That’s the advice that fitness pros give to people who have never given more thought to what they eat than whether Mountain Dew and Doritos are on super-saver discount this week.
“Just eat in a calorie deficit! It’s simple!”
Simple when you have self-awareness about what goes in your mouth. Simple when you know how to put together a meal based on quality protein with decent carbs and fats. Simple when you’ve learned the basic skills to plan ahead and buy what you need to eat for the week.
That simple 500-calorie deficit breaks down into a whole lot of assumptions about people’s beliefs and behaviors and abilities that do not survive observation.
A calorie deficit is necessary. But if you don’t know HOW to eat in order to get into an energy deficit, or how to do it in a way that is sustainable over time, this advice falls into the True But Worthless bucket.
If somebody is constantly over-eating, it isn’t because they’ve planned a calorie surplus.
Most people who “need to lose some weight” are not gaining weight at all, or they’re putting it on very slowly over many years on account of natural decline.
They eat on autopilot without giving a sideways glance at the awful nutrient-free junk going in their mouths.
Folks have to be taught how to eat, and how to prepare what they eat.
Even when a diet brings in new, positive behaviors and that person shifts out of junk-food haze, changes on the scale and in the mirror can happen fast.
But those behaviors don’t always stick.
So much dieting is built around short-term extremism.
Water fasting with kale. Demonize meat and eat veggies. Demonize plants and eat only meat. That kind of dogmatic crap you find on social media. Anyone that comes out as a hard-liner about One Right (or Wrong) Food is someone I safely ignore. Evangelists and fanatics never have anything interesting to say.
None of this is hard. Nutrition is a solved problem, no matter how many geeks armed with terrible research papers try to convince you otherwise.
Get your protein target.
Stay within your calorie ceiling.
If you did nothing else but hit those targets, building the daily habits necessary to get there, you’d be ahead of 99% of the population.
It ain’t rocket surgery.
Trouble is, you’re being pushed to give your attention to all the wrong things.
Focus on all this information you must know.
Forget about changing your daily habits of behavior.
Small wonder people get big and unhealthy and stay there for decades, even after “trying everything”.
Changing behaviors is key to everything I do. The smaller the change, the better.
If you’ve gotten stuck somewhere, you don’t need to read more or learn more or scroll more junk on social media.
You need to look at what you’re doing and WHY you’re doing it.
The body you want, or don’t want, begins right there.
That’s what I do and that’s how I help my people get into fantastic condition.
If you’d like help with that, you’ll need to be a regular email-reader of mine for access to new spaces.
Matt Perryman