Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 45 - 7 Reasons You Cant't Lose Fat

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

In this episode, Danny breaks down the most common reason fat-loss stalls. This issue not only outlines common errors and pitfalls but also provides realistic solutions.Thanks For Listening!---RESOURCES/COACHING: I am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE! Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS:Follow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!Support the Show.

Welcome back, guys. So today's episode is all about weight loss and why it is weight loss can be a little bit tricky for many people, particularly when they are just getting started. Now, the majority of people who begin a diet will abandon it within the first couple weeks. And the reason for that, quite frankly, is because we have a culture that we've created in the fitness space where the scale tends to be the end-all be-all with regards to how we track weight loss. Before we get into any of this, I think it's important to paint the picture that the scale is in fact one of many tools we can use to gauge and measure the effectiveness of our diet, of our exercise regimes, and of our efforts to lose weight. We have things like circumference

measurements, body fat scans, the way you look in the mirror, the way you feel in your clothes. There's so many different ways we can go about measuring and quantifying how our body is changing in response to a diet that I don't want anybody to hear this episode and think that I believe the scale is the end-all be-all. But everything that I'm going to list today has a particular impact on scale weight. And the title of the episode is seven reasons why you are not losing weight. So I think it's really important that we discuss, yes, we're going to use the scale as the primary metric for today's discussion, but it's not the end-all be-all. But I will say,

in defense of the scale, it's a great tool for gathering data, but many people really struggle with detaching morality and their success from the scale. They step on and they see a bad way, and they feel like a failure, and they feel like they've done something wrong when quite often the fluctuations that come with the scale are just to be looked at or should generally just be looked at as data and they're quite common. You're very, very rarely going to see linear weight loss with most people. It just doesn't happen often. It's very unlikely that you'll see weight loss day in and day out in a linear fashion. You'll almost always see fluctuation. With that covered, I think we can move into this episode with the right foundation. Because again, I don't want anybody to get it twisted. The scale is not the end-all be-all, but it's a part of

your journey that you should have a good relationship with. And everything we talk about today will help you better understand why it is that I think that the scale can be a useful tool if you have the requisite knowledge to use it properly. So the number one thing that I see without a doubt is impatience. So the number one reason people don't lose the weight that they want to lose in the long term is they're simply too impatient to do so. The 3,500 calorie per pound of body fat number has been thrown around a lot. Many people say it's a myth that's been debunked, but we can assume that the average one pound of body fat can probably hold anywhere between 3,200 to 4,000 or so calories. So that would mean that to lose one pound, you would need to have a dietary reduction of about 3,200 to 4,000 calories.

That's quite a bit, particularly when we begin to consider how people eat. You're going to need to make a deficit, and you're going to need to make a deficit that lasts for a considerable amount of time if you want to lose one pound, let alone 15 to 20 pounds. Now, this isn't to discourage you. Plenty of people are capable of creating an adequate enough deficit to lose a tremendous amount of weight and keep it off. But the biggest issue from the jump tends to be patience. People just simply don't have a quality understanding of about how much time this should take. And I find that people generally quit because of the confusion or the frustration around that time more than they do when they find out how long it's actually

going to take. So for many of my clients, I recommend one pound a week. And while two to three pounds a week is possible, it seems to be certainly less sustainable, and it definitely trickles down after that initial weight loss period. So I strongly recommend coming at this with a sense of patience and an expectation that one pound a week is probably a reasonable amount of weight to lose for most individuals. And that's not a ton, particularly when you bake in fluctuations.

But if you have the understanding that, hey, this is going to require some time, it's going to require some diligence, it's going to require some patience, you eliminate the likelihood of quitting because it's going too slow, or you at least mitigate the likelihood of quitting because you've established this baseline expectation that, hey, this is going to be a journey. I can't let impatience get in my way. It takes years often to gain weight, and it can take months to get it off with diligent dieting. But if you lay that foundation and that fundamental expectation of, I need to be patient with this process, I need to let it come to me, I need to take it one day at a time, you'll always do better than

if you rush it and you expect rapid results. And that's why, number one, I think the biggest reason people are not able to lose weight is they refuse to be patient. They refuse to stare at themselves in the mirror and say, it took me months, if not years, to gain this weight. And it's going to take me months, if not years, to fully lose it, keep it off, and be healthy. And that's a really hard pill to swallow in today's instant gratification world where we want everything fast, on demand, streaming, instantaneous. It's just not a realistic situation when it comes to body fat reduction. Certainly you can lose weight very quickly. Certainly you can even lose some fat quite quickly.

