Here's When A Calorie Deficit DOESN'T Work

You've probably been told before a calorie deficit is the only way to lose weight, and that's true most of the time, but there are 6 scenarios where that is not true. And not only will I tell you those scenarios in this video, but I'll tell you how to fix them so you can start losing the body fat that you want to lose. The first scenario a calorie deficit won't work is going to be when you are eating back the calories you burn fast. from your exercise. And let me explain a bit more in depth what I mean here. This doesn't mean you can't eat after your exercise, but if let's say your calorie deficit is 1,500 calories and you go to your workout and you burn 500 calories because your Fitbit or Apple Watch— Fitbit, Fitbit or Apple Watch says that you burned 500 calories. I wasn't supposed to say that. You didn't actually burn 500 calories. Those trackers that are used to calculate how many calories you burn during your activity can be up to 50% inaccurate. So if you think you burned 500 calories, but you really only burned 250 calories, you would go and eat back 500 more calories. So you would eat 2,000 calories, but that would be taking you out of your calorie deficit because you didn't actually burn that many calories in your workout. So if your calorie deficit says 1,500 or whatever the number is, do not take your exercise calories and go eat that amount of calories back. Also, not only is it inaccurate, but remember your calorie deficit. Let's say you're using any sort of calorie calculator. For example, I have a free calorie calculator you can use. The link will be in the description of this video. But when you enter all of your information into this calorie calculator, what do you normally do? You enter like your activity level where it says like, do you have light activity, moderate activity, high-intensity activity? You're going to enter your activity level anyway. So your activity level is already worked into your calorie deficit for that day. So then adding in more calories that you would eat on top of that to That just means you're eating more calories and taking yourself out of that calorie deficit. And not to mention, mentally speaking, I have seen just coaching thousands of people by now, if you're like, oh, I just did a hard workout, I'm gonna go eat whatever I want, that is going to take you out of your calorie deficit. And so it's not necessarily the calorie deficit doesn't work, it's if you're doing this, you would take yourself out of the calorie deficit that you think you're in. Think you're in, and that's why it wouldn't work. Now, the second scenario when a calorie deficit wouldn't work would be when you are having a lack of movement during your day, and especially a lack of something that we call NEAT, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis. All of this big scary bunch of words means is all the extraneous movement you're doing throughout the day. That is not a dedicated workout. So even me doing this stuff with my hands, you walking to the bathroom, walking to the fridge, walking to the grocery store from your car, all of that is considered non-exercise activity thermogenesis. And it's just helping your body burn more calories. Because remember, a calorie deficit means you are intaking calories and you are burning calories. The amount of calories that you are intaking has to be less than the amount of calories that you are burning to create a calorie deficit. If you are not getting enough movement, what's going to end up happening is since you are not burning that many calories, the amount of calories that you're burning comes down to here. So that means you will have to take your energy in, calories in your food. You're going to have to take that even lower because you're not getting enough movement and calorie burn during the day. And when you have to take your calories that low, it is incredibly hard to stick to and people usually just end up not seeing progress because either they're not willing to take their calories that low or because when they do try to take their calories that low, they just can't be consistent with it. And more on that to come in a minute. So with that being said, when you're going into your calorie deficit journey, don't just think about your nutrition. Yes, that plays a role, but you want to think about some other things too. So first and foremost, you should be trying to get somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 steps per day. And you've probably heard the 10,000 step number as like this holy grail. You don't have to get 10,000 steps per day. It's just a really good number to shoot for to make sure you don't have to take your calories so low. But I always tell a lot of our online coaching clients, if you're currently at 3,000 steps per day, try to get yourself to 4,000 or 5,000. If you're at 5,000, try to get to about 6,000 or 7,000. That way, You can just add a little bit more to your goal and it doesn't make it super overwhelming to go from 3,000 steps per day to 10,000 steps per day. So add 1,000 to 2,000 steps per day to your goal. And some people are like, Eric, I work a desk job. Eric, it's the wintertime where I am. It's cold outside. It gets dark early. Okay. You can supplement with some extra cardio if you know you're not gonna hit this on a consistent basis. Generally speaking, I'd recommend doing somewhere around 2 to 4 days a week of 15 to 30 minutes of extra cardio. Or even if you know you might be on the lower end of these steps, supplementing with some extra cardio because again, that way you don't have to go as low in your calorie intake, which the lower you go in your intake, the harder it is to stick to. So if you're not getting enough movement to create the calorie deficit, that