Yo-Yo Dieting – Think About What Didn’t Work!

We have all seen or been examples of someone who is a yo-yo dieter. They go on a diet with some success. They lose weight. Then they regain the weight and even in some cases become heavier than they were before they started dieting. There are a number of reasons for this:

• Diet in itself is usually a short-term commitment rather than a lifestyle change. As soon as the diet ends it is unreasonable to assume you will maintain the results.
• Drastic decreases in calorie intake. People reduce their daily caloric intake by too much. By a drastic decrease in calories, it is likely that you will lose weight quickly but you don’t give yourself anywhere to go. Results plateau and the only way to get things moving is another decrease in calories. This creates an unhealthy cycle that is not sustainable. Quite often large weight loss incurs a large amount of lean tissue loss too. Bye, bye to all your hard gym work.
• Reduced Resting Metabolic Rate(RMR) – Your resting metabolic rate is the amount of calories burned to keep your normal bodily functions going. It accounts for 60-75% of your total daily energy expenditure (calories burned). When you lose weight quickly this usually means losing some fat, water and lean tissue such as muscle. Losing muscle will decrease your RMR, so not only have you cut calories to get a calorie deficit but now your RMR is lower meaning you’ll have to stay at this low intake just to maintain weight.
• Focusing on what worked – At a recent seminar in Belfast a nutrition coach pointed out that people tend to go back to what worked for them without thinking about where it might have failed.  For example, someone loses 6lbs on a diet, then weight loss plateaus, then weight gain begins again. Instead of thinking that the diet was flawed because it wasn’t sustainable long-term, they go back to a short stint at that diet, lose some weight, plateau and then begin the cycle again.

I think most people have some experience of Yo-yo dieting and the unfortunate thing is that there are a lot of trainers, coaches and overnight pyramid selling nutritionists that rather than address and help people with this, they exploit it for money. Again people get great results short-term but if you were to go back after a year and measure this persons body composition, more often than not they’ll have rebounded to their starting point or perhaps gained more fat.

All trainers, nutritionists, lifestyles coaches etc should have your long-term health in mind. This isn’t just body composition, but dental health, digestive health, cholesterol, blood pressure etc. It is possible to get results quickly and maintain them but most products/transformations I see being sold are huge calorie deficits for quick weight loss, with no thought of preservation of lean muscle mass.

Without ranting any further I want to provide you with my main guidelines on 1. losing body fat and minimising the loss of muscle mass and 2. gaining muscle mass and minimising the amount of body fat gained.

1. Focus on what didn’t work – if a diet got you results and then stalled. Don’t go back to step 1 and begin again. Think about why it didn’t work. Find a more sustainable solution that is more of a lifestyle change.  Speak to a coach who can show you long-term results rather than 9 day, 4 week or 12 week results.
2. Aim to increase/ preserve lean muscle mass – If you don’t use it, you lose it. Don’t get caught up doing endless cardio to try to burn calories. The amount of calories you burn whilst training accounts for quite a low percentage of your total calorie expenditure. Instead aim to preserve/increase lean muscle mass by following a progressive resistance training program. Squats, deadlifts, presses, rows, weighted carries, sprints and jumps will form a great program. This will in turn increase your RMR which accounts for 60% of your total calories burned. 
3. Calculate your RMR. – RMR Calculator . Once you have your RMR only cut your calorie intake at first by no more than 10% for fat loss. If you are losing more than 2lb per week you will need to add some calories back in. For muscle gain, increase calorie intake by 10% or RMR. You will need to track and reassess this every few weeks.
4. Tracking – Download myfitness pal. Enter your new calorie intake goal that you have just worked out. Enter everything you eat and drink to track how close you are to hitting this goal each day. Don’t just guess.
5. Follow these guidelines:
   1. Protein source with every meal
   2. Drink water
   3. Vegetable and/or fruit with every meal
   4. Get 80% of your food from whole, 1 ingredient foods.
   5. Allow some of your calories to eat the foods you enjoy – e.g. if you want ice cream on Saturday allow yourself a reasonable amount but work this into your weekly calorie intake.
   6. Supplement when necessary – Don’t live on supplements but use them to hit targets if you can’t do this from food alone.