But for most people, patience is the number one reason they can't get it done. They simply do not embrace the fact that this is a journey and that it will require some patience. So that's number one. So here's another interesting one that can really, really empower you if you understand fundamental physiology. And it's one of the reasons you might be losing body fat, but might not be losing weight on a scale. And it particularly applies to new lifters. So coaches, this is really relevant for you when working with clients and hobbyists and just general health enthusiasts listening. This is something to consider.

So inside of our muscle tissue, so think about your bicep, right? Like if you're driving the car, flex your bicep, feel that muscle right there. Okay. That muscle contains more than just protein and muscle fiber and connective tissue. There's a lot of water in there. There's also a lot of something called glycogen. Now, glycogen is stored carbohydrates. What we do as human beings, when we eat carbohydrates, we take some of them and we put them away into our skeletal muscle so that we have energy right there in our muscle ready to go and ready to do work when the time comes. Now, that glycogen weighs something, and it also brings in quite a bit of water. So here's why this is relevant. If you're new to resistance training, you're on a calorie deficit, you're in a calorie deficit, you're on a diet,

you might actually see no changes on the scale. But you could be losing fat. But because that number is going down, you're getting discouraged and you can't figure it out. But for a lot of people, what happens is when you have not been lifting weights or you haven't been lifting weights hard, or you haven't been following a really good program, when you start to do all of those things, your body goes, holy crap, I need to hold more glycogen. I'm doing work that I haven't done before. I need to make sure that my tissue is more hydrated and ready to perform. So if the average human stores between 300 to 400 glycogen when they're fit, maybe the grams of glycogen, maybe they only

store 200 when they're not. So all of a sudden they start packing away more glycogen and more fluid. And that's going to trick the scale because all of a sudden, even though you might be liquidating fat, you could in fact be holding more water and more glycogen and muscle tissue, which will offset some of what happens on the scale. And I see this a lot with new lifters and people who are just starting to lift weights. The inflammatory response to beating yourself up in the gym, the impetus to hold more glycogen and more water to do work as your body starts to realize this is actually really important, this is becoming regular, this is part of my routine, I need to be prepared for this. Those things can cause some frustrations because people expect to lose weight

on the scale when in fact they might be stagnating or losing it more slowly as tissue starts to rehydrate, as glycogen starts to become increasingly more stored. And that's all good stuff. But these are problems that happen. And that's one of the reasons why people quit is they don't see what they want to see on the scale, when in fact, they might be losing body fat while their body does what it needs to do to help you perform better in the gym with the exercise routine you just started. If you go from completely sedentary to working out pretty regularly, things are going to change at the level of your tissue. Your body's going to have to do stuff to make sure that you can meet the demands placed upon it by

the new exercise and by the new routine you're starting. So you need to be somewhat patient with this and understand that the scale is not able to pick up. Even some of the scales that have bioelectrical impedance or the ability to kind of do what they call disassociate fluid and water and bone and all that stuff, they're not entirely accurate. So be patient and understand. And please understand that early on, particularly for people who have not been lifting, physiological changes at the level of the muscle tissue will impact the scale. So be patient. Reason number three why you're not losing weight. And this is far and away the most common for people who have been doing it for a while.

