Sometimes I talk to my clients about how I used to weigh 45kg at school, got teased for it and called “Angierexic”, hated my skinny Mr Burns arms and the fact I couldn’t fill out a pair of levis…..

Point of the story is at my lightest weight, there were many things I didn’t like about my body, so a goal weight or being as skinny as possible is not always a great goal to be after.

For most women, it’s a case of we will find something to pick on ourselves over regardless of what we weigh….

I recently realised that I missed something really crucial about this story that is extremely relevant to my clients who are trying to lose weight as adults.  (Please note, I was not trying to be 45kg and used to WANT to weigh more, but didn’t know how…..)

I had a really “bad” diet.  I worked at KFC part time, and I took advantage of it.  Why shouldn’t I take home buckets of chicken/potato & gravy, and all the bread rolls that were going to get chucked out if they were going to put me on the dreaded close shift all the time 🙄

Still couldn’t gain weight.

Why?

Although I ate A LOT of KFC, and often bought the school canteen chicken burgers with my earnings……  I probably wasn’t eating as frequently, and therefore as much as I do these days being a more financial adult with more responsibilities and stresses to deal with, and a busier lifestyle.

If only I knew then what I know now. (Why weren’t we taught this in PE instead of the Food pyramid??)

If I’m brutally honest I was probably too lazy to eat properly/pack a decent lunch etc.  Also on reflection, some of that was around anxiousness associated with High School.

I. Walked. Everywhere.  My parents never gave me a lift in daylight hours.  I could cross town to school, work, home, my friends’ places multiple times some days.

No such thing as step counters then but my incidental activity was obviously through the roof.

Side note: skinny does NOT automatically equal FIT.

So clearly I can’t spend that much time walking, and I don’t particularly want to return to those poor eating habits as an adult…. so what is the answer?

If I can help people understand the one thing they need to know to succeed in their fat loss goal it’s that the first thing you need to focus on BEFORE you worry about food quality, the “right” kinds of food to eat etc is that if your energy expenditure does not match or exceed the energy (food) that goes in, you WILL gain body fat.  This could be over days, weeks, months or even years.  

Once you understand that, you can start to play around with macro splits, food selection for health and performance, nutrient timing, meal frequency, supplements etc etc.  These are the icing on the cake so to speak, but not the main event.

If you skip the foundations of fat loss, you’ll likely always struggle (unless you can stick to a particular method indefinitely, which is not common).

No it’s not as simple as eat as little as possible, I certainly don’t recommend that.  In fact, quite often, I’ve given clients MORE calories than they’ve been trying to diet on, and they finally started seeing some change.

I really hope this helps those of you who are ready to hear the TRUTH (not everyone is).  To be fair to the Diet industry (and in some cases medical/surgical fields) keeping people ignorant of these facts is in the interests of selling products and interventions at a profit.  #sorrynotsorry

With this in mind, can you draw some conclusions about your lifestyle in the past, vs your lifestyle now?

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