What Actually Matters For Fat Loss Part 3
What Actually Matters For Fat Loss Part 3
Strategies for dietary success
So we covered Energy In in part 1 and Energy Out in part 2. Now what? I’m going to zoom out to talk about the bigger picture as well as cover practical strategies for improving both sides of the energy equation in parts 3 and 4.
To reiterate what I said in earlier posts, it’s always best to assume that if you aren’t losing fat, you’re likely still eating too many calories. You can increase your energy demand through exercise, but the best fat loss strategies also address energy intake.
There are many ways to skin a cat—or to build a fat loss diet in this case—but they all have a few things in common:
Allow you to eat fewer calories
Have enough protein to support lean tissue growth or maintenance
Allow you to manage hunger
Prevent micronutrient deficiencies
Are nice to your digestive system
Are sustainable
You can structure your diet however you like as long as you’re satisfying those conditions. You can limit your feeding window, reduce carbohydrate or fat intake, avoid ultra-processed foods, eat predominately high volume foods, limit or eliminate liquid calories, etc. There are many arrows in the quiver of fat loss.
The important thing to remember is that your diet should fit your lifestyle, not the other way around.
Practical Suggestions For A Better Diet
Psychological Tricks For Eating Less
Our bodies don’t inherently know how much energy is in the food we eat; instead we use contextual information to “guess” how much we’re eating. If we can manipulate that information to make us think we’re eating more, we can eat less. Here are some strategies you can try.
Container and Portion Size
The amount of food relative to the container plays a significant role in how much we eat. Eating on small plates and out of small containers can lead to eating less, and the reverse is true of big containers and plates.
Here are Menno Henselmans bullet points to ensure your eating environment is conducive to eating less:
Your plate should be barely bigger than the desired portion, but if your plate is obviously too small, your brain likely won’t be “tricked”
Use brightly colored plates to contrast with the food, which makes the food appear “larger”
Use small cutlery
Similarly, we tend to eat what we’re served, because our brains see this as the amount of food we are supposed to eat. We eat most of the food we’re served regardless of the amount, so the amount of food we eat increases almost linearly with how much food we are served or serve to ourselves. This is called the Clean-Plate Effect.
If you don’t have control over the portions or arrangement of food, cutlery, or utensils, there are plenty of other strategies to try.
Doggybagging
Packing food away to eat later is a great way to remove food from your visual environment, and it allows you to enjoy the delicious meal twice, which I’m wont to do. Couple that with the fact that some foods straight up taste better as leftovers, and you have a recipe for extending your money and eating less.
I find that when I can decide at the beginning of a meal how much I want to eat and doggybag the rest, I feel much better and less bloated at the end of a meal and I’m not any less full. Fullness has diminishing returns and our bodies aren’t always great at telling us when it’s time to stop eating. I’ve found eating until you’re sick is not a great strategy. Who knew?
Emma Story Gordon—who is a great follow on Instagram btw—has said something like, “What is the next bite going to do for me that the last didn’t?” That’s a great question to keep asking yourself when you’re eating. Not only is eating until you’re full to bursting going to lead to overeating, it’s going to make you feel like shit in the process.
You also have to rid yourself of the notion that you’re “wasting” food if you don’t clean your plate. In the words of Gordon, you are not a rubbish bin (or garbage can if you’re from the US); the food was “wasted” the moment you ordered it. This is a hard mindset to escape, but once you do, it can be transformative.
Availability or “Just Being Around”
I never have food in my apartment unless I intend to, and want to, eat it. It blows my mind how many people have junk food all over the place in their homes. They’ll say something like, “What if I want a snack?” It’s precisely because that food is there that you get snacky; that, or you’re not eating enough or the right foods at meals.
I understand that this isn’t always your choice: someone brings food into the office, your partner brings the food into your home, you go to a party and there is all sorts of temptation. You won’t always be able to control your environment, but the more of your environment you can control, the better outcomes you’ll have.
Mitigating the “just being around” damage:
Don’t bring food into your home that you don’t want to eat. You need to make this decision when you have the mental wherewithal to make the right choice. If snacks are around when you’re mentally exhausted and hungry, you will eat them.