Let's say their glycogen stores are already hydrated. They understand it's going to be a long haul. They are not adequately tracking calorie intake. So let me paint a picture for you. When people are left to their own devices, we know that they don't track calories very rapidly. So, or I'm sorry, very accurately. don't track calories very rapidly. So, or I'm sorry, very accurately. If you put people in a situation where they're tracking calories and eyeballing things and doing everything on the fly, we know that generally speaking, they're going to overeat and under report their calories. We've actually seen this in the literature. People are going to eat one thing and representatively track another, and there's going to be a gap. And a lot of times that gap is quite large. There's one study that showed an over 50% gap between calories consumed and calories

tracked. When left to their own devices, when eyeballing, people are consistently unreliable when it comes to tracking their calories. And I'll be honest, guys, I've been tracking my macros on and off for almost a decade. When I eyeball it, when I tell myself, Dan, you've been doing this forever, you can eyeball it, I'm pretty spot on pretty often. However, I lose weight and body fat much more rapidly when I track and weigh my food. The difference in that pace, eyeballing it, I still lose weight with 10 years of practice. Tracking it, I lose body fat much more quickly. The difference there is that accuracy because in eyeballing it, people tend

to under report what they're eating. It happens even to people like me who have been doing it long enough that they should quote unquote be able to eyeball their food. But this is simply not the case. There is no substitution for accurately tracking your calories. And I understand that for people, that's frustrating. It seems like a lot of time to spend opening and closing apps, pulling food scales in and out, but I promise you, it's unbelievably less time than waiting in the doctor's office for poor metabolic health, researching the next fad diet on the internet, being frustrated about the way you look and taking forever to try on clothes and find

clothes that look flattering with a physique you're not happy with. That's a lot longer time and it's a lot less comfortable. Simply taking the time on the front end to pull out your food scale, track your calories, is going to pay unbelievable dividends. I promise you this. If you take the time to do it on the front end and accurately track your calories, you will lose weight more quickly and more reliably, and you'll have the data right in front of you to look at in case you get stuck, in case you get frustrated than if you don't. It is far and away the thing to do when it comes to, I want to eat the foods I want. I want to see the results I want to see, but I really want to be sure that I'm doing this right and I have some consistency here. You need to track your calories to do that. You don't need to track your calories every day of the week. You don't need to go crazy. You don't need to even track them every single meal. But if you get in a rhythm

of tracking them more often than not, I can almost guarantee you're going to see more rapid, more consistent, more reliable weight loss. And that is the reason that people quit their diets in the first place. They're not losing weight fast enough. They are, but it's not consistent. And they can only get it right sometimes. And they can never figure out why it is they're losing. And tracking calories allows you to gather all of that data so that you have answers, you have reliability, and you have consistency. And that's really, really big.

So I implore you, if you have not tried it, it doesn't take that much time. It's a skill. The more you do it, the faster you get at it. Try tracking your calories. It makes a huge difference. If you don't know where to start, go to my website, download the free nutrition guide. It's got everything in there. It makes it very, very easy for you to understand how to do this.

And you'll have everything you need to successfully lose weight. to do this and you'll have everything you need to successfully lose weight. and share the episode to your Instagram story or share it to Facebook. But be sure to tag me so I can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how I can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. Number four, and this is a big mistake that a lot of people make and it's actually eating back exercise calories. So in about, I'll say about 2011, Fitbits kind of burst onto the scene and started to become really popular as a means to track exercise calories. It might have been like 2012.

It really blew up in like 13, 14, 15. And so the new name of the game was I'm going to wear my watch. I'm going to see how many calories I can burn in my workout. I'm going to try to burn as many as possible. And for fat loss, expending a high amount of calories during your exercise is certainly a helpful tool. But here's a big thing a lot of people do, is they calculate how many calories they should eat. They use an online calculator, and let's say they get a number like 1,800, they go, okay, I'm going to eat 1800 calories. Here's the problem. When you calculate that number, there's almost always an activity multiplier, which takes your exercise into account. And so what these people do is they get that

number, but they forget that their exercise is already included. Then they go to the gym and they try to rack up the highest total possible on their metric device, like their Fitbit or their Apple Watch, which are empirically shown to be inaccurate. Multiple tens of percentiles sometimes. They're not accurate. They usually overestimate what you're burning. And so they think they're supposed

to eat 1800. They go to the gym. Their Apple Watch says they burn 600, but really they only burn three. So they take that 600, they put it on top of that 1800 and they eat 2400 calories. Let's say their maintenance was 2300. All of a sudden, not only are you no longer in a deficit, but you're actually eating back such a large portion of your calorie total that you're in a surplus. And this happens an unbelievably surprising number of times. surprising number of times. I cannot tell you how many people tell me or ask me a question on a daily basis on Instagram, should I eat back the calories I burn on my Apple Watch? Should I eat back the calories I burn on my Fitbit? And the answer to that nine times times out of ten, is no. You should not do that.

