When it comes to assessing weight loss, there are two main camps when it comes to how to assess progress. Some people live and die with the number on the scale, and some people say “screw the scale”. Here at Strive Fitness and Performance we are in the middle when it comes to assessments. On one hand, we help the majority of our clients change their mindset away from just using the scale to determine everything. On the other hand, we also use the scale as one of our many assessments.
Over the last couple of months, I realized that people only depend on the scale because that is the easiest to assess and that is what the majority of the media showcase as progress. Some people pair that up with dropping pant sizes which is a better indicator of progress. Most people, however, miss out on a huge way of assessing whether or not they are making progress. Most people don’t take into account how healthy their bodies are….And to be honest, if your body is not in a good place, you will certainly not get the desired results you are looking.
Do any of these sound familiar?
Majority of these people have gotten great results one way or another….Some are even eating clean and can’t seem to understand why their results have stopped.
To be fair, rarely is this the fault of the individual coming to me for help.
Take a moment and open another browser. Google “fat loss diet” and see how many ridiculous $10 eBooks are out there telling you that they can guarantee your results in 8 weeks.
Seriously!?
The madness needs to stop. It is in large part why YOU, the person reading this blog, are stuck.
My goal is to help you understand your body a bit better – and hopefully how to make small adjustments using biofeedback first, and assessing weight loss second.
This approach is counter-culture to what is currently popularized by most articles which will recommend that you only make changes based on the scale.
But screw the scale, that thing will you drive crazy! You can read HERE why the scale fluctuates throughout the week and throughout the day
Let’s get into REAL results, SUSTAINABLE results – RESULTS that you can feel good about!
Biofeedback Marker #1 – Hunger
One of the first questions I ask my clients each week is how they feel….let’s call it the conversation starter
This is quickly followed by questions about hunger.
Let’s be very clear on something – hunger is inevitable in any dietary process. You are eating less calories than before….And hunger is the bodies response.
In fact, losing hunger is one of the SINGLE WORST THINGS you can observe in a dietary process.
You see, hunger is very strongly correlated with a metabolic response. Whether you are looking to lose weight, gain weight, recomp, or simply perform better – you should always be operating with a small degree of hunger.
Please note the use of words there – “small degree of hunger” – this is not an excuse for the BS starvation diets out there that want to rely on the fact that the hunger response is a good thing….that’s just nonsense.
So the question begs – are you HUNGRY? And how has hunger changed since your last assessment?
Let’s start with hunger by itself. If you aren’t hungry then we likely need to fix that. There are a few exceptions (early stages of a keto based diet, early stages of a long term fat loss diet), but for most we would like to create a mild hunger response.
In absence of a hunger response, first look at caloric intake and you will notice one of two things:
1 – calories are too high
2 – calories are dangerously too low
Seems odd that both ends of the spectrum can cause this, huh? I hear ya….
Let’s start with number 1, calories being too high. The fix here is simple, decrease calories (yes, that’s why they pay me the big bucks.) Typically I recommend dropping anywhere from 10-20% of total calorie intake, depending on the current surplus.
Unfortunately, scenario number 1 is rare, and scenario number 2 is all too common – people simply aren’t eating enough. (surprising right)
I’m not sure if this is from fear of food (and potential fat gain), or just simply lack of education – but it is absolutely the current trend.
The fix here is simple, but not easy to implement. First and foremost – more calories are needed – that’s clearly not rocket science, but it needs to be stated.
The real magic is in HOW we increase those calories, which can be done in one of two ways:
1 – increase daily caloric intake by 10-20%. This is the reverse of what we did in scenario number 1, and is very favorable for most people not eating enough. The depth of the current caloric deficit along with a current assessment of other metabolic factors is what will determine the degree of caloric increase.
2 – a strategic, periodic overfeed (refeed). This involves intentionally overfeeding on certain days (at given intervals) to help restore metabolic function while in a caloric deficit. This is usually part of a well controlled plan rather than going nuts one day and calling it a "cheat day".
