5 Weight Loss Lies Your Personal Trainer Believes

So James, what's 5 things that people need to know about weight loss?

Well, look, I think the first thing that I see all too often is people try to eat less to continually lose weight, and ultimately starving yourself long term just isn't a, isn't a strategy.

Yes, as I would say, starvation is not a strategy. Do you have any clients that kind of ring that true?

You can explain. Yeah, I've had a few, um, and look, without putting people into boxes, it generally tends to be the female clients a lot more often than the male clients.

It does.

Um, And I think that's just a society thing over a long period of time, and maybe some generations as well, where certain food trends have been on fad.

Well, I suppose if we pull on that thread a little bit, when we say society, it's— I think people are sold the idea that they need to be burning fat all year long, you know, they need to have a summer body, you need to get toned. And it kind of helps this thought process where, you know, if I'm on 1,200 calories, well then 1,000 calories must get me the goal faster. And if I'm on 1,000 calories, 800 must get me the goal faster. And if I'm on 800, 1,600 might get me to goal faster, but the problem is like you get to the point where it's just ridiculous and your body does start to shut down. I don't know if you remember Helen. Yep. You know, she came in eating 800 calories and to get her to where we wanted her to go, she lost 40 kilos over about 18 months. And to get her where we wanted her to get, which was, you know, obviously the 40-kilo weight loss, she was started at 800 calories and we had to bring her up to slowly 1,000, 1,200, 1,600, et cetera. And then we would zigzag and bring her diet back because when you get into those ridiculous levels, things start to shut down. And you're basically, your NEAT and your, what's the word I'm looking for, James?

Baseline.

Baseline, that's exactly right. Your baseline starts to become lower and lower, but you're functioning. So your output on a daily level is, is just always lower. So it, it adjusts. So you don't want the body to adapt to these things.

Yeah, for sure. And I think that's where people, people get, get lost, I suppose, is the best way to put it. Is like you said, they just think less is going to be the, the solution. Um, but ultimately our body needs a minimum amount of food just to function at its minimum capacity on a day-to-day basis. And the more and more you take away the less and less food you're giving the body, or energy if we look at it as what it actually is, to, to be able to do those things. And the body has to start to compromise on certain functions to allow for the key functions to keep functioning at the end of the day.

We're talking about Italian pizzas, right? You, you just had a client come back, and I mean, she's been training for quite a while, but she left and she came back lighter, and she was eating pizzas and cocktails.

Yeah, absolutely. And this is a great example, and I think this is always a really good way for people to lose weight as well, because then they realize there's a lot more to it than just paint the scene in terms of like, you know, she was started with you eating fairly restricted diet.

Over the course of what, 12, 18 months, she's lost about 15 kilos-ish. Yes, no?

Oh, it's been, it's been a long time. So she's been with me for for 5 years. She started during or kind of in and around that COVID period where she probably was overindulging a lot more and not exercising as much as she should have been. Then we made some really solid progress. She started with me at about 93 kilos. We lost maybe 10, 15 in the first couple of years, so pretty steady and consistent. And then things started to slow down.

She was on a lot less calories when she started with you.

No, she was probably eating too much when she started. Okay, but then once we got into the dieting process and she saw the progress and we lost those 10-15 kilos, the challenge was then starting to build her food up. Because like you said, at the beginning she wanted to eat less because she thought it would get an even bigger and even faster weight loss result, but that wasn't the case. Um, and it took me, took me a little while to, to overcome that hurdle with her.

And then she just went to Italy recently and enjoyed all the pasta, the pizzas, and the alcohol and came back lighter.

Absolutely. So before she went away, we got her to the lightest we'd ever had her, eating more food. And then, like you said, she went away for 5 weeks drinking, eating, enjoying herself, and come back even lighter again. And she was shocked as to how that could possibly happen.

So if, if you're watching this and listening, how is that possible? It's because this is what you want to think about, right? If your body adapts to— let's say you're 80 kilos and your body adapts to that 80 kilos at eating 800 calories, you need to stay start seeing it as a win, that if you can push it to 1,000 calories and still be 80 kilos, that's a win. If you can push it to 12,000 calories and still be 80 kilos, that's a win. If you can push it to 1,500 calories and you're still 80 kilos, you've got to see that as a win. Even though on the scales you're not losing weight, your body is now starting to regulate, upregulate. So then when you get to your actual maintenance, let's say in this case it's 1,500 calories, then when you start dieting, the dieting process is going to be far more effective because your baseline has been brought up.

Spot on. That's going to be far less restrictive as well, because who doesn't want to eat more food?

I love food.

Be able to lose weight.

Blocks of chocolate every day.

Absolutely.