You're letting more calories back in that you already calculated into your deficit, and you're extending the duration and increasing the likelihood of confusion. So do not eat back your exercise calories. Number five, and this is a big one because a lot of people don't understand how food mass and food volume impacts the scale. But if you eat a big meal before you go to bed, or you eat a big meal before you go on the scale, you're going to be holding that food mass until you excrete it when you step on the scale. So it's in your best interest to weigh yourself in the morning, fasted, without clothes on, after you have used the bathroom.

That includes both urine and feces. You want to excrete that stuff because if you eat a huge meal, particularly if it's a sodium rich meal, you're going to be maintaining the mass of the food that you've ingested but have not excreted. You're going to likely be holding fluid from that meal from the sodium because sodium is going to pull in more water. If you had alcohol, you're likely going to be holding water due to systemic inflammation. So all of these things are considerations when you step on the scale. And a lot of times what I'll do is if I step on the scale and I have a high weigh-in and I know I had a big meal before, I will actually

write that down in my log. I'll write down my weight, but I'll also write down I had a big meal the night before this weigh-in. I'll write down what that meal was. And then when I step on the scale the next day, usually I see a big drop. And it's not that I lost more fat. It's just that's the big drop from having likely excreted that meal, normalized my fluid retention, maybe bumped out some of that systemic inflammation. But if you eat a big meal and you step on the scale, even if it was a big meal that was in the inclusion of a calorie deficit, if you haven't digested it all the way, it might not look the way you want to look on the scale and people get frustrated. So you have to understand the mass of the food that you ingest and the qualities of

that food, if it's carbohydrate rich, sodium rich, served with alcohol, might trick the scale. So you have to be a little bit patient there and understand that's all a part of the greater process and that your scale is weighing your mass. It is not weighing your body fat. It is weighing your mass. So if you're wearing a lot of clothes, if you have shoes on, if you've eaten a big meal, all of that stuff has the ability to impact what you see on the scale. All of that stuff has the ability to impact what you see on the scale. So another reason people struggle with losing weight has to do with stress.

So reason number six is stress. Stress oftentimes will increase a hormone known as cortisol. And cortisol is a catabolic hormone. It can actually help with fat loss and it can actually help with muscle loss. One of those is good, one of those is bad. But the problem with systemically elevated cortisol is it will lead to increased inflammation and fluid retention. And if you have a stressful day and you have an acute spike in cortisol, while it might not directly impair fat loss and it might not lead

to muscle loss, it may directly correlate with increased retention of water. So it's very important to at least understand in the short term how your stress might be impacting fluid retention and how that might be tricking the scale. So in the same way, I recommend taking notes around a bigger meal and saying, oh man, yeah, I had So in the same way I recommend taking notes around a bigger meal and say, oh man, yeah, I had a bad weigh-in. Oh, I had a big meal the day before. I better write that down. You might want to do the same with your stress. And that's why with clients who I work with online, during our weekly check-in process, I actually request that they rate their perceived stress on a scale of one to five, because that helps me look

at weight loss metrics with a more holistic approach and a more holistic response to how things are actually going. And so you just have to look at things in the greater, you have to zoom out a little bit, I should say, when it comes to having an accurate representation and creating some peace of mind around this process. Because if you are stressed from work, from family, from relationships, you step on the scale and you see it go up and you don't have this understanding of how stress can manipulate water fluid retention, you're going to add even more stress as you beat yourself up. But having a little bit of understanding and knowledge around there gives you the ammunition required to be able to step on the scale when you're stressed. Say, okay, didn't drop. Maybe it went up a little bit, but that's okay. I genuinely track my calories. I know I'm in a