As with most things diet related – creating a current assessment is key. Take a look at how many calories you’re consuming, and what your TDEE (total daily energy expenditure) is. If the gap seems extreme and you aren’t hungry – it’s probably time to start increasing calories.
Additionally, if you have been hungry in your journey and suddenly lost that hunger response, it is likely time to eat more for a few days (refeed).
Biofeedback Marker #2 – Sleep
Sleep may be the single most important factor to recovery that exists. I don’t care how good your training program is and how detailed you are with your nutrition, if you aren’t sleeping then you aren’t recovering!
But the intent of this is not to tell you to sleep, but rather to look at sleep as a biofeedback indicator.
So the question used in assessment is simple: “How has sleep quality changed?”
Are you someone that normally sleeps well and suddenly can’t?
If so, that is likely a sign of under recovery.
But how do we fix it?
There are 2 ways:
1 – Increase direct recovery protocols (food intake)
2 – decrease direct stressors (training volume/intensity)....Yes, You may have to tone down the amount of workouts (especially cardio)
As is usual, the real solution is usually a combination of both.
Start to pay attention to how your body reacts to what you do to it…It will tell you if it is happy. When you have a poor night’s sleep – note what the workout was that day and what other stressors were present that day. See if similar workouts become problematic moving forward, and if so then it’s clearly time to implement additional nutritional recovery on those days (post workout carbs).
Once again, knowing yourself, your periodization, your goals, and having a consistent assessment of what is going on is ESSENTIAL to making the right adjustments from biofeedback.
Truthfully this article could go on for days in reference to Bio Feed Back Markers but I will conclude with the hope that you understand assessment is far more than the number on the scale.
Real change happens from the inside out, and real coaching is about far more than physical changes.
How are you approaching your nutrition?
Around the New Year, The masses start to make "New Year Resolutions" and begin to think about how they can make the next year better. One of the most common "New Year Resolutions" is to get healthy and this leads to a large surplus of people joining gyms. While these new go-getters are certainly well-intentioned, sadly for the majority, the motivation doesn’t last. Quora.com reports that 80% of resolution gym goers will stop attending by the second week of February.
There are lots of reasons, and many of them are specific to the individual, but one overarching reason is that for most people, a gym is simply a place to work out, and that isn’t enough to entice most to make it a regular part of life. People join gyms and become a number and are not provided with direction or even acceptance in some cases. If you stop showing up, no one else notices or cares; and soon, your yourself stop caring, because the space adds no value to your life. After a few weeks, once the fire of the new years resolution fizzles out and the desired results have yet to show up, it’s difficult to drag your butt out of bed at the crack of dawn (or before) to go to a place where you are alone, physically uncomfortable, and nameless to the other bodies sweating next to you.
Here are four reasons why it’s important and in your best interest to join a gym – or enroll your kids in a gym – that is more than just a gym.
1. A gym that is more than a gym helps you train to become better, not just workout…
…and yes, there is a difference, both between working out and training, and a gym and a training center. Any local gym will be a decent fit if you are the type of person that enjoys exercise in itself – the discomfort and the exertion wrapped up into one 60-minute sweat fest. Some people think exercise is fun, and this direct pay-off is sufficient to propel them to create their own discipline and accountability. But for most of us mere mortals, the individual sweat sessions are just not enticing enough. And if you are just hitting the gym with no direction or the latest Pinterest workout in hand, the sessions start to seem disconnected and purposeless, making you question if the discomfort is really worth your time.
That’s why it’s important to join a gym that is, specifically, a training center. Meaning that the institution has a mission statement that hinges on coaches who come alongside you to help you focus and adapt your sessions toward a clearly defined goal.
is the key idea here. We would all laugh if, while we were driving, we saw a man in a field throwing darts in different directions, aiming at nothing. Throwing darts only becomes meaningful and recognizable as a sane activity when there’s a target involved. This illustrates the distinction between working out and training. It’s easy to quit showing up if you’re not sure where you’re aiming. Working out is simply a task; training is a goal-oriented process, spilling over and reaping its benefits into other areas of life.