could be a reason why. Now the third scenario of when a calorie deficit won't be working is something you might not want to hear, but I'm going to tell you, I'm going to give you the hard truth. If you're not being at least 80% consistent with your calorie deficit number that you have been given, it's not that the calorie deficit isn't working, it's that you aren't working the calorie deficit. And people often ask me, Eric, what is 80% consistent? What does that mean? What does that look like? Let's say there are 31 days in a month, and you can do this. And I would challenge you to do this. Go back and look at the last 31 days. Go back and look at the last month you've had. 25 out of 31—that is 80% consistent. That means you need to have hit your calories at least 25 out of the last 31 days. And if you haven't done that, it's not that your calorie deficit isn't working; it's that you. Aren't working the deficit consistently enough to see the progress you want to see. If I'm being real, real with you, I would move this number to about 27 to 28 days out of 31 days. I would move this number more towards 85 to 90% consistency if you're really struggling to try to see progress because most people think about— let's say you're tracking your calories in MyFitnessPal or the Lose It app or whatever the case may be. You can go and look at the last 31 days and look at, tally it up, almost like put it on your calendar. This is something we've done with a lot of our clients is we create a calendar each month for the month of October, November, and every day that they hit their calories, they put a check mark. Every day they do not hit their calories, they put a little X. And that way you can visually see how many days are you on, on plan versus Off plan. And a lot of times when you go and do this right here, you'll go back and look and say, huh, I've only been 12 out of the last 31 days I've been consistent. And I'm not doing this to like make you feel bad. I'm doing this to hopefully open your eyes and make you see you probably just need to be a little bit more consistent to make the deficit work. And a lot of times I've seen with clients, you feel like you're dieting all the time. You feel like you're thinking about the scale, you're thinking about your nutrition. You feel like you're counting your calories. And so it's not like maliciously, you're just not being consistent. A lot of times you really do think you are, but when you see the numbers, it's like, oh, it's much like maybe sometimes when you like, you check how much money you're spending and you're like, oh shit, I need to get it together. This is the same thing. The 4th scenario when your calorie deficit might not be working is when you're not tracking your calories correctly. So I'm going to talk about what a calorie deficit is versus isn't. So a calorie deficit is not You scan the food label of a product and you say, hmm, that looks about 4 ounces, and then you go and track that you ate 4 ounces. That is guessing. And don't get me wrong, it's better than doing nothing. And if it's working for you, kudos to you. But you're probably watching this video still because it's not working for you and you're not seeing the progress that you wanna see. So a calorie deficit is not that. A calorie deficit Is you take the food, you put it on a food scale, you weigh out the portion size in grams, not cups, tablespoons, ounces. You weigh the food in grams to get the proper portion size. Solid foods you weigh in grams, liquids you can weigh in ounces or milliliters, but you weigh the food and you take that, what you weighed on the food scale, then you put it into your calorie counting app And then it tells you how many calories you are actually consuming. And this is really important. And if you don't believe me, try it for a week. If you're somebody who right now you're just guessing and you're scanning the barcode and guesstimating your portion sizes, try this for a week. Actually weigh your food, get the proper portion size that you weighed out, then track that. Do it for 7 days. Tell me how much more progress you see in just 7 days. Because you are over— you're underestimating how many calories that you're actually eating. They've actually done studies on this where they've estimated, and people have estimated how many calories they're consuming. People thought they were eating 1,200, 1,300 calories, and the actual amount of calories they were consuming was more towards the 2,000 mark. So we just underestimate how much we're eating. We're not good at guesstimating. So make sure you're doing that, and if you don't do that, then just don't be upset at the guessing results that you get. If you want to get good, accurate results, make sure you're weighing your food. If you don't care about that, then don't do that. So that's the first part of it, and then the second part of it, just make sure you're tracking everything. This— I know maybe you're taking a bite here and there when you're making dinner, maybe you're taking a bite off your kid's plate, maybe you're having a chocolate or two at work, and you might not think that it's a big deal. And honestly, in little increments it might not be, but 30 calories here, 60 calories there, 70 calories here— you do that a couple times a day. On top of the fact that if you're not tracking your calories accurately with a food scale, this is how you add up to the 30 calories here, 60 calories, 70 calories— that becomes 150, 200, 300 calories during your day. That you're not tracking. So now you think you're eating 1,200 calories when in reality you might be eating 1,600, 1,700 calories. And that's where the frustration probably comes in for you because you think you're doing everything right, but you're not seeing the progress. When in reality, we