deficit. I'm stressed. I'm probably holding a little bit of water, a little bit of fluid. I can move on from this. Instead of letting that frustration turn into an even greater issue and add even more stress, which takes us to number seven. This is the last one. And this is perhaps one of the ones that I think has been criminally overlooked the longest. And that is how sleep impacts weight loss. And it impacts weight loss indirectly, directly, physiologically, behaviorally, in pretty much every facet and avenue you can imagine. So the amount of sleep we get is actually directly correlated with the type of tissue we lose when we lose weight. They've done studies where they've taken two groups of people, one slept six hours, one slept eight. They ate the same exact diet. They lost the same amount of weight. They've done studies where they've taken two groups of people, one slept six hours, one slept eight. They ate the same exact diet. They lost the same amount of weight. But the group

that slept six hours lost a lot more muscle, which is deleterious to your metabolism, your strength, and your physique. The group that slept eight hours lost exponentially more fat. So getting adequate sleep is really important for losing the right type of tissue. And if you're dieting like crazy and you're in a calorie deficit, you may be losing weight. But if you're not getting enough sleep, a lot of that weight may come from muscle. And if you lose too much muscle, you're going to expedite how quickly your metabolism adapts to weight loss because you're going to be losing more metabolically active tissue and becoming a smaller person. So sleep becomes incredibly important for maintaining muscle tissue and encouraging body fat reduction while on a calorie deficit. Here's some of the other ways sleep

really impacts fat loss. It can help us manage stressors, right? Which is something we just talked about in the point before. It's been shown that people who get adequate sleep tend to make better decisions around food. They tend to be more rested and have better performance in the gym. So not only will increased sleep improve the likelihood of you having better sessions in the gym, it'll also improve the likelihood of adhering to your diet as you're going to be less fatigued and more likely to make better decisions. So sleep is really, really important when it comes to losing body fat, but also adhering to your diet, performing at the highest level, and losing the right type of tissue from a deficit. So again,

guys, to circle the wagons and reiterate here, the seven most common reasons I find people are not losing weight is number one, they're simply being too impatient. They're not understanding that if it took years to gain weight, it may take years to lose it. They want it too fast. They're not willing to do the work and accept that this is a journey. Number two, they're unaware of how glycogen, water, fluid, and resistance training can impact the initial rate of weight loss. You might still be losing fat while you rehydrate muscle tissue, gain muscle tissue, and hold on to glycogen. And that's part of the reason why so many people quit so early on. The biggest reason that experienced lifters and dieters can't lose weight, I've found, is because they're not adequately tracking calories.

They're under-reporting. It's very common. It makes sense. Humans are bound and prone to make errors. But if you're not being open and honest with yourself about this, you say you're tracking your calories, but you're just eyeballing them, that's 9 out of 10 times the biggest reason why people cannot lose weight as quickly as they would like. Another reason is people tend to eat back their exercise calories, and this has become exponentially more prevalent with the advancement of devices like

Fitbits and Apple Watches being used to track training expenditure. Those devices are simply not very accurate, and generally you've already equated your exercise calories into your total daily energy expenditure. And then your deficit should represent all of that stuff. Adding it back in is just probably more likely to pull you out of a deficit. So another one people tend not to consider is the size of the meal or the food that they ate the day before, the contents of the foods that they ate the day before, whether they're rich in carbohydrates, whether they're rich in sodium, whether they take a while to digest, which fattier foods typically do, whether they were served with alcohol. All of those things can change the way the scale represents and paints the picture the following day. So being aware of that can really help you gather a more representative sample of data. Another reason is stress and the correlated water retention. People simply just

tend not to understand that. And then lastly, sleep, which we just talked about ad nauseum. So understanding that weight loss is multifactorial and it's impacted by a variety of different things should give you a little bit of peace of mind when it comes to gathering data each and every day. And that's exactly what the scale is. It's an opportunity to gather data. And those are the most common reasons that we see fluctuations or that people aren't losing body fat for whether it's that they're not in a deficit, whether it's not that they're grasping the entire picture, but knowing these things is unbelievably valuable and it will likely help you out on your fitness journey. So

guys, do me a favor. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a screenshot, share it to your Instagram story and tag me. Leave me a five-star rating and review on iTunes. It means the world. If you write a review, it's even more impactful. Let's help get this out there so we can start to end some of the stigmatization around scale and help people start to feel empowered around losing weight so we can all live a healthier life. Thank you guys so much for listening and have a great day peace