A great coach helps you identify and define that target, articulate WHY it’s important in your life, and then works with you to create a path for your journey and helps you form tactics to adjust when hardships come about. A training center operates daily with the purpose of helping its clients embrace an improved quality of life, whereas a gym simply exists to make money. In short, a training center cares about YOU, while a gym may not.
2. Such a gym can become a second home
A gym that is a second home is composed of staff and members who create community by fostering and maintaining meaningful relationships. If you join any local gym, chances are, you’ll see the same people a few days per week...You may say hi or introduce yourself....but you’ll never actually get to know them and connect. It is no more to you than space with weights and faces that have no significance.
As a coach on the floor at 5:30 every morning, I relish the opportunity to be the first positive interaction in a client’s day. As Strive coaches, we focus our efforts on staying in tune with every important aspect of our clients’ lives – family events, work changes, surgeries, and victories both inside and outside of the gym.
At most gyms, you’ll walk in and out of the door without anyone acknowledging your presence. Make sure you find a gym that can also be a second home.
3. Community creates accountability
Belonging to a gym that feels like home entices you to make training a habit. Community fosters accountability. Period. When you know you will be missed, you are more likely to go. You are far less likely to skip when you know a coach will be calling or emailing you, checking up to make sure everything is okay if you don’t show up.
Here at Strive Fitness and Performance, your coaches are just as serious about your goals and training as you are. They are consistently positive and relentlessly demanding, and they, along with the clients who have become your friends, will remind you of what you really want even when you don’t feel it. They’ll help you maintain focus when your own vision of your target gets blurred by other life stresses or periods of low motivation.
The truth is, we aren’t wired to be our best on our own. We need accountability where discipline wanes. Join a gym that fills that need.
4. Enrolling your children in such a training center provides them with positive role models
If you want your child to become a more well-rounded athlete, seek out a training center with coaches who are positive role models. Sending your kid to the gym might make them stronger and better at their sport, but being regularly under the guidance of coaches who are relentlessly positive, demanding, as well as caring, will reap a much vaster benefit. Kids adopt the habits and mannerisms of people they look up to, so placing them under the guidance of coaches who are excellent role models is a move that has the power to transform the way they think, see, and conduct themselves on and off the field.
For parents with young girls especially, it’s a great moment when your fourteen year-old daughter comes home from her training session and says, “Mom, I want to be STRONG,” instead of “Mom, how can I look like a Victoria’s Secret model?” Entrusting your female athlete to the care of coaches who emphasize the importance of feeling strong instead of being skinny – both through their coaching and their own habits – has the power to reverse the damaging societal norms associated with female body image.
If you want your child to get stronger, buy them a gym membership. If you want your athlete to become stronger, more inspired, increasingly confident, and a better teammate, entrust them to a training center with coaches who are positive role models.
Contact us Today and set up your FREE Success Session
Committed to your success,
Derek Ledwidge
Weight loss is hard!! Not only are you trying to accomplish something that is not your normal...Often times life gets in the way.
When our clients here at Strive Fitness and Performance become insanely busy, it can be tough to focus on your goals in a healthy, sustainable way, let alone work towards them at all. It’s easy to fall into pitfalls. Here are some helpful tips that you can avoid as you start your weight loss journey.
1. FOCUSING ON WHAT YOU CAN’T EAT
So many people embarking on a weight loss journey focus on what they can’t have. Examples are things like no sugar, no alcohol, no dessert, no bread, no cheese. They restrict everything that they usually have...This often causes the relapse after a couple of days or weeks as they start to crave those foods.
Instead, people should not necessarily worry about eliminating the bad foods, but adding some healthy foods. As you add healthy foods, you will start to eat less of the bad foods.