So tell me, uh, this is going to be controversial, so I'll just say it straight out, but you can't train for fat loss. And I know people really don't like it when I say that because people think they can just go on the treadmill and do hours and hours of cardio and they do a fat loss workout. I mean, that, you know, the headlines on Instagram and TikTok really don't like that, you know, you can't train for fat loss, but you can't because Your adaptations to training are either strength, you either get stronger, you build muscle, or you build your, your cardiovascular endurance, right? Your ability to repeat effort. They are the only adaptations. Fat loss is a byproduct. So you need to look at this is, can these things be true? Can I train for fat loss and still be overweight? Yes. Why is that? Because the variable is nutrition. So fat loss is a byproduct. You want to add anything to that?

Yeah, absolutely. Fat loss is a culmination of many things, right? Um, nutrition is the biggest single thing that will move the needle regardless, and I think that's where people should put a lot more focus. But I think people generally focus on, if I just train more and do more, I'll lose the weight. But then, like you said, they don't dial in their nutrition, and all of a sudden things aren't changing as they so thought they would when they started to add more training and do more. And then you do more, you get hungrier, you want to eat more. So if the nutrition element isn't dialed in, then it's just a vicious cycle of doing more, not losing weight, trying to do more, not losing weight. And people don't understand how they get stuck in that cycle and how to actually come out the other side and make sustainable steps forward where they're able to manage nutrition. They're also doing enough movements and enough exercise that accumulates over time, which ultimately results in the fat loss result that people are looking for.

Yeah, I think it, you know, if you say it in a soundbite, it's adaptations versus byproduct. You know, in your training, your adaptation is you get stronger and you build muscle or you build cardiovascular endurance. The, the byproduct of that is you get a leaner physique and, uh, you know, you're carrying less fat, you're more mobile, you're healthier. You know, you're not training for specifically for fat loss. You need to diet and have the whole plan inside of fat loss. Now I was speaking the other day about this, but it's kind of like if you don't train, then people also don't lose weight. So it almost seems paradoxical because training is more than just training and getting bigger muscles. But the other thing people should be aware of, if I increase someone's muscle size and every other variable stays the same, their body fat percentage is going to be lower. So I have a little saying that dieting makes you look good normal, training makes you look sexy and harder to kill. Do you want to expand?

Yes, for sure. So obviously when we gain muscle, it's more metabolically active tissue that we're putting on the body, for want of a scientific term, right? So if we have more metabolically active tissue, that means our body's energy demands now increase. However, if somebody keeps their food the same as they gain muscle in those early stages, then realistically they should be able to lose more body fat. Because now their body is able to burn more calories. So the benefits of strength training and hypertrophy specifically and putting on muscle is it actually makes it easier to lose fat loss in the long run.

I'm also going to add to that and say that I think the benefit of strength training and training with weights is that it shifts people's mindset from being about lack of, I need to get rid of these foods to achieve my goal, and shifts them into, I look forward to my training, I want to lift more on the bar, and switches that mindset from pain to performance. I'm doing cardio because I'm fat, I'm overweight, I need to lose 10 kilos, and I don't like who I am. Versus the goal of I want to bench 100 kilos, I want to squat 150 kilos, I want to go into the gym and push myself physically. These are goals that seem lighter. You don't have to do these things, and you're not punishing yourself. Training should never come from a place of punishment, but it's that X factor I find for so many people in terms of weaving into their life health and fitness, keeping them consistent. So it's almost like paradoxical because on one hand we're saying you can't train for fat loss But at the same time, if you're not training, it's almost 100% unsustainable. Yeah. So my saying, and I talk about this in my book as well, but mindset over macros, which obviously ties in perfectly to my point before, but the be, do, have philosophy. I think I try and teach every client that I've ever worked with that you want to be the person who does the actions that gets the result. What I see a lot of time in weight loss is people focus on, I wanna lose 20 kilos and they set up in their subconscious, I wanna lose 20 kilos, I wanna lose 20 kilos, I need to lose weight. And they get to losing 20 kilos and they wanna lose another 5 kilos and they constantly trying to lose and then they put on weight to lose weight. And there's a point where pain will push you but ultimately the vision needs to pull you and the vision can't always be, well, it shouldn't be, I'll say matter of fact, if you want sustainable results without feeling of the heaviness and punishment, you wanna have a vision where it is about performance rather than punishment. So performance always over punishment. I remember having a specific client who just her relationship with food and her body was very bad. And when she made that flip, it was almost like overnight she lost 5% body fat, but it wasn't because we did really anything different. It was the way she related to what we were doing. It was no longer hard to stick to the diet. It was, I'm a healthy person who eats healthy foods that build and nourish my body. Now from that place, let me go shopping and see what I'm gonna buy. 'Cause if you go shopping with the fact of I need to lose 20 kilos, what do you look at in the supermarket? Well, you look at all the things that are gonna help you put on 20 kilos. It's like an old thing, you know, don't think of a blue elephant. What's the first thing you think of, right? A blue elephant. If I tell you, hey, you gotta go shopping, but by the way, don't lose, you gotta lose 20 kilos, you're in your subconscious is gonna go through the supermarket and look at all the foods that are gonna make sure you don't lose 20 kilos. Whereas if you have the same experience, you go into the shop, center and you say, I am a healthy person, eats healthy foods that build and nourish my body, your reticular activating system now filters that into the world. What are the foods that correspond to this identity of who I want to be? So whilst macros obviously play a role and macros are important, science is important, of course, folks, science is important, calories are important, the mindset and psychology of getting into someone's identity and mindset so they can stick to it is the glue that's going to hold the consistency together.

