-I have a client who’s not averse to counting calories and using a food tracking app. Her weight during our check-ins had plateaued and when I asked to see her food log over a week’s time, every day was “technically” in a deficit. In other words, she “should” have been seeing progress. I asked if there were any areas of her diet that she could think of that maybe weren’t being tracked as diligently. She mentioned that she didn’t track the cream she put in her coffee, the granola she sprinkled on her yogurt, and the assorted drinks she bought when she was working. When I asked her if she could just track those items for a few days and see what the calories came out to, she discovered why the scale wasn’t moving. Long story short: the little details matter.

-I do everything I can to make fat loss easier for people. Much of this comes down to time and convenience. Not everyone wants to make a home cooked meal, either because of the time it takes to do so or because they have to navigate too many different tastes/preferences in the house. As result, many of my tips come down to saying: YES, you should try a meal delivery service, YES, you should try high protein TV dinners, YES, you should buy pre-made meals from the grocery store and warm them up, YES, you should use your crockpot more. Remember that the less brainpower you have to spend on what you’re going to eat the more you can use brainpower for more important things in life.

-If your doctor and your therapist are both telling you to put fat loss on the backburner temporarily, that’s a really great sign that you’re putting too much value on the size of your body and not enough value on what it’s costing your mental health.

-A fantastic (but not foolproof) tool for fat loss is asking yourself: How will I feel 20-30 minutes after I eat this? Asked differently: How will I feel tomorrow if I eat this today?

-If my accountant asks me how much money I’ve spent on things I don’t need, I will probably underestimate the number but she can check my bank account and see how much I’ve spent down to the penny. Fat loss doesn’t work that way. If the scale isn’t moving, we don’t know exactly what you’ve consumed, how much you’ve consumed, how much you metabolized, and how much you expended. The only way to do that is to put you into a metabolic ward. Piggybacking off the first tip in this post, pay attention to those little details and look for margins of error. Oh yeah, and don’t ever, ever, ever, ever put your exercise calories burned into your food app. Those numbers are wrong.

-I heard two people talking about how much sugar was in a type of cereal that kids typically eat. They conveniently ignored (or forgot) about the fact that the juice they also serve the child had more than double the amount of sugar. I think this type of thing happens more often than we give it credit for. Sugar, frequently demonized, isn’t the monster people think it is. Can a lot of people benefit by reducing it? Sure. Do people need to be maniacal about every single gram of it? No.

-A lot of diet plans work well because they find a way to restrict a significant portion of foods. Some might tell you to remove all highly-processed foods, others might tell you to remove all white starchy carbs, and another still might suggest that you remove potentially inflammatory foods. A diet I was recently reminded of was so strict that it requested (among other foods) to remove carrots. Yes, carrots. A medium carrot has 25 calories. If you’re struggling with fat loss, your problem is not carrots. And whoever approved that meal plan to be sent out to the masses may need to sit in a warm corner of hell.

-How you speak about your body speaks volumes about how you feed and train your body. If you speak about your body with disdain and disrespect, there’s a great chance how you nourish and train your body aligns with those feelings. This sentiment is common regardless of the size and shape of the person. So, if you do anything today (and hopefully every day thereafter), speak about your body with kindness. It may not look or perform exactly the way you want it to, but what you’re capable of doing with it is a marvel in and of itself. Treat it that way.

The next intake of my 8-week online group coaching program, Fat Loss Simplified, begins the first week of July. The regular price is $189/month for two months. If you join between now and June 30, you’ll get in at $159/month for two months. If you’re interested in joining, drop me a message below.

(Photo courtesy of Fumiaki Hayashi)