Common mistakes that can stop weight loss I Why cant I lose weight I Mistakes when losing weight

YouTube, what's going on? Welcome back to the channel. I can actually say that this time because I have been MIA for a while. Welcome back to the channel. Welcome to the video. In this video, we're gonna be covering the most common weight loss mistakes. But before I dive into the video right now, I just wanna quickly say the reason that I took a little hiatus from doing YouTube videos was because quite frankly, I didn't really know what to talk about. I tried to come up with ideas and I was like, well, I've already talked about this. Well, I've already talked about that. So on and so forth. And so what I wanna say is, if you have any questions, if you have any ideas, if you have any topics that you would love to see covered in a YouTube video, could be fitness topics, could be nutrition, could be exercise, could be mindset, could be whatever. Any topics that you wanna have me discuss on the channel, I would love to discuss them for you because that's the only reason I do these videos anyways, because I wanna be able to help you as much as I humanly possibly can. So If you have any ideas, feel free to drop them down below in the comment section. Or if you're like, Eric, just stay off YouTube forever and never see you again, maybe I can do that as well. But if you have any ideas, feel free to drop them below, and I would love to hopefully start making more videos that can help you. So that is number one. Now, number two, let's just go ahead and dive right into the video today, which is— this video was actually inspired by— I did a TikTok Live yesterday, which if you don't follow me on TikTok, you can do that. Here below, just Eric Roberts Fitness on TikTok. I did a TikTok Live Q&A yesterday and I got a lot of questions that got me thinking about the most common mistakes people make when they go into their fitness journey, their weight loss journey in particular. So I want to cover each one of them piece by piece. None of these are in any particular order, but I will say the first one and the last one right here are probably the 2 most important ones because when I thought about it, I was like Well, not in any order, but these 2 right here are probably, probably the most important. So let's go ahead and dive right into them. The first one is going to be eating healthy. And you're probably like, Eric, what the hell are you talking about eating healthy? I thought eating healthy was a good thing if you want to lose weight. Dropped my marker. But eating healthy is great, and I'm so glad that you want to eat healthier. You want to eat more nutrient-dense whole foods. You want to have less processed foods, more fruits, more vegetables. That's awesome. Here's the mistake. People will come to me. The most common thing I get from people is, Eric, I'm eating healthy but I'm not losing weight. What's going on? Let me just make this abundantly clear. Unless you are in an overall calorie deficit, you will not lose weight. And what that means is you can eat as healthy as you think you want to. Eric, I'm having almonds for snacks. Eric, I'm having a Source a vegetable at breakfast every single night. Eric, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. I just said breakfast and nighttime. That's obviously dinner and nighttime. Oh boy. Okay. Gotta get back into the YouTube grind here. But you can eat as healthy as you think you are. That's amazing. But if you're not in an overall calorie deficit, you will not be losing weight. And this is why this doesn't come down to eating healthy. It doesn't come down to how many fucking handfuls of almonds you ate that day. It comes down to How many calories did you eat that day? If you do not know, you need to know because this is the only way you are going to see fat loss progress. Now, do you need to track your calories? No, you don't need to track your calories, but you do need to be in a calorie deficit. And if you're somebody who is frustrated with your lack of progress and you're not losing weight and you're not counting your calories, you need to start doing that because until you know how many calories you are intaking, how the hell are you going to know If you're in this calorie deficit, you would be surprised at how those healthy foods still have a lot of calories. Almonds, for example, very healthy food, great food. You should eat them. They're very high in calories. So you can have 4 handfuls of almonds and that could be your entire fucking calorie intake for the, for the entire day and you won't know it because you're not tracking calories. And so I suggest make sure you start tracking calories, but please make sure you do it the right way. I'm begging you. So many people go into calorie counting and just absolutely fuck it up, for lack of better terms. They absolutely butcher it. I'm going to link a video here above on exactly how you should be tracking calories, and I really need you to watch that video after this video because you need to be weighing your food in grams on a food scale, not cups, not tablespoons, not ounces, none of that. You need to be weighing your food in grams on a food scale. If you're not doing that, please check out that video. It'll blow your freaking mind at how many calories you think you are eating versus how many calories you're actually eating when you actually start using a food scale. Because if you're not using a food scale, you're literally just guessing and you're going to get guessing results. You can't be upset with your results if you're just guessing. All right, so that's number one. Now number 2, burning calories. And again, you're probably like, Eric, what do you mean? Like