A Calorie Deficit Doesn't Work, Here's Why

Tell me if I'm wrong here. Everywhere you look on social media, you have all of these trainers talking about you need to eat in a calorie deficit. And then you ask them, okay, got it, but how do I do that? And then they tell you, just eat less and move more. And you're kind of just like, no shit, Sherlock. I know that. How do I actually end up doing that though? You see, it's not the principles of a calorie deficit that are wrong because the laws of thermodynamics can never be broken. For a very brief recap, here's how a calorie deficit works. Your body expends a certain amount of energy per day. This is called your total daily energy expenditure. Energy comes in the form of calories for us humans. So if you're burning X amount and you are eating Y amount below the amount of calories that you're burning per day, you're going to lose weight every single time. Doesn't matter who you are, doesn't matter where you are, doesn't matter how old you are, doesn't matter what diet you do. You could do keto, you could do fasting, you could do carnivore, you could You can do XYZ, you name it, because all of those diets just come back to you eating in a calorie deficit. So the science and principles of a calorie deficit, I'm not arguing with in this video. It's the implementation of a calorie deficit that I want to touch on because let's be honest, in this day and age, the information is not what's holding people back. Sure, there might be some shitty information out there, but all in all, even if there was no internet and no information, you know what you need to do. You need to move more. You need to eat less and eat healthier foods. It's not rocket science. So why the hell do so many people struggle to actually implement what they know they need to do? That's what this video is about, and we're going to talk about the 3 main reasons why. The first reason is from something I call the overwhelming outlook. When you start to think about what you need to do to eat less and move more and lose weight and get healthier, what are you thinking about? You're thinking about only eating clean foods from now on. You're thinking about having to do an extra hour or 2 of cardio 5, 6, 7 days a week. You're thinking about never going out to eat again, never drinking again, never having any of your favorite foods again, because now you have to eat healthy. When have you ever thought about, I'm gonna be healthier, so I'll take a 5-minute walk? Never. You think you have to be perfect with it, and you think you have to do this complete 180. So when you think about that outlook of it, it's very overwhelming to you, which then causes you to do one of 2 things. Either number one, You're like, fuck this, I'd rather be fat, I'm not doing that. Or number 2, maybe you do end up taking some action on it, but when you don't live up to that like perfect outlook on it that you thought you were supposed to do, you say you fucked up and you say, screw this, I quit. Does this sound familiar at all? So my first tip would be kill off the overwhelming outlook. Instead of thinking about you're gonna have to start going outside for an hour and finding an hour each day to go start walking, think about just taking a 5 or 10 minute walk around your block after you eat dinner Or when you're on your lunch break. Instead of thinking about going from eating out 3 times a week when you drink 3 to 4 drinks at a time to none at all, start thinking about maybe you go out to eat 2 times a week and then just have 1 to 2 drinks instead of having 3 to 4. Basically, take whatever you're doing right now and just make it a little bit better, because what this is going to do is allow you to stack up these positive habit changes and these positive lifestyle changes, which will then start to lead to more results and progress over time because This allows you to be much more consistent with the actions necessary to see progress. The next one, you ever heard before that losing weight is 80% nutrition and 20% exercise? I've even been guilty of saying that myself in my earlier coaching days, but it's bullshit. And here's why. When people hear that phrase, they go to either one of two sides. The first side is going to be, well, okay, I'm not going to lose weight through my exercise, so I'm I'm solely going to focus on my nutrition, which nothing inherently wrong with focusing on your nutrition. I think it's amazing that you want to start doing that. But what is going to make implementing your calorie deficit that much easier? It's going to be getting more movement throughout the day. I want you to think about this for a second. Think about, let's say just for example, if you were in college, right? Maybe you didn't have like the best Nutritional habits to you because you were a broke college student, but did you really end up gaining that much weight? Maybe some people did, but maybe not because why? You were walking all over campus. You had to walk over here to class, walk over there to class. You didn't have a car, so you had to walk to the store. Your overall daily movement was just so much more. Or let's say, for example, if one of your first jobs or maybe it's your job now, I have no clue. But if one of your jobs was to be a waitress or a server, you're on your feet ten, fifteen, twenty thousand steps per day. So that That helped you in terms of creating that, you know, energy balance equation where remember we talked about the energy you burn, the calories you burn, and the energy you consume, the calories you consume. If you're somebody who's getting 3,000 steps per day, when you go to implement a calorie deficit, what's going to have to happen? You're going to have to eat exponentially less calories because your overall energy expenditure is so high. So low, and it's already hard enough to eat in a calorie deficit as it is. I think we can all agree it's like the nutrition is in fact the hardest part, right? But what most people don't get is if you added in a bit more movement throughout your day, and I'm not talking about like again the thing we talked about earlier. I'm not talking about you have to go spend 60 minutes and 120 minutes seven days a week doing cardio. I'm talking about simple shit. I'm talking about parking farther away at work or at the grocery store or when you run errands. I'm talking about using the ups. Bathroom instead of the downstairs bathroom because it's farther away and you get more steps. I'm talking about going to fill up your water bottle more times throughout the day to get more steps throughout the day. I don't mean you have to take this, again, overwhelming outlook to it where it's like, oh my God, I got to end up doing all this extra stuff. Just do a little bit more throughout the day to get more movement. If you're taking a lunch break, if you have an hour lunch break and right now you're spending 30 minutes eating and 30 minutes scrolling social media, get your ass outside and get some more walking in. Because I don't want you to think that, okay, I'm just going to cardio my way to losing weight because that's actually where the second part of this comes into play. When it comes to exercising to lose weight, you just heard me be like, okay, well if you move more, you're going to burn more calories and you'll be good to a degree. Because here's the other side people fall on. And I've talked about this a bit before