How to “Fuel to Flourish”: Why You Aren’t Losing Weight on Your Fitness Regimen + Alternate Hunger Cues
You are a few weeks into a new workout routine and you’re about to check in with the scale.
You’re feeling pretty pleased with yourself (and rightly so!); you’ve been hitting the gym consistently several times a week, lifting weights, getting your cardio in, and experiencing the DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) that tells you you should be making progress. You’ve even reduced your calorie intake and been much stricter with your nutrition!
So, you are understandably perturbed to find that, when you step on the scale, you’ve not only not lost any weight; you may have even gained a pound or two! And now that you think about it, your clothes have been a little more snug, and you’ve also felt a bit puffy and bloated lately.
What is going on??? Conventional “health” and fitness doctrine tells you that eating less + moving more = weight-loss, and you’ve been doing everything right! It almost seems like the more strict you are with your diet and exercise, the less progress you make; if the traditional tenets of diet culture and calorie deficits are to be believed, this doesn’t track.
You might tell yourself you are just losing fat and replacing it with muscle (which is more dense gram-for-gram). And, if you had been on this workout regimen for a few months versus just a few weeks, this would be a very real possibility. Unfortunately, body re-composition (the process by which your body fat percentage decreases and your skeletal muscle increases) simply does not happen that quickly.
What is more likely happening is that your body is retaining water and experiencing inflammation, which are the fundamental processes by which tissue heals itself. If it occurs to you that you feel extra bloated after ab day, for instance, you are not imagining things; your body is mobilizing its lymphatic and fluid resources to your abdomen to help repair the muscle tissue that you’ve broken down during your workout (this does not happen to everyone; certain genetically-blessed individuals – and often men – may see the results of their ab work more immediately after training).
The important thing is that you do not get discouraged; your hard work is paying off, even if you aren’t seeing the results just yet. It takes time for the body to adapt and to release its excess fluid, and for your muscles to look more “toned”. Stick with it, and over time you will experience all of the benefits of a quality exercise routine, many of which (such as increased energy, a more efficient immune system, balanced hormones, etc.) go beyond aesthetics, even if that is your main motivator.
The other common reason your body might not be releasing weight is because you aren’t fueling it properly. Contrary to popular belief, by eating less (than you normally would) and moving more (than you normally do), you are sending signals to your body that tell it to conserve and store energy in the form of fat and calories.
Our bodies are remarkably intelligent and efficient survival machines. The only reason our species is still walking the earth after several millennia of famine, drought, migrations, climate fluctuation, and other hardships, is because our bodies are built to adapt to changes in our environment; evolutionarily speaking, when our bodies experience less food intake (energy input) and greater energy output in the form of movement, it can trigger biological processes that result in more efficient energy conservation in the form of fat storage.
So is there no hope? Is this all to say that eating less and moving more will only take us farther away from our goals, and we might as well not even try?
No.
We just have to make sure we are eating enough to fuel our workouts and to support the biological processes (such as hormonal and blood sugar balance, tissue repair, and detoxification) that need to take place if we want to lose weight in a healthy way.
What is “enough”?
The minimum recommended calorie intake will vary from person to person, and there are plenty of online calculators that can help you determine your basal metabolic rate (or, to put it simply, the number of calories you burn just by existing) and then factor in your activity level to give you your total estimated caloric burn.
The important thing is that you don’t go into too much of a deficit (if you know roughly how many calories you burn in a day, you probably don’t want to eat any less than a couple hundred calories below this) and that you are consuming a balance of the right nutrients to support your body’s processes, like high-quality protein, healthy fats, complex carbohydrates, and vitamins and minerals.
A healthy rate of weight loss for most people is about 1-2 pounds per week (not per day), despite what you may have seen on some extreme and exploitive reality shows. Any more than this, and you run the risk of metabolic damage and consequent fat storage, or even more serious implications, like injuries. And for women in their childbearing years especially, there is a real risk with extreme dieting and/or overexercising of amenorrhea (or the loss of your menstrual cycle) and decreased bone density.
But without over-complicating things with math or fancy terms like “Basal Metabolic Rate”, there are plenty of ways to know, if you are in tune with your body, whether or not you are eating enough; physical hunger does not always present as a growling stomach. Some other indicators that are important to pay attention to, if you want to honor your hunger cues and support your body as much as possible, can include low energy, trouble concentrating, shakiness, or headaches. And God forbid you go a prolonged period of time without properly nourishing your body, you may experience more serious symptoms like chronic fatigue, joint pain or increased rate of injury, mood swings, insomnia, or blood sugar and/or hormone dis-regulation.
Many people are surprised by how much faster they reach their goals (and how much more they enjoy the process) when they give their body the support that it needs. Food is not something to be feared. Food is fuel.
And remember, you’ve got to fuel to flourish.