Yeah, that's why I think it's also important to break people's goals down into bite-sized pieces. So somebody has a 12-week goal, let's just focus on week 1. What things are you going to do in week 1? What habits are you going to create in week 1? Focus on doing them, doing them really well, and eventually stack them week to week to week. And by week 12, rather than focusing on I need to lose 10 kilos, by focusing on the habits and making them just the things that they do day in, day out without overthinking it, all of a sudden that 10 kilos comes off. And it's a lot easier when people focus on the habits as, as opposed to the outcome, because the longer-term strategy I find for people is if we can draw that fat loss out over a long period of time, they build more and more habits, and ultimately when they achieve the goal they set out to achieve they understand exactly how they got there. Because it's very easy for us to just slash somebody's calories, give them the plan, and say just follow this and you'll lose weight. But do they fundamentally understand how they got from A to B?

Well, you also make a good point of that because I think part of it is also helping people re-establish what normal is. Because how many times do people come in and that, you know, maybe 4,000 steps in a day, they're eating Uber Eats every meal, they don't eat breakfast, they have 6 coffees a day or 7 coffees a day, and it's just sugary food, and they're up too late, they're always on their phone, and this has become their normal. So you need to start exposing people to, no, that's not normal, that's just for the low standard of health that you've settled for. And the way you feel right now isn't normal, it's actually below normal. And it's a lot of times very confronting for people, but it's also— you want to— I always believe that you want to know the truth and you want to have an accurate map of reality. And I want to know if I'm not good at something, I want to know that I suck and where I am in relation to being average and also being exceptional so that the map of reality— and, and sometimes people look at this and they find it intimidating, but you want to know that you suck at something and also how to get there. Because if I'm in Sydney and I don't have a map to get to Melbourne but I think I'm in Adelaide, well, how am I going to get to Melbourne, right? It's— there's no chance because the map isn't accurate. It's the same thing when we relate to our goals of what is common versus what is normal. And we want to look at these things that people have done in society— makes us lazy, right? It's very easy and common to order Uber Eats, but normal is eating foods that— it's not to poopoo on Uber Eats because you can obviously get healthy food on Uber Eats and you can use it and you can track macros and calories, but it's to have an awareness of your lifestyle is, is not one that's going to be conducive to getting the ultimate outcome.

And this is exactly how I approached the, the client that we spoke about at the beginning is I really focused on stacking those habits over a long time to allow her to go out and enjoy nice meals where she didn't have to feel like she restricted herself. And over 5 years, we've created such a structured routine. And I don't mean structured in a negative sense where she's being super restrictive. She just has things that she consumes daily that become her normal at the end of the day. And then because that's what she does 90-95% of the time, when she goes out and enjoys those really nice meals, it actually doesn't impact her negatively. Actually, before she went on holiday and she reached the lowest weight she'd been since training with me, she went out to a fancy restaurant the night before. She had wine, she had dessert, she had all the things she wanted to eat. She'd come in the next day and she was like, my weight's the lowest it's ever been. And I said, that's because you've ingrained such good habits over a long period of time Now when you go out to eat, it actually serves your body well because you're giving your body more food, more nutrients to allow it to recover, to allow you to sleep better, which ultimately results in a better fat loss outcome over a longer period of time.

Well, I was saying, James, uh, well, to quote Jocko Willink, first of all, discipline equals freedom. And on top of that, my saying and relating it to health and fitness is you can pay for indulgence in two ways. You can pay for indulgence with discipline, or you can pay with indulgence with regret. You got to pick one. And what you're talking about is, you know, the client is, is paying for indulgence with being disciplined, you know, 6 days out of 7, right? And because that she goes out, she has a great meal, and she looks better the next day, and she's happy, and it hasn't derailed her. It's like, this is fantastic, I can have my cake and eat it too. Which, by the way, I hate that saying because what else would you do with cake? Uh, so yeah, finally, it should feel boring, and it should feel— weight loss should feel like paint, watching paint dry. And I do believe personal trainers by and large are discipline and routine coaches for people's health and fitness. And a big part of personal training, a big part of any type of coaching, is to get people to be disciplined and to get people to be routines and to accept that the process is going and should be boring. You're not jumping out of an airplane, you're not going on a roller coaster. It's showing up every day and it's showing up on the days that you really don't want to. That's going to give you the result.

