If you’re trying really hard to diet but not lose weight, it’s almost impossible to stay motivated. Our calorie-intensive society is the reason this can happen, making traditional diets increasingly ineffective. The availability of so many foods with extreme calorie levels creates misconceptions about what it takes to lose weight and stay slim.
Easy to win, hard to lose. It’s easy to gain weight, but losing it can take ten times longer. For example, on a long Christmas weekend, you decide that you will eat whatever you want with the promise that you will be serious about dieting when the New Year begins. Let’s do the math:
• Long weekend: 4 days multiplied by 5,000 calories per day with the promise of “Dieting after the holidays” = 20,000 calories.
• Daily energy expenditure = 80 average calories per hour for 24 hours = 1,920 calories per day. 1,920 calories per day for 4 days = 7,680 calories burned.
• 20,000 – 7680 = 12,320 calories over what you have burned, divided by 3,500 calories per pound = 3.52 pounds gained in 4 days.
To burn the extra 12,320 calories, you need to eat at least 500 fewer calories per day than you burn. Burning 500 calories a day more than you eat should be the minimum goal, otherwise losing weight can take a long time. Of course, you’ll lose weight faster if you can burn, say, 1,000 more calories per day than you eat, but for this discussion we’ll set the rate to 500.
At this rate, it will take 24.64 days of dieting just to get back to your “pre-4-day meal break” event. And this assuming you only “ate whatever you wanted” for only four days. Many people eat what they want for a period of ten days around Christmas time. The math about that amount of extra calorie intake can result in months of necessary dieting.
This framework is important to understand because to lose weight and stay lean, you will need to learn to navigate every day where you must eat at least 500 fewer calories than you burn. Now that you know the reality of weight gain, what can you do to have a plan where you are burning 500 more calories than you are eating?
There are many strategies for doing this, discussed in dozens (hundreds) of books from popular online bookstores. One strategy is to prepare all your food ahead of time using 95% or more single-ingredient whole foods, and have all foods cooked with you at all times. This strategy can greatly eliminate the need for willpower.
There are only two ways to carry food with you all the time:
• cook all your food yourself the day before, – or –
• Join a diet program where your food is suggested and / or prepared.
You’ll find great motivation to stick with your diet when you prepare all the foods you will need to eat throughout the next day the night before. This technique alone can make your diet successful! If you can find a way to prepare the right foods ahead of time and have them with you always, you will lose all the weight you want and keep it off.