2. ADOPTING AN ALL-OR-NOTHING ATTITUDE
The all-or-nothing attitude is very similar to the above tip. Too many people who are trying to lose weight develop the all-or-nothing attitude. This way of thinking can be detrimental in the long run. Instead of depriving oneself of foods they love, they should learn how to incorporate them into their diet in a healthier way. For example, love pasta? Instead of adding a creamy high fat sauce, add lots of veggies, grilled shrimp, and toss in olive oil and garlic. Can’t live without bread? Well, you shouldn’t have to. Make a healthy sandwich for lunch on 100 percent whole grain bread with grilled chicken, avocado, lettuce, and tomato.
3. EATING TOO FEW CALORIES
The biggest pitfall I constantly see my clients falling into is the calorie counting trap. Many women come to me struggling to follow a 1,200 calorie per day diet and ask me what would help them to feel more full during the day. My answer is always to eat more! We live in a culture that is so obsessed with calorie counting that oftentimes we are depriving our body of the very nutrients that will actually help us not only to live healthier, but lose more weight.
4. TAKING THE WEEKENDS OFF FROM HEALTHY EATING
You should take the weekends off from your job, not your diet. Sure, you can still have fun and go out to eat on the weekends, but make an effort not to stuff yourself to the brim with food or drink. Getting away from the healthy habits of the week and going the exact opposite way can be very disastrous. A simple weekend day can easily amount to 5,000 calories (beer, pizza, wings etc.).
Simply eating mindfully when you are enjoying good food can be enough to not wreck your hard work during the week. If the weekends are a problem for you, consider eliminating one of the party days
5. Not Having A Plan
Not having a solid, realistic plan is a huge mistake. People should set themselves up for failure by going all in and not having a set plan of action....They just know that they want change. Start off with a few actionable and specific goals for the first week. Once you master those, keep adding on. Before you know it, those action steps will become lifelong healthy habits.
If you need help with organizing your plan feel free to contact us here at Strive Fitness and Performance and we can go over your nutritional breakdown
Isn't it interesting how obsessed we get with losing weight?
Seriously, a LOT of people will start their day happy or sad based entirely on the 3-digit number they see flashing back at them each morning.
But what's even more interesting than our obsession with losing weight is the fact that "weight loss" isn't always the most useful marker of progress. You see, there are a buttload of things that influence your daily & weekly body weight....
🍕 A higher/lower salt intake than normal
😷 Food intolerance's
🙋 Where you are at on your cycle
💦 Hydration levels
💩 You need to good to the bathroom
🍔 Food still in your body
💉 Hormones
💊 Supplements
💪 DOMS from your heavy workout
You know what you don't see on that list? FAT LOSS
Reason being, fat loss doesn't happen over the course of a day or even a week (well, it does "technically", but not in a very noticeable or meaningful way.) Instead, fat loss happens over the course of multiple weeks and months.
So really, it is just a matter of understanding that weight loss and fat loss are not synonymous. Once you realize that, you can start taking steps that will put the power of the scale back in YOUR hands.
✅One way is by taking measurements:
Soooo many things influence your scale weight, which makes it difficult to know if you are making progress. But if you are losing inches, even at the same weight, it is a good sign you are losing fat!
✅ Another tip is to start analyzing your AVERAGE weight over the course of weeks and months.
The bottom line: Don't let your daily and weekly fluctuations in body weight discourage you. Instead focus on fat loss by tracking your measurements, weight averages and progress pictures
Losing weight is hard. We focus solely on the number on our scale (mostly because it is fast an easy to do). That number goes up, it goes down and so does our sanity.
Losing weight it involves spending time at the gym, stopping yourself from eating your favorite foods, and saying “no” to things that make you happy in general and “yes” to things that don’t.
If you’re like most people, you want to see results that justify your hard work. And that result, more often than not, has to do with seeing that number on the scale go steadily down. So you weigh yourself. Even though you know you shouldn’t, you weigh yourself every day because you need a reason to keep going.