on my channel, but people will try to cardio their way to lose weight. They're— you're just going to burn more calories and do a bunch of high-intensity cardio, burn as many calories as you can, and that's how you'll lose weight. This backfires almost every single time, and the reason being is because when you are doing such high amounts of high-intensity cardio where your heart rate gets super high, what ends up happening is your cortisol goes through the roof and And the stress that you're, you are putting on your body goes through the roof. When these 2 things happen, you become under-recovered. What happens when you get under-recovered is your cravings go up, your hunger goes up, your energy goes down, your willpower goes down. The result of all of that, you end up not being as consistent with your nutrition and you end up eating more calories. Even though you're burning more calories, you end up eating way more calories. And trust me, you'll never be able to out-train a bad diet. Okay? And so even though you're doing more and more and more, it gets very frustrating for you because you're not seeing the progress you want to see. And then you start to think like, oh well, it's my fault. I just, I can't stick to my deficit. I suck at my diet. I'm always starving. I can't do this. And of course there is a degree of personal responsibility here, but what I've seen just through coaching a ton of people, In my day is when you start to actually look at the exercise, that's what's causing you to have such low willpower, low energy, you know, high cravings, high hunger. When you change up the exercise, it then makes a massive impact on your nutrition and you can stick to your nutrition a lot better, which allows you to again implement that calorie deficit a lot better. So what I usually recommend for people is lifting weights 3 to 4 times a week, walking 5,000 to 10,000 steps per day, as close to that 10,000 step mark as possible. And then if somebody wants to, maybe incorporating 1 to 3 days a week of low intensity, so not like keeping your heart rate super high, like staying at a conversational pace like we are right now, low intensity steady state cardio, whether it's on the bike, treadmill, elliptical, rower, whatever. And I've seen that be able to play a role in both nutrition and exercising because they both play a massive role at helping you implement that calorie deficit. Then the other part of this equation is going to be the expectations component. When we talk about implementing a calorie deficit, there's something that this day and age currently brings to us, which is everybody expects everything to happen right now for them. And I get it. We have Amazon where fucking Jeff Bezos drops an Amazon package through your fucking roof. We have DoorDash where people— not only do people cook your food for you, They deliver it to your front door for you. You do nothing. And that happens in like an hour. And we have all these things where it's very, very, very instant. And so when we talk about implementing a calorie deficit, one of the number one things I see people mess up is you just quite simply don't have the proper expectations for what this is going to look like. It took you how long to gain the weight? It took you a year, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years. Maybe you've been this way your entire life. And so why do you think that in a month, You are going to see drastic changes from this. It makes no sense. And when it's not going as fast as you'd like, you automatically write it off and you go to the next thing. You go to the next thing, you go to the next thing. This is why people— it's called program hopping. When you just hop from one program or one diet to another, to another, to another, and you never actually give something long enough and give something a true commitment try and a true commitment like doing it. To actually see if it's going to work for you or not, which always amazes me because you always hear, and this might be you, you always hear people talk about, I want to make a lifestyle change. And it's so funny because when they don't lose weight fast enough in a week or 2 weeks or a month, they're onto the next thing. But it's funny because what, what do you think you're going to do when you lose the weight? Like what do you think happens at that point? Do you think you're just going to like stop working out and stop eating healthy and stop doing all the things that you were doing? Because if you do end up doing that, that's fine. You're, but you're just going to go right back to where you were before. So stop treating this like it's some short-term fix or some short-term diet that you're doing for just the right now. Like you're going to be working out forever. You're going to be eating in a better fashion forever. You might not be eating in a calorie deficit forever. You might not be tracking your calories forever or whatever the case may be, but you're going to be getting more movement forever. You're going to be working out forever. You're going to be eating better forever. And I know I talked about the overwhelming mindset of that, but in this situation, I don't mean that to be overwhelming. I mean that just to like calm you the fuck down and slow you the fuck down. Because when something isn't going fast enough for you, even when you do reach your goal, it's not like it's over in terms of the lifestyle that you are going to live. You're going to be living a healthier lifestyle forever. So what is the rush? Because even when you do hit that goal, which you will if you stay consistent, But even if you do hit that goal, it's not just like you go back to doing nothing because that's going to put you right back to where you were in the first place where you hated where you were, which is why you're probably watching this video. You want it to happen as fast as possible, which I can empathize with and I understand. But go back to the first time you had ever like tried something. If you would have made that the time where you just stuck with it no matter what, even if it wasn't going fast enough, that actually would have been the shortest time possible for you to get to your goal. Because as opposed to trying this new diet, trying that new diet, trying this new program, trying that new program, if you just would have stuck with it, even if it wasn't going fast enough, you would have by now— you would have not only been at your goal, but you probably would have been maintaining that healthy lifestyle that we talked about a little bit earlier by now. So the next time you go and start something, make it the last time you start something and make it the first time that you commit to something forever, because I know that's what you truly want to do. And that's why I believe the concept of a calorie deficit is not bullshit. The science of a calorie deficit is not bullshit. But the way that most people try to implement that calorie deficit, that is in fact where the bullshit comes into play, because you know what to do, and I know you know what to do. It's just about actually implementing what it is that you know you need to do. I hope this video helped you do just that. If it did, please feel free to drop a comment below, subscribe to the channel, let me know if you did enjoy the video, as well as feel free to check out this video right here as well. Hope it helped, and we'll chat soon.