got to make sure we're tracking everything. That also includes, you know, all the oils that you're cooking in. It includes all the bites, the licks, the tastes, the snacks, everything. Tracking everything. The 5th reason a calorie deficit might not be working is because you might be in too big of a calorie deficit. And this is where you might be like, I've been waiting for this one. You're going to tell me I'm eating too few calories and that's why I'm not losing weight. I'm not going to tell you that, Cheryl. I apologize because no, there is no such thing as starvation mode. There is no such thing as eating too little calories and not losing weight for all of the reasons that we talked about earlier. But if you want to get sciencey with it. They've actually done a study, it's called the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. There'll be a link for that in the description of this video, where they actually did starve people. And you can go and look at some of the pictures of these participants. I don't know why you'd be a participant in starving yourself, but the participants are skin and bones. There's no such thing as starvation mode. If you are eating in a calorie deficit, you will be losing weight. But I want to talk about this because let's take a 1,000 calorie deficit versus a 500 calorie deficit. Now for context on this, sorry, a 1,000 calorie deficit means let's say your maintenance calories were 2,000. This means a 1,000 calorie deficit, you would be eating 1,000 calories versus let's say your calorie deficit, uh, your maintenance calories are 2,000 minus 500, you would be eating a 1,500 calorie deficit. Calorie deficit there. So that's the difference. You're taking this amount of calories off of your maintenance calories, and the bigger the deficit, the quicker you would lose weight in, in imagination land. I don't know what the right word I was going for there, but in practicality, this doesn't always work. And let me quickly tell you why. I actually did a 1,000 calorie deficit for 2 weeks. You know what happened? I did lose. weight pretty rapidly those 2 weeks. You know what also happened? I had terrible energy, I had terrible workouts, terrible sleep. I was starving, thinking about food all the time. That like food noise you probably hear people talk about, that was me during that time. Because when you go on this bigger aggressive deficit, you are go— it is gonna be much harder to stick to. And then that goes back to the other point we talked about earlier of staying consistent with your calorie deficit. Most people try to create the biggest deficit they can to lose weight as quickly as they can. And while in the short term it may work, you're not able to stick with it. So then you're not able to keep it up and see the progress for the long haul. You, you know, you kind of revert back, you go back to, you know, this like restrict and binge and restrict and binge and lose weight, gain weight. The cycle most people fall into for their entire journeys, unfortunately, until they find me. In my channel. But so as opposed to doing that, if you just take a 500 calorie deficit instead, or even maybe a 250 calorie deficit, yeah, you might not lose weight as quickly in the beginning, but it'll be much more sustainable for you and you'll be able to stick with that for the long run. I actually just recently did a video, you can watch it right here, where I talked about an aggressive versus a moderate calorie deficit. So you want to, if you want to check it out, check it out. But If you're creating too big of a deficit, you won't be able to stick with it. You'll fall into the restrict and binge yo-yo dieting cycle and you won't have a good time. And the 6th reason why your calorie deficit might not be working is not because the deficit isn't working, it's because you're not tracking your progress accurately. So if you're not taking progress pictures or if you're not taking measurements, then you don't really know if your calorie deficit is working or not because remember, Let's say you're losing fat and building muscle at the same time. One pound of fat weighs the same as one pound of muscle. They both weigh a pound. And so if you're losing fat and gaining muscle, the number on the scale might not change that much, but your clothes will fit different, your body will look different. And if you're— but if you're not tracking this, it's very easy to just get caught up in the number on the scale each morning, which is why for all of our online coaching clients, we make sure Every 4 weeks we take progress pictures, front, side, rear. I'll put some of our clients right here. And we also take their measurements every 2 weeks because that way, even if the scale is acting funny, but we look at their progress pictures and say, you clearly have lost weight in your stomach, your arms look more toned, defined, we can tell that they're making progress. And then they don't think they're not making progress. They don't think my calorie deficit isn't working anymore. They look at it and say, oh sweet, I'm seeing great progress. My measurements are going down. My progress pictures are changing. They know they're seeing progress. But if you're not tracking that and you're solely relying on the scale, again, you are not going to have a good time. Your calorie deficit might actually be working. You just don't know it because you're not tracking the data that you need to track. And then if you're somebody who's sitting there saying, this guy's right about a lot of this, and you would like some extra help being held accountable, creating a plan, that can actually make you lose weight. You can check out our online coaching program and maybe we can help you see more progress as well. I hope this video helped and we'll chat next time.