Why Fat Loss Feels So Hard (It’s Not Just You) | E30

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Welcome back to Train Like a Girl. My name is Abby. I am your host and I am an online women's health and fitness coach. Today I want to delve into why fat loss feels so difficult for so many of us. And I want to talk specifically about something that really validated the way that I think about weight loss and obesity. It's something that I came across about a year ago called the Obesity System Map. And if you've never seen it, I highly recommend just putting Obesity System Map into Google and you'll see it for yourself. But it's basically this big map of factors that contributes to obesity and weight gain. Um, and it's as you'll see, it's not just a simple diagram. When researchers sat down to make this map of all the contributing factors, they ended up with this enormous mass of boxes and arrows and everything spilled out onto this huge diagram. It's actually nicknamed, I think, the obesity spaghetti diagram. And when you look at it, it's like, oh yeah, that makes sense because it literally looks like somebody's dumped a few tins of spaghetti across a whiteboard. But not only does it look complicated, the things within it, it's fascinating because what most people talk about when we think about weight loss, fat loss, and myself included, you know, on Instagram, is the the conversation usually focuses on two things, right? Food and exercise. But it rarely goes beyond that. Like that's kind of the end of discussion. It's kind of like we need to eat less and move more. But when these researchers mapped out all the things that can influence body weight, they identified hundreds of other factors. Things like some of the obvious things like sleep and stress and mental health, but also like education, shift work, food availability, um, social pressure, food marketing, like even where you live, like your neighborhood design, portion sizes, genetics, work schedules, um food reward, access to uh recreational spaces, just so many, so many things that influenced whether people were able to lose weight, their their body size, whatever. And it begs the question: if obesity is influenced by all of these factors, why then do we spend almost all of our time only talking about two of them? Now, before I go any further, this isn't me saying that food and exercise don't matter. Obviously, they matter. You cannot ignore energy balance. Like that, there's no undoing the the science of that, right? If we eat in a calorie deficit, we'll lose weight. If we eat in a calorie surplus, we'll gain weight. You can't ignore those facts. You can't ignore movement, you can't ignore nutrition. And and you know, body body fat doesn't just appear because of where you live or whatever, but what this diagram helps outline is that whilst food and exercise are the behaviors that will sort of drive uh how your body responds, right, there are so many factors underneath those behaviors influencing how difficult that is going to be for any individual. Um, and I think that is where in the fitness industry we often fall short, right? Because when somebody struggles with their weight, one might assume, you know, from looking at just general advice that they might just be making poor choices when really we are we're stopping and asking ourselves, or you know, a lot of PTs online really stop and ask why those choices are difficult in the first place. So it becomes a deeper conversation, right? So why does one person find it relatively easy, potentially, to stick to a calorie deficit, whilst another might find themselves fighting against it every single day? Why does one person manage to train consistently while another falls off track? And it's really because one person's just good at it and the other's just bad at it. It's not that. It's about behavior, it's it's because human behavior doesn't exist in one plane of motion. It's it's it's not one isolated thing, right? It's influenced by everything that is happening around us. And this is where I'm gonna bring in another term: the obesogenic environment. And that's where this comes in. That sounds incredibly academic of me, but it all that really means is we're living in an environment that is making weight gain easier and weight management so much more difficult for us. And if we're being honest, that is the environment that we live in now, most of us. Think about how different modern life is from the environment that we started in, you know, as humans, how we evolved. For most of human history, food wasn't available 24 hours a day. You couldn't have a restaurant quality meal delivered to your front door within a couple of taps on your phone. You couldn't just stop for a coffee or a muffin or a cookie or a protein bar on every bloody corner of every street. You couldn't sit on the sofa at 8 pm and order 3,000 calories worth of food to arrive within half an hour. It used to be that food required effort. You actually had to move to get that food. Um, now before anyone thinks I'm sort of thinking we need to all go back to how we were in the cave times, like I'm not thinking that. Obviously, modern conveniences are incredible. Supermarkets are incredible, food delivery is incredible. We're actually making things more efficient for ourselves, which is just, you know, the process of um moving forwards, which is good. It's obviously we don't want to be living in an environment where we've got to hunt for our dinner, but I do think that we are potentially underestimating how much our environment behapes our behavior and then ultimately shapes our decisions. Um and the reality is as humans, we heavily we are heavily reliant on and influenced by convenience. So we tend to choose what's easiest, we pick the things that are closest. Like literally, there are studies that show if a food is closer to us, we're more likely to choose it. So if their fruit is closer to us, we'll choose that. Or if the chocolate bar is closest to us, we'll choose that. Or we'll choose what's most rewarding. And the thing is, people and marketing is very, very clever. Food companies know this. So the food industry will spend literally billions understanding what makes us want more, what's gonna make us buy more. Um, and so oftentimes what we see is a combination of high sugar, high fat, high salt, texture, and flavor that creates the most rewarding experience possible because obviously the more enjoyable the food is, the