burning calories is a good thing if I want to lose weight. Yes, it's a good thing, but 2 things here inside of this one point. Number 1, stop eating back the calories you burn from your exercise. I've done an entire video here on YouTube on why you should stop eating back the calories you burn from your exercise, so feel free to go check it out. But essentially the workouts that you're doing and like your Apple Watch says, oh Sally, you burned 500 calories doing your HIIT cardio bootcamp. You didn't burn 500 calories, Sally. So you're going to go and eat back 500 calories and you're thinking, oh well, I burned that many so I can eat that many and still be in a calorie deficit. No, because those devices that you use to track your calories are wildly inaccurate. So if you're eating back the calories you burn from exercise, that is why you're not losing weight. So please stop doing that, number one. And again, I've done an entire video on that separately, so please feel free to go check it out. Number 2, the thought process here of trying to exercise in order to lose weight. Let me tell you something you've probably heard before. You can never out-train a bad diet. Never. You're never going to be able to out-train a bad diet. And what this means is, and you've probably, you probably either are experiencing this right now or you have experienced this in the past, you can exercise all you want, but if your nutrition in a calorie deficit, if your nutrition is not in check, you're not gonna lose weight. You're just gonna frustrate yourself even more. So So please stop using your exercise as a tool to burn calories. Your nutrition is going to take care of your fat loss. That is what your fat loss is going to come from. Your exercise, you're probably thinking that, well, what is my exercise supposed to be, Eric? Your exercise is supposed to build you up. Your exercise is supposed to help build strength, help build muscle, help build endurance, help build cardiovascular health. Uh, you know, do more weight. Lift more reps. Like, do all the things that build you up. Increase your workout performance. That's what you should be looking to do when you go into your exercise. You should not be looking to burn calories. Number one, like I just said, it's not accurate anyway. And number two, the thought process of that just leads to a very unhealthy relationship with food and exercise. Please, I'm begging you, please stop thinking about exercise as a tool to burn calories, to lose weight. Please start thinking about your exercise as a tool to get you stronger, to build more muscle, to build, you know, make you feel like a fucking badass from lifting weights and getting stronger and building your endurance and improving your mile time. Stop thinking of it as a tool to help you burn calories. Never going to work in the long run. It's going to create a very unhealthy relationship with food and exercise, and I just don't recommend it. Now, number 3, and this is honestly, this is one of the, one of the most important ones as well. You're not being patient enough. And here's what I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you a graph of one of my clients. Her name is Nicole. Shout out Nicole. I'm going to show you a graph of one of my clients, Nicole, where her weight didn't move for 3 weeks in a row. Oh my God. Oh my— and you're probably thinking, oh my God, my weight didn't move for 3 weeks. I would have quit. Oh my God, I'm gonna freak out. Stick with me here. You're not being patient enough because you think that not losing weight for 4 days Is is a is a weight loss plateau. You think not losing weight for two weeks is oh my god, I'm in a weight loss plateau and I'm never going to see any weight loss progress. Stop it. You not losing weight for two weeks is not a weight loss plateau. You not losing weight for three weeks is not a weight loss plateau. And you can see that right here because as you saw, Nicole's weight kind of stayed around the same for roughly three weeks. Guess what? She didn't quit. She didn't freak out. She didn't end up like overly complaining about it. She just stuck with what she was supposed to do. She kept hitting her calories. She kept doing her workouts. And guess what? She was able to, on that 4th week, lose roughly 3 to 4 pounds and then go off and keep it off forever. So, you need to stop quitting. You need to stop quitting when things don't happen overnight. You need to stop quitting when things don't happen in a week. This takes time. Just because you're not losing weight for a week or 2 or 3 or 4 doesn't mean that you are not seeing progress. And I really want you to start looking at this from a 4-week scope, not a 4-hour scope or a 4-day scope. I don't care what you weighed on Tuesday versus Saturday. It's totally 100% irrelevant. It doesn't matter what you weighed on that. And I believe you should be weighing yourself every single day, and I talk about that for reasons listed in this video above, but you should be weighing yourself every single day, but not looking at what you weigh on Tuesday versus Saturday. Look at what did you weigh on January 26th versus February 26th, February 26th versus March 26th. For example, in February— on January 3rd, were you weighing roughly 215? Then February 3rd rolls around and you're weighing 220. 