Yeah, I think the start of everybody's journey has to be somewhat challenging, right? Because they're stepping out of the comfort zone, because ultimately they've come to us because they're not where they want to be with their health and well-being. So there's a level of discomfort that they have to overcome in those early stages to allow them to start making progress. I think the more people get into the process and the more normal it becomes for them to live their life that way, the easier it gets. But that's not to say it's super exciting to lose weight after you've established those habits either, because it's not. Like, it's a lot of the same things day in, day out— being organized, getting your supplements ready the night before, making sure your meals are organized, making sure you track in some way, or you've got a good idea of what you are consuming. So there's, there's habits in there that to a lot of people might feel or seem like rather it's, it's a lot of work, um, but the more you do it, it just becomes—

yeah, it really, it really doesn't have to be a lot of work because structuring your meal plan, eating the same thing every day, having a routine, it's just boring. But I think, you know, in the day of TikTok and Instagram, people want to scroll and they want to get their dopamine hit. And people, these are people, you know, trust your gut, trust your feelings and that kind of stuff. But there's so many days where I don't feel like doing things but if I trust that feeling of not doing things, then I'll get nothing done. So you have to work through those uncomfortable feelings and delay instant gratification. And I think being in shape and walking around year round with a great body that you're proud of is a lesson in delaying instant gratification, which is a lesson. And this is why I find so many people who've come through the doors at Enterprise Fitness over the two decades that we've been here, is the fact that we, Give them exposure to, okay, this is, you're not gonna get your gratification today. It's gonna be delayed. No, I know that you really think you need to eat more food, but we're not gonna do that yet. We're gonna stick to the plan and you stick to the plan and at the end of it you'll get to indulge and you're gonna indulge it with discipline rather than a feeling that you think you need it now. And people, I think their mindsets just expand to another dimension which gives them zest to go get life.

Yeah, and the goal is eventually to get people to be able to eat more, but they need to create the healthy habits and understand how to get there properly in order to sustain results. Otherwise, they go from what they were doing to what we need them to do from a dieting perspective to lose the weight, back to what they were doing before because they don't understand how to build their calories back up to that maintenance level, eating the right foods in the right quantities to sustain the results they've achieved at the end of the day.

I'm just gonna go a little woo-woo for a second and say that— always, I'm always— but I'm surprisingly very grounded and practical as well. So my woo-woo segment is I do believe that the body is a physical vessel that holds our spiritual essence, and it is wisdom to look after the physical vessel because that's the only thing that carries you through life. People buy cars, they buy a lot of things that are external, but this is where you express life. It's— you express life through your body. So you want to keep your body as healthy and as optimal and as fine-tuned as possible because that's the only thing that really— I mean, any An investment between the ears is one that's never lost. An investment in your body is also one that will never be lost because you're the one who carries that with you throughout life. So if you're listening to this, I just really encourage you, if you're in a place where you're overweight, you don't know where to start, just start with one action. Hopefully today's tips will give you some practical takeaways of where to begin. Start with routine, start with setup. You can check out my book, The Enterprise Diet, which will definitely— it's also, if you want me to read it to you, James, I can. It's on Audible and I can read it. Final thoughts from you today, James.

Exactly as you said. I think if people are stuck as to where to begin, there's some really actionable things that we've just gone through. And if you're still unsure as to where to begin, then just reach out to us. We're, we're here to help. Um, that's what we do day in, day out, and we've done it with thousands and thousands of people. Um, not just people who want to compete, but your everyday general population as well. So absolutely, if you're stuck in that cycle of losing weight, gaining weight, or you're stuck in the cycle of just giving yourself less and less food and you're not sure where to turn, come to Enterprise and we'll show you.

And together we have 31 years of personal training experience. There we go. Yeah, it's a long time. So to, to rehash our points today so, uh, you can summarize in your head what we've gone over. Number 1, strategy— uh, sorry, strategy— starving yourself isn't a strategy for fat loss. Number 2, you can't train for fat loss. Number 3, diet will make you look good normal, training will make you sexy and harder to kill. Mindset over macros is number 4. And number 5, it should be boring. It should feel like watching paint dry. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have enjoyed today, make sure you hit subscribe, give some love on YouTube and wherever you're listening to this. Train hard, eat well, and supplement smart.