Eat before you go out to parties or bring your own snacks. I know how lame this sounds, but it’s a little easier to avoid snacking if you’re already satiated or if you’ve got snacks with you.
Saying no in the beginning is much easier than saying no once you’ve gotten started. As soon as a delicious snack hits the reward center in your brain, you’re much more likely to go off the rails. It’s easier to let the temptation go when that pathway hasn’t been activated.
Don’t Eat While Distracted (Mindful Eating)
I mentioned before that your body doesn’t actually have an internal mechanism for gauging how much you’ve eaten. It uses contextual information and combines it with internal satiety signals to “guess” at intake. So it makes sense that eating in a way that doesn’t allow either of those mechanisms to work as intended can lead to overeating.
Distracted eating prevents us from properly assessing how much we’re eating, so eating with friends, eating in front of the television, or eating while looking at your phone can lead to overconsumption. Mindful eating as a practice has picked up a lot of steam over the years, because we’re more distracted than ever and there is a high cost for distractedness in our modern food environment. In other words, we can do a lot more damage if we aren’t carefully monitoring intake.
I’m not safe from this, as I often eat in front of the tv while watching my favorite show. Fortunately it hasn’t become a problem because I don’t give myself unlimited access to food when I do this. My meal is always the same size so being distracted doesn’t have the same adverse effect.
If I were in an environment where I could keep eating to my heart’s content, there is no question my intake would increase. The best way to avoid this situation is to try to focus as much as you can on what you’re putting into your mouth, or to take my approach and simply limit the damage you can do when distracted.
Palatability (Tastiness)
Your taste sensitivity will be dictated by the foods you regularly consume. If you eat healthy, minimally processed whole foods, eating a “typical” western dessert will be jarring. On the flipside, if you’re constantly eating processed, flavorful foods you may find healthier foods bland by comparison. Making healthy food choices is already hard enough, so making those foods taste worse can make it damn near impossible.
You want to get to a point where healthy foods taste amazing to you and you can do that by infrequently eating junk food, but also by eating only when you’re hungry. Broccoli may sound terrible if you’re not hungry and you subsist on a processed diet, but I bet you gobble that broccoli up if your stomach is rumbling and you have a more sensitive palate.
I’m not saying you can’t occasionally eat more indulgent foods, but the more often you eat them the less likely you’re going to crave healthy food. I can attest to this personally. When I regularly eat well and only when hungry, healthy food tastes incredible.
Your Social Environment
We are heavily influenced by peer pressure or maybe even subtly influenced by our social environment. We’ve all had times where we were pushed to drink or eat more than we otherwise would have, but it can also happen less directly.
What the people you’re eating with order will often dictate what you eat. If people are choosing healthier menu items, you are more likely to follow suit, but the same is true if many choose unhealthy options.
This isn’t a strategy so much as it is something for you to be aware of. Looking at the menu ahead of time, which I mention in the next section, can prevent you from being swayed by the orders of your dining company.
Planning Ahead
If you want to successfully lose fat, you must be willing to predict and plan for moments of friction. We tend to make the worst choices when we’re hungry, so having something already made will decrease the risk of making unhealthy choices when we’re most vulnerable.
Most of the people I know that have their diet on lock take several hours on Sunday to grocery shop and meal prep. It can be depressing to spend a great deal of time on one of your two days off meal prepping and grocery shopping, but it will save you time, calories, and money during the week.
The trick with meal prepping—or any habit you don’t want to do but need to do—is to find a way to make it as easy and attractive as possible.
Make Meal Prep Fun
In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about a concept called temptation bundling, where you combine something you want to do with something you need to do to make it more attractive.
For example, you could put on your favorite tv show, music, audiobook, or podcast while meal prepping. My ex girlfriend used to drink a glass of wine and watch her favorite shows/listen to her favorite music while doing it, which I think is fine as long as you’re not drinking right before bed and you don’t drink a whole bottle. If you don’t want the alcohol, you could use substitutes like non-alcoholic beer or wine or sparkling waters to scratch that itch with less negative impact.
The French have a term, mise en place, which refers to preparing everything you need before you start the process of cooking. It streamlines the entire process and makes meal prepping significantly easier. I find the ritualistic nature of getting everything ready to be quite satisfying.
