Sustainable Fat Loss and the Habits That Make It Stick

Welcome to Part 2 of our Sustainable Fat Loss Series. Previously, we talked about the Fat Loss Hierarchy and where your focus should be to make the most of your effort. Now we’ll dig deeper into the habits that make that hierarchy easier to stick to.

Fat loss isn’t complicated, but it is painfully tedious and can be brutally monotonous. This is why diet culture has a new hack, diet, workout, or whatever is coming out every month to spice it up. As we mentioned before, it’s not the fancy stuff that comes along, it’s the same old basics that work:

1. Tracking your food intake. You need to be aware of your food intake if the goal is fat loss. There needs to be enough structure built into your routine and diet to make food choices predictable.
2. Protein and high volume foods. During fat loss phases, hunger is unavoidable. Bodies don’t want change; they want homeostasis. In a fat loss phase, your calories will drop slightly (note: we want to create a slight deficit, not a significant deficit, so we can maintain this and not worry about binging and underfeeding) and hunger will be inevitable.

Protein is essential for maintaining muscle mass and many other functions in our body, but it also helps us feel full longer. The same is true for high volume foods – big ass salads, potatoes for carb sources, watermelon, etc. The foods that by weight of themselves do not carry a ton of calories, so you can eat a large amount to keep yourself feeling full while maintaining the deficit.

All new goals and habits for Fat Loss should be SMALL STEPS.

There should be a 90% certainty that you can accomplish the new step/habit. Change is hard, so making sure we can take small steps to stack wins will take you the distance. How often have you or somebody you know started going 100 mph only to crash and burn out within a week or months?

Your Environment will drive decisions and actions more than you realize.

When you are constantly surrounded by snacks, high-calorie foods, in a high-stress environment, and have a lack of support – fat loss choices become harder. The more you can control your environment, the easier choices and changes become.

As always, fat loss is a great goal for many, but it is far from the only fitness goal to have, and in many cases, it is far from the most important. These same lessons for fat loss can be applied no matter the fitness goal.

There are a handful of important mental shifts to make in order to make fat loss principles stick:

All of these will slowly teach you how to eat. You develop the skills, strategies, and structure in your life to manage eating more appropriately for your goals. Diet plans and diets rarely work long term but if we can slowly adapt new habits and strategies to navigate the many phases and stresses of life…progress actually happens!

Consistency over Intensity.

Too much intensity leads to burnout, negative relationships with food and exercise, binging, and other negative food/exercise behaviors.

“Good enough” over perfection.

Perfectionism leads to a lot of the same as too much intensity. We get stuck in a cycle of overthinking, kicking the can down the road, and not working towards the goal if circumstances and actions can’t be perfect.

Habits over diets.

All diets work through the exact same mechanism: calorie restriction. However, there is no such thing as bad food; labels like that lead to negative relationships with food. When we learn to focus on a handful of nutrition habits, we can navigate all types of situations.

Good Nutrition Habits include eating slowly, focusing on complete meals, protein-and-fiber focused meals, stopping at 80% full to let your satiety cues catch up.

Actions over motivation.

Action leads to motivation. If we wait for motivation, it never comes. You have to move the needle forward yourself and create positive momentum for your goals.