Inconvenient Truths About Fat Loss

by Tom Venuto from the Burn The Fat E-Zine 

Fat loss can be frustrating at times. You lose fat more slowly than you think you should, your progress stalls completely, it feels like your metabolism is broken, you do cardio but it doesn’t help, or life gets in the way. Some things that interfere with your fat loss efforts are out of your control. In many cases, the frustration is self-inflicted because you don’t yet understand or are not yet willing to admit the truth about how fat loss and human bodies work.

Sometimes the facts are unpleasant. There are truths you may not want to hear, but they’re things you need to hear. As Carl Sagan once said, “Better the hard truth than a comforting fantasy.” When you learn the truth about fat loss, and accept it, you still might not be happy about it, but its only then that real change starts to happen.
In this post, you’ll learn some of the most inconvenient fat loss truths. If you understand, accept, and respond to these in the right way, you will break through any past barriers and forge on to the lean body you want.

1. Too much healthy food can lead to weight gain: Fat loss happens when you achieve a calorie deficit. Yet not all diets ask you to count calories. Some diets are based on the premise that all you have to do to lose weight is to eat certain foods – namely the unprocessed, nutrient-dense foods, and avoid others – the processed, nutrient-sparse foods.

Guidelines urging you to eat unprocessed foods are well-intentioned on two levels. One is because less processed foods make you healthier. The other is because processed foods are usually more calorie-dense and hyper-palatable, so focusing on eating healthier foods usually does help you control calories, and that helps with fat loss.

However, there are always many frustrated dieters screaming, “I’m eating healthy, but not losing any weight!” Why does this happen?  Because you’re eating too much healthy food! Healthy foods are not calorie-free. Too much of anything, even healthy foods, will get stored as fat.You don’t get an unlimited all-you-can-eat pass. Ever.

For some reason, this fact does not register in the brains of many health food eaters.
Many foods with a reputation for being healthy, especially fats like avocado, natural peanut butter and olive oil, are incredibly calorie dense and easily overeaten into surplus levels. Making it worse, the popularity of keto-type diets has normalized eating more fat, including things like coconut oil, which is perceived by some people as healthy but adds hundreds of extra calories to their diets in a snap. 

The truth is, eating healthy foods doesn’t get you lean. Eating healthy foods gets you healthy. A sustained calorie deficit gets you lean.

2. You eat more calories than you think: Almost everyone eats more than they think. Why? Because almost all of us are bad at estimating how many calories are in our food. It’s very difficult to eyeball a food portion and correctly guess the calories (darn near impossible in restaurants). The only sure-fire solution to underestimating calorie intake is to weigh and measure food and track the calories and macros (protein, carbs, and fats).

In a NEJM (New England Journal of Medicine) study which found that so-called “diet resistant” people did not have slow metabolisms, they also discovered the real cause for the lack of weight loss: The subjects underestimated their calorie intake by 47%! That’s not a minor mistake – that’s a massive “make you or break you” kind of mistake! The researchers said, “The failure of some obese subjects to lose weight while eating a diet they report as low in calories is due to an energy intake substantially higher than reported, not to an abnormality in thermogenesis.”

To be fair, we should acknowledge that there are some clinical explanations for short term diet resistance. For example, undiagnosed and untreated thyroid disease could cause difficulty with losing weight. Certain medications can stimulate appetite or decrease calorie burning. And there are a handful of medical conditions that can hinder fat loss efforts.

In this study however, people with these issues were excluded, so these exceptions were ruled out. Lack of weight loss wasn’t caused by slow metabolism, thyroid problems, or medication, it was caused by eating too much food.

It’s important to know that we’re not saying frustrated dieters are dishonest about how much they eat. They’re simply not aware that they eat so much because it’s so hard to guess the calories in meals, and so easy to lose track over time.

3. You burn less calories than you think you do: The overestimation of calories burned is just as alarming as the underestimation of calories eaten. In the NEJM study, the subjects not only under-estimated their food intake by 47%, they over-estimated how many calories they burned by 51%! Think for a minute about the impact of both put together.

In a different study, researchers from York University in Toronto had a group of test subjects exercise on a treadmill for 25 minutes at either a moderate or intense level. After the exercise, they were asked to estimate the number of calories they burned and create a meal containing that many calories.

This study was also cleverly designed in the way they used different groups, including some individuals who were not trying to lose weight. There were four types of participants in the study:
1. Normal weight
2. Overweight
3. Trying to lose weight
4. Not trying to lose weight

Every subject did a poor job trying to estimate calories burned, with one group (overweight, not trying to lose weight), doing a terrible job: They overestimated their calories burned by 72%!

The subjects who were trying to lose weight did better, but still failed to accurately estimate their calories burned and eaten. In all the participants from all four groups, there was a range of calories burned estimation error between 280 and 702 calories per day.

4. One weekend of overeating can cancel out a whole week of dieting and training: Most people believe the cliché, “You can’t out-train a lousy diet” is more or less true. At the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, a study was designed to find out whether a “lousy diet” on weekends specifically, was causing weight loss failure.
Prior to this study, the best evidence for weekend eating causing fat loss plateaus or weight gain, came from the National Weight control Registry (NWCR). NWCR research had found an association between lower weekday to weekend diet consistency with weight loss relapse.

People who maintained the same eating patterns on weekends as weekdays were more likely to maintain their weight during the subsequent year. The newer study was a randomized controlled trial with a large sample size, and it ran for a whole year. It measured compliance to diet and exercise during the week as compared to the weekend, as well as changes in body weight during the week as compared to the weekend.

Over the entire 52 weeks, what they discovered was that both test groups – a calorie restricted group and an exercise group – successfully adhered to their calorie deficit on the weekdays. On the weekends, however, calorie restricted participants stopped losing weight and exercise participants actually gained weight.

The study was the first controlled trial to confirm what the NWCR had reported observationally and what we always suspected: weight gain does happen on the weekends more than the weekdays and it’s because of increased calorie intake on the weekends. Things go awry because most people have different eating schedules, patterns or habits on the weekends than on weekdays.

Calorie intake was highest on Saturdays – about 236 calories more than on weekdays, mostly from fatty foods. A couple hundred calories more on Saturday doesn’t seem like much, and of course it’s possible to eat more on some days than others and still have a weekly deficit.

But the excess calories most people eat on weekends are not a part of deliberate, controlled refeeds, built into a weekly plan to maintain an overall deficit. The weekend excess most people eat is overlooked and adds up over time.

Just this barely noticeable increase in weekend food intake could cause a weight gain of nearly 9 pounds if you didn’t catch it and let it go on unchecked all year long. Of course, some people indulge even more than others from Friday night through Sunday, so the fat gain could be even higher. Note that weekends come around 52 times a year.