Meal prepping can sound tedious, but it’s doing more front-end work so you don’t have to think when you’re exhausted during the week. It’s a great first line of attack against a volatile environment.
Just In Case Snacks
Managing hunger is the name of the game for long-term fat loss. It’s the hardest variable to take care of and the one most likely to derail you. If you’re not in a setting where you can have a full meal, having premade snacks to get you to the next planned meal can work. Things like protein bars, hard-boiled eggs, fruit, jerky, veggies and dip, Greek yogurt, string or cottage cheese, tuna pouches, popcorn, edamame etc can all work.
I don’t personally love the idea of snacking because it creates unnecessary volatility and usually stems from poor meal planning and/or an inability to deal with hunger. If you constantly feel the need to snack, take a long look at why. Are you not eating enough at meal times? Is your meal spacing irregular? Are you bored? Or are you eating because you’re trying to avoid uncomfortable feelings?
Once you’ve addressed the reason for snacking, you can use the healthier suggestions I provided to bridge the gap from meal to meal.
Look At The Menu Ahead of Time
I never used to look at menus ahead of time when eating out, but my friend group and my taste have expanded so I’ve made a habit of seeing what I’m getting into beforehand. I don’t think it’s entirely necessary, especially if you don’t eat out frequently, but many franchise restaurants will list nutrition info on their website so you can make informed choices.
I’m what’s called a satisficer, a term coined by political scientist Herbert Simon. In contrast to a maximizer, which is someone that wants the best possible solution, I’m okay with “good enough”. I’ll often make a choice from the menu ahead of time, so I’m not making a decision when rushed or under the influence of peer pressure or alcohol. Once the decision has been made—and it is presumably a healthier one—I need not think any more about it.
Checking menus like this can not only help you make decisions when you’re better equipped to make them, but it can also help you avoid restaurants that don’t jive with your tastes or goals.
Don’t Overcomplicate Your Meals
Most folks looking to start a fat loss diet think they’re going to have to eat chicken and broccoli for every meal, and while that would certainly work and may even be doable for some, it’s not sustainable for most. If you’re diet is going to be sustainable, you can’t hate it.
One of the best things you can do for fat loss is to get better at cooking at home. Not only do you save money and calories, but you decrease the risk of food burnout by increasing your culinary arsenal.
Even if you aren’t great at cooking, developing simple strategies to mass cook most things will allow you to properly meal prep and create enough variety to keep you from getting bored of the food you eat. I, for example, cook almost everything in an air fryer because it’s fast, simple, and the food always tastes amazing. Meats cook thoroughly and evenly, and I can make my vegetables crispy (which is my favorite way to prepare them), all by simply changing a couple settings and tossing them in.
The salient point is to keep things as simple as possible at first if the goal is to eat more at home. Trying to make food with a ton of ingredients or a long prep and cook time is going to make it hard to get off the ground. Find a few simple things you can throw together in large quantities, and slowly start to add recipes, and complexity, to the mix.
The Harsh Truth About Fat Loss and Your Diet
Our modern food environment is like a minefield; when looking at it, you might not ask “how can anyone be overweight?”, but rather, “how the hell can anyone stay at a healthy bodyweight?” The answer is by being ruthlessly committed to your health.
Others won’t want the same thing or care about your goals or desires. Colleagues might bring unhealthy food around you, family and friends will want to go out to eat all the time and drink, and worst of all, your significant other may not be on the same page. A partner that is overweight significantly increases the likelihood of the other partner being or becoming overweight.
At some point, you have to decide why you want this and the choices you make must align with your decision. That also means placing yourself in an environment conducive to success. You will almost never be able to control everything about your environment; just control what you can to minimize the influence it has.
You need some flexibility because the last thing you want is to get derailed with one slip up. But 90% of your decisions need to align with the type of person you wish to be.
Fat loss is equal parts personal drive and environment. The best environment won’t save you if you don’t have a strong intrinsic motivation to lose fat, and herculean willpower will lose to a poor environment through attrition.
To finish this series off (finally), head to part 4.
If you have any questions or comments, please drop them below the article. Thanks for reading.