Everything is fine, until the unthinkable happens: the scale stops going down. Or, after one “cheat day” you find yourself 8 pounds heavier and you think, “Oh no! Everything I’ve done for the past 2 weeks is for nothing!” Repeat this a few times and before you know it, you’ve given up on working out and you’ve dumped your diet and are back to squat one.
The truth is you were probable doing a great job. You were just overly focused on the wrong indicators. Wanting to lose weight is a great goal, but the scale is just a number. It tells us how much you weigh (water, fat, muscle, bones etc.) not how much fat you have in your body.
Here are some reasons why you should not depend on the scale.
First and foremost…
It’s a safe bet to assume that when people want to lose weight, what they really mean is that they want to lose fat. The problem is, many people use the words “weight loss” and “fat loss” interchangeably, which are two separate concepts.
Losing Weight is not hard– you’ll drop a few pounds if you sit in a sauna for a while. Fat loss is harder to achieve, depends on several factors, and it takes more time than you think to truly lose it. Here are a couple key points about fat loss to consider:
Muscle and water are two other components that make up your weight, and when you lose weight, you can lose some of each. How much of each you lose depends in part on how much fat you have to lose when you start. Overweight people have more to lose than thin people, and will be able to lose weight faster as well.
Many people set fat loss goals for themselves that are unreasonable (see any challenge/product that will get you to lose 30 lbs in 6 weeks). The truth is, without going on an unhealthy near-starvation diet, you can only expect to lose 1-2 pounds of fat per week at best. If you are unsure about whether you are losing weight or fat, contact us for a FREE INBODY ASSESSMENT SCAN
Don’t expect to lose 10 pounds in a week, because even if you do, that weight is not going to be all fat. Losing muscle is not good for your health, and you will want to preserve it as much as you can.
2. You’re retaining water due to your salt intake
Salt (or more accurately, sodium) is everywhere and extremely hard to avoid. It might not surprise you that a single patty cheeseburger contains over 500 mg of sodium (nearly a quarter of the daily recommended levels).
Sodium is linked with water retention, and it is the job of your kidneys to expel unneeded sodium out of your body. Until your kidneys are able to do that, you will temporarily be holding onto extra water.
So, if you were on a diet but flooded your body with more salt than you normally have, you can expect to see a temporary increase in weight. It doesn’t mean that all your hard work is for nothing; it just means that you’re experiencing additional water weight because of the extra sodium in your body.
However, there are other factors other than diet that can lead to fluctuating weight on the scale, including…
3. Your muscle gains are outweighing your fat loss
If you’re lifting weights as part of your strategy to burn fat and lose weight, you’re doing something right! Adding resistance training to your fat/weight loss plan is a great way to protect and preserve muscle loss as you subtract fat from your frame. This is why we focus on changing the body fat % of clients, so we focus on not only losing fat, but also focus on getting our clients stronger.
However, if you’re new to weightlifting and you’re pushing yourself hard, you’re going to see some things on the scale that may surprise you. Your weight might actually not go down; it might go up! Why?
This is because as you are losing fat, you are replacing that weight with muscle. Your weight may not go down, but your body fat percentage will.
There are so many things that can affect your weight, so you should never get into the habit of weighing yourself every day. So if not that, what should you be doing?
As difficult as it sounds, if you are using just a scale to determine your progress, you have to take the averages from your measurements. This will help us determine trends in your weight and will help you go against going all out for some quick fix or to get to a certain number fast in order to win a competition.
Because your weight is made up of many different elements and can fluctuate for so many different reasons, assessing your weight by tracking your body composition is a much better way to determine how you’re meeting your goals.
Don't let your daily and weekly fluctuations in body weight discourage you. It is completely normal and it does NOT reflect fat loss programs. If you diet and exercise properly with enough patience and determination, you will reach your goals.
If you need help reaching your goals, contact us here at Strive Fitness and Performance and we can set up a consultation to figure out the right path for you.
Committed to your success,
Derek Ledwidge