more likely we are to buy it again. So suddenly we're living in a world where every food is highly palatable. I mean, you only have to look, I'm included in this. Like, I only have to look at stuff and be like, oh, I really want that. I'm drooling. And it's available everywhere, and it's available all the time, and it's it's often cheaper than healthier alternatives. Um, so that's like a nutrition. We're living in an environment where nutrition then has become that. But we also at the same time we are living in a world where we generally move less because we have cars, we have trains, we we walk less, we only have to walk a couple of meters to most things. We don't have to walk a foot to our bathroom, for example. We also live in a world where all of us are working more, and a lot of that work is done from a desk, and we're sat in meetings, and we're sat behind a computer. So it's no wonder then why we're we're we we're getting less steps overall than what we did years and years and years ago. So, and that and obviously, movement doesn't just happen by accident in this day and age. It's so easy for our step count to be so low because of the lives that we live, and that's not me saying that we're living a bad life. Like, obviously, we need to be in offices, we need to we need to have people working on different things behind a desk and all of this, but movement now doesn't happen automatically like maybe it once did. So it needs to now be intentional, and that is difficult. Um because we are then asking ourselves to perform behaviors that go against everything that is around surrounding us. Um we're, you know, going to the gym is we're gonna have some resistance to that. We are asking ourselves to choose the meal that requires preparation instead of one that arrives in 20 minutes. We're asking ourselves to go for a walk when Netflix, that is so tempting, is sitting right there. We're asking ourselves to stop eating foods that have literally been engineered to make it difficult to stop eating. And then the issue with all of this then is when we struggle, we're taught that it's our fault. We blame ourselves. We especially when we're then seeing people online in the top 1% that are like bloody rippling abs and all the rest of it, we compare. We tell us tell ourselves we're lazy, we tell ourselves we're unmotivated, that we're weak. But I don't think that's the full picture, is it? Because understanding the environment that we're operating in doesn't remove responsibility, it simply gives us context and it explains why it feels hard, and I think that is really important. Because if you believe your struggles are purely like your fault, the only thing that you'll then address is willpower. You'll try and like bulldoze your way through stuff, which is why long term we don't kind of keep results and stuff, like it's harder to maintain a smaller body weight, for example. It's harder to get stay fit, it's keep it's hard to keep that consistency. You know, willpower is terrible for like as a long-term strategy. Nobody is, let's face it, with the convenience of everything, nobody is gonna win against the environment that we live in. Because that would be extremely difficult, as has been proven by all the things that we've listed in this episode so far. But the people that do succeed long-term aren't usually the people that are whitenuckling their way through with just willpower alone. They are the people who've taken this information about okay, the environment that we live in now is making it more difficult for us. But they instead of just like white knuckling their way around that, what they've done is they've learned how to work their their environment to make it easier for themselves. Like they build systems, they create routines, they remove friction, they make they make the healthier choices easier. Do you know what I mean? So because if a behavior is influenced by environment, changing the environment is often going to be far more effective than trying to force your way, force yourself to be more disciplined. And and honestly, this is the one one of the biggest things I do as a coach. It's not just about me telling you, this is how much protein you need, this is how much movement you need, because most people know that. Most people know that they need more protein, most people know that movement matters and that a calorie deficit matters for fat loss. The inf the issue isn't the information, the issue is trying to apply that to your world in a world that constantly pushes you in the opposite direction. Because we do live in a world that makes all those things, it makes living a healthy life more difficult. And that is why my coaching isn't just about calories and macros and a fitness plan. It's about identifying which parts of your personal life resonate with that obesity system map. So it's about looking for what is making things hard for you. Maybe it's stress, maybe it's shift work, maybe it's social events, maybe it's emotional eating, maybe it's um compassion with yourself, maybe it's a lack of structure, maybe it's an environment that makes healthy choices harder than they need to be. Because once you identify those barriers, you can actually work from that place. And I think that is the takeaway from this episode. Fat loss isn't difficult because calories don't matter. Fat loss is difficult because calories are influenced by a million other things. And the sooner we address those things, the sooner we can we can start creating systems that actually work for you and for your life and start, you know, looking at the f the things that are creating friction for you in your life. And then the results will last. So it's not about perfection, it's not about willpower, it's about understanding our environment and tailoring and creating something for you, therefore, that will mean that sticking to your calorie deficit and and those basic exercise, you know, coming back to the basic two nutrition and exercise, it's making those work. And that's what I do with my clients. So if you are interested in unpacking all of that lifestyle stuff with me, there is information in the show notes. And that is everything for today, guys. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate the podcast. Please share it with a friend. Please share this with somebody that you think might get something out of it. It helps me, it helps you, it helps them. But for now, that is everything, and I will see you again next week.