new maintenance to maintain that new lower body weight [00:04:00] is going to be less.

Then your 200 pound maintenance, if everything else remains equal, like your activity levels, because there's just less mass to move around, therefore less energy or calories required for this. So your new maintenance, once you've lost that weight is going to be lower. If you go right back to what you were eating when you were 200 pounds, then you're eventually going to end up at 200 pounds.

So you need to adapt to your new optimal maintenance calorie intake. Now there's some nuance here because once you have lost weight. You made experiences where you plateau because the metabolism down regulates very, very normal. And then you might decrease your calories even further. Okay. So eventually you reach a point and you might be in a down regulated state where your biofeedback isn't as great.

Your sleep starts to suffer digestion, um, hunger cues, cravings, things like that. And so eventually you want to increase your calorie intake to your new optimal. Maintenance. And I had no clue about any of this. If you're hearing this for the first time and you're like, I don't know what on earth you're talking about.

I totally get it. It's too much for this video. I have a whole jam packed. It's my favorite masterclass called the [00:05:00] maintenance masterclass. It's 27. You can find that in the notes below, so I won't dive into that, but just know you have to have an exit plan and exit strategy once you lose this video. the weight.

And this is especially pertinent beyond the lifestyle phase. But of course, if you're overhauling your lifestyle, that has to stick as well. 

Third big mistake I made when trying to get leaner was thinking I could just exercise my way there. And like all things with health, fitness, fat loss, there is nuance here because there are plenty of people who've gone from not exercising a lot to starting to exercise and they lose weight and they maintain it because they keep up with the exercise regimen, which is wonderful exercising for health.

Absolutely love it. Now, the thing is. is I was doing a lot of cardio. I was a cardio bunny back in the day. I would hop on the elliptical for an hour and I didn't want to be doing the elliptical every day for an hour. So I would do that and my appetite would really increase, which is very common if you're doing a lot of exercise.

And then when I would stop doing that, because again, doing that every day, gouge my eyes out, I gained it all back further. You cannot [00:06:00] exercise a bad diet simply because The calories required or the calorie intake that you might have from, let's say, eating 500 extra calories in order to burn that in the gym, which we don't really want to have that association with the gym anyway.

But hypothetically to burn that, that is a lot of time spent in the gym doing cardio, an hour of resistance training, hard resistance training is not going to get you to that number typically. So imagine how much extra exercise you would have to do. And it's pretty damn easy. to overeat by 500 calories.

People do it all the time. So firstly, I recommend that you do not use the gym to undo, quote unquote, any damage from eating. Separate those. The gym is for performance, building muscle, your health. There might be times when you kick things up a notch to get fat loss, but it's not going to be anything extreme.

Secondly, keep an eye on the impact on your appetite. Because if it is kicking your appetite up so much that it actually surpasses the amount of energy that you are burning in the gym and you're trying to get leaner or maintain your weight, then that is going to backfire, right? That's going to lead you [00:07:00] further away from your goals.

Now, the second phase I went through is when I was doing CrossFit four to five times a week and CrossFit is very intense. And I loved it. I was not trying to lose weight at all during this time, but what this really taught me was the importance of rest and recovery, which I was not prioritizing. I had a lot of other stressful things going on in my life.

And then on top of four to five days a week of pushing super hard in my CrossFit classes, eventually my nervous system went haywire. I developed a bunch of chronic health issues, and this is when I understood the importance of rest. Stress management, which brings me to my next one. Mistake number four when trying to get leaner was not understanding and prioritizing stress management. as I mentioned, I went through a health crisis where it was just overwhelming amounts of chronic stress, acute stress. So short periods of stress is how we adapt as humans. It's very, very important.

It's good for us. Mentally, emotionally, physically, we need it in order to be resilient human beings. It's when it's chronic and we don't ever have periods [00:08:00] to come down and actually rest and recover. That's where the adaptation actually happens. That is when we run into issues. And I learned this the hard way because the nervous system is closely tied to the metabolism.

 Your body will start to give you signals like sleep. Trouble staying or falling asleep, digestion, bloating, constipation, mood, energy, cravings, menstrual cycle. A lot of things can start to go haywire. And in today's modern food environment, where we have highly palatable foods, literally around every corner, you can just flip open your phone and there you go.

You have access to it. You're more likely to end up overeating. It's going to be more difficult to adhere to your maintenance calorie intake, your calorie deficit. I want to be clear here because there's this rhetoric that I can't lose weight because I'm stressed. People unfortunately starve to death and that is a highly, highly stressful situation to be in.

We can absolutely still lose weight when we are stressed. I'm sure you know someone or maybe yourself you've experienced that when you've gone through a period of. High stress. It's typically acute stress where you just completely lose your appetite and you [00:09:00] lose weight. Okay, so that's an example it's the chronic stress that we want to be mindful of when you're chronically stressed and your sleep is suffering and your digestion is a mess.

You're experiencing those mood changes You might be more likely to reach for tasty foods to self soothe. It's more difficult to mindfully eat Then adhering to your calorie deficit is going to be super super challenging and this is important further it's just really important for your overall health and well being your mental and your physical health lastly When you are under a lot of stress, so there's a stress component and the sleep component and stress impacts your sleep You are more likely to lose more muscle mass when you're in a calorie deficit and it is more difficult to gain muscle With these two things, so super important to understand your life will be made a thousand times easier Trying to achieve your physique goals If you just have periods of true downtime where you are still your body and your nervous system can register that you are safe Not constantly trying to exercise and push your body and have technology is a huge source of stress these days constant [00:10:00] input on our brains So we have stress for both our brains and our bodies.

If you're mindful of this and you give your brain and your body periods to actually rest and recover, it will change the game for you. It will make it so, so much easier.

 These are just four of the mistakes that I've made a rest assured. There are many, many more. I would love to hear from you guys what mistakes that you have made on your journey. If any of the ones that I have mentioned have resonated with you, if you're watching this on YouTube, let me know in the comments.

And if you are listening to this on the podcast, go ahead and let me know over on my DMS and let me know what other things you are struggling with so that I know what to create more content around. If you would like help with getting leaner, start with the maintenance masterclass or jump straight into sustainably lean Academy, it will give you everything you need to know to get results, to stay lean, and to do it while protecting your relationship with food and your health along the way.

I will see you in the next one.