210, 211. Well, guess what? That downward trend is roughly 4 pounds in a month, which guess what? That'd be roughly a pound a week on average, which guess what? That would be tremendous fat loss progress. And so you need to stop being so impatient. I understand that in the world that we live in, people want quick fixes and people want it right now, and we're bred and we're, you know, indoctrinated to, you know, not be patient nowadays. I get it, but it doesn't change the fact that you need to be fucking patient. So that is number 3. Number 4, and it bleeds right into this point, you're not taking measurements and you're not taking progress pictures. I've said this multiple times on this channel. I've said it multiple times on my podcast. I've said it multiple times on my Instagram. Anywhere I go, I've said this. If you are using the scale as your only form of data, you are fucked. You're fucked. You're gonna lose and you're setting yourself up for failure. I promise you that with all of my heart. And the reason for that is, let's go back to my client Nicole. During those 3 weeks, guess what? Even though her weight wasn't going down, we saw her measurements were going down during that period of time. What does that tell us? That tells us that she was losing body fat during that period of time. What does that tell us? That also tells us Nicole had no reason to quit. The number one reason you never get to your goal is because you quit before you get there. Why do you quit before you get there? If we weren't tracking her measurements during this period of time, Nicole in particular would not have quit because she's a badass and she's a beast. But like most individuals would have quit when they did, when you didn't see your weight go down for 3 weeks. Don't fucking lie to me either. I know you would have. You would have quit. You'd be like, oh, I'm not doing this right. Oh, this isn't working. Oh, it's taking so long. Oh my God. And you would have quit and you would have gotten even farther away from your goals because you would have quit because your weight wasn't going down for 3 weeks. That's why most people quit. That's why most people don't ever get to their results. So if you're not taking measurements and progress pictures, that's a huge mistake because, because we were taking measurements with Nicole, we saw her measurements were going down. So even though the scale was being fickle, which it's going to be, it's going to lie to you sometimes, the scale wasn't moving. But her measurements were trending down and that let her and I both know she was doing everything right and it was just a matter of time before the scale was gonna follow. And as you saw, the scale did follow. And I put up a picture of her to begin with right here because again, we also are taking progress pictures. You saw her face, you saw her body. She was— she's changing her body, right? She's down over almost 30 pounds right now. She's changing her body because she sees that because she's taking measurements and she's taking progress pictures. I've done an entire video on what measurements to take, how to take them, and how to take your progress pictures. So I'll put that video here above, but please make sure you are taking your measurements and taking progress pictures and not just using the scale as your only form of data. If there's one thing I really need you to understand, stop fucking doing that shit. All right, number 5 is going to be you're not tracking your consistency. And there's this saying that what gets tracked Gets improved upon. There's also the saying that awareness creates change. The 2 things we do as human beings— number one, like I talked about earlier, we vastly underestimate how many calories we are actually eating. That's why when people tell me, Eric, I'm eating healthy but not losing weight, well, you're eating too many calories because you think you're eating healthy and you think you're eating, you know, so few calories when in reality you're eating way more calories than you think. The second thing we do as humans is we overestimate how consistent we are actually being. And this proves every single time. So this is why if you start tracking your consistency— and literally one of my friends and mentors, Jordan Syatt, he talks about, you know, he came up with the consistency calendar and he talks about for every day you hit your calories, you give yourself a red X. For every day you don't hit your calories, you give yourself a black circle. It's as simple as that. But what that is going to do for you is it's going to make you aware of Holy shit. If there's 31 days in a month, for example, for you to see progress at the very, very least, you need to be 80% consistent. And I say very least, honestly, I would lean more towards 85 to 90% consistent. So if that's 80% consistency to 85% consistency, that would be roughly 25 to 26 days out of the course of a month that you need to hit your calorie intake in order To see weight loss progress. And if you over the course of a month notice that you have, you know, 15 Xs and 15 Os, well then guess what? You're not being consistent enough in order to see progress. But like you swear up and down that you're eating 1,200 calories and you're doing this and you're doing that and you're being very consistent, but you're not actually tracking your consistency. And if you've never done this, I literally just challenge you for one month. One month. Track your consistency for one month. You can do it the way Jordan does it, where again, he just go get a calendar, put an X on the days you hit your calories, put an O on the days you don't hit your calories. You can do this in a Google spreadsheet. You can do this however you do it, but you have to see it. You have to see and track your consistency because what happens is people will get in the dieting mindset and what this is, it's like all you think about is losing weight. All you think about is counting calories. All you think about is losing, you know, is eating your calorie amount or whatever the case may be. Quite honestly, you just kind of forget about the Thursday night you went out to dinner with your friends and didn't track your calories. You just kind of forget about the Saturday and Sunday where maybe you had a crazy busy weekend with your friends or your kids or your spouse or whoever and you just didn't track calories or you went over in calories. You just forget about these things because what's front and center is, oh my God, I want to lose weight. Oh my God, the scale. Oh my God, dieting. That's all that's ever front and center. You get into the dieting mindset and you think you're being super consistent when in reality, if you actually tracked your consistency, you would see you're not being consistent enough. And again, the reason you track it is because it makes you aware of it and the more aware of it that you are in the same way when you start tracking your calorie intake, what happens? You're more aware of what you are putting into your mouth, right? When you have to write it down, you have to track it, you have to weigh it, you're more aware of it. The same with consistency. So the more aware you are of something, the more you can create change around it. You can take action to create change around that specific thing. So if you're not tracking your consistency, you need to start doing that ASAP. All right. And last but not least, and probably one of the most important things I can leave you with, so that's why I put it last, is you're trying to rush it. You have to stop trying to rush it. You have to stop trying to speed things up. You have to stop cutting your calories so low In order to speed up your weight loss progress. Well, if I'm eating 1,600 calories and I'm losing roughly a pound per week, clearly if I eat 1,200 calories, I'll lose 2 pounds per week and I'll, I'll get to my goal even faster and I'll lose more weight. It's going to backfire every single time. Well, if I'm working out 3 days a week right now, I can increase to 7 days a week and I'm going to see more progress and I'm going to lose weight faster. It's going to backfire every single time. Single time. And the reason for that is when you try to speed things up, inherently these things are going to be unsustainable and over-restrictive. And so if something is unsustainable and over-restrictive, you are not going to be able to be consistent with it over the long haul. Guess what? What breeds results? Consistency. Consistency breeds results. Doing these unsustainable things eating 1,200 calories, trying to work out 7 days a week, doing all this shit that you're doing, cutting out all of your carbs and only eating clean food and never having any foods you enjoy, trying to be perfect. All of that shit breeds inconsistency. Inconsistency breeds— I mean, you being pissed off, you being frustrated, you not seeing progress, you watching this video right now because you're not seeing progress. That's what it breeds. And yet every time You keep trying to go back to it. You keep trying to speed things up. You keep trying to get greedy and lose weight faster and oh my God, it's going to take me so long to reach my goal, so I'm just going to eat less calories. That's the fucking reason that you can never reach your goal because you keep trying to speed things up. Stop doing that. It is going to be unsustainable. You will not be able to be consistent with it and you're just going to have this cycle forever. That's how people yo-yo diet. They go up and down in weight. They go down in weight. They go back up and wait. They go down and wait. They go back up and wait. You never make any headway because all you're ever trying to do is speed things up as fast as possible. You can't be consistent, so you can't see any long-term progress. Please stop doing that. Take a slow, steady, and sustainable approach. Working out 5 times a week is not better than working out 3 times a week. Eating 1,200 calories is not better than eating 1,500 calories. It's not. So stop trying to speed things up. You're going to be able to be more consistent. And in the long run, as opposed to your weight doing this and never actually making any change, your weight's going to do this. And over time, it is going to trend down just like I showed you. I'll put a picture up here of some of my clients, you know, of their, of their weight charts. You can see there's like up and downs, but what happens? That trend line you see every single time, that trend line trends down because They're taking a slow, steady, and sustainable approach and actually seeing progress over the long haul. You're trying to speed things up in the short term. All you're ever thinking about is short-term progress. You have to stop doing that. You have to start thinking more long-term. You have to start thinking about what is going to be able to be sustainable for you. And you have to realize in the long term, if you just stop fucking trying to speed things up, you'll actually see better progress in the long term as opposed to speeding it up now, losing a lot of weight, gaining a lot of weight, losing a lot, gaining a lot, and never actually making any headway. So that is the video for today, guys. Hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please feel free to leave a thumbs up. Please feel free to subscribe to the channel. And again, if you want specific topics covered on the channel, please feel free to drop them below. I would be happy to go— I would be happy to make a video because that's why I, I don't make these. I honestly don't make these videos for me. I make these videos for you because I want to help you, because I want to be able to educate you And I want you to get some value from these videos. So if you want me to cover a topic, drop it down below. Thank you for watching, and we'll chat soon.