Why asking the wrong questions is keeping you from the weight loss results you desire.
Have you ever considered one of the following questions? What is the best diet for fat loss? or What type of exercise burns the most fat? If so, you are not alone. These are two of the most googled fitness questions. What if I told you these aren't the questions that lead you to the results you desire? As a personal trainer and coach, especially when it comes to weight loss goals, I see most people are searching for answers to the wrong questions. So, no matter the answer they find, it will not lead them to the desired results. Unfortunately, the answers many people get when they seek fitness information, lead them onto the hamster wheel of:
yo-yo dieting
fad diets
overly restrictive diets
crazy workouts
a poor relationship with exercise
a poor relationship with food
a poor relationship with one’s self
In this article, you are going to learn the power of levelling up your questions and how that can lead to the lifelong, sustainable fitness results you are after.
The Power of Questions
Questions shape the way we make decisions. Questions can alter the way we experience the world; questions can even hijack the brain. What colour are your bath towels? No matter what you were thinking about, when I asked you that question, your brain stopped what it was doing and considered the answer. Questions can be extremely powerful. When I first read some of Tony Robins' work, I was just starting out my fitness coaching journey. One quote has stuck with me:
"Quality questions create a quality life. Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers."-Tony Robbins
They say genius leaves clues. When I first set out in fitness, with the mission to help regular country people live happier and healthier lives. I made a conscious effort to study:
the habits of fit people
the best coaches, who had already transformed the lives of many people
people who have transformed their own lives and maintained their results
people that were already living healthy and happy lives
What was their secret? The above quote served as my framework. I needed to know what made these people different from the majority of the population.
What questions are fit people asking that everyone else is not?
In my search for the secret sauce I dove into books, podcasts, and videos, I went to fitness retreats and surrounded myself with the very people I wanted to become. I was a sponge for information and was waiting to discover the big secret that made these people different. What I discovered however, was that these people weren't so different at all, they were just normal people. They still went out and enjoyed themselves, they didn't spend all day in the gym, they didn't do crazy exercises. They didn't follow any whacky diets, they enjoyed their favourite foods and they didn't take every supplement under the sun. Many of them weren't even particularly athletic. They came from all different walks of life, with different careers, and different beliefs. They ate in different ways, they trained in different ways. Some were former athletes, and some had been obese and lost tremendous amounts of weight. So what did these people have in common, to now all be living fit, happy, healthy, and sustainable lifestyles? What were they doing that everyone else was not?
It turns out I never did find the magic pill because it doesn't exist. The answer is relatively simple. They have developed healthy habits, that they have done consistently over a long period of time. That's it! It sounds too simple to be true, but if you currently aren't where you want to be fitness-wise, then ask yourself this: Have you ever stuck to a diet or exercise regime consistently and for a long period of time (1yr+)? There is a reason you may have found it hard to stick to anything for more than a month or so, this reason is one of the main things that attracted me to coaching fitness. You are set up to fail by a vast majority of fitness information that's out there. You ask the questions I listed above because they are the answers you think you need. We are all conditioned to think this way, it’s not your fault! That's the availability bias at work. The availability bias is where we give more weight to information that is readily available. Like how we see horrific pictures of plane crashes on the news all the time. Many develop a fear of flying because they think of those images the next time they fly, the 20-odd million safe flights that take place every year don't elicit an emotional response so don't enter the mind. So, even though the chance of a plane crashing is very low we believe it is far more likely to happen than it actually is due to the availability bias. If you are interested in learning more about cognitive biases, I highly recommend Daniel Kahneman's book, "Thinking Fast and Slow".
When it comes to fitness information and availability bias, what do you see the most? It's the fad diets, the 6 week challenges, and the tv shows pushing rapid fat loss. Don't get me started on them! It's the "fast" this, the "best" that, the insert food here .......... to lose fat, the fat burners, and supplements that promise the world. This bullsh*t elicits an emotional response, the wackier it is, the more clicks it gets. So, it's what you see most often. Availability bias has us believing this is the stuff we need and it’s one of the reasons you ask those questions. I'm going to help get you off that hamster wheel, by showing you how to level up the questions you are asking.
Let’s start with the most common one:
What is the best diet for fat loss?
Most people get caught up in which is the best diet for fat loss, but they are losing the forest for the trees. What if I told you the differences between all the diets out there don't matter? The real magic lies in adherence. The main thing that matters is: What diet can you stick to? The number one predictor of success with dieting is adherence. All diets can work, there is no magic in any of them, and they all create an energy deficit (you consume less energy than you burn). This is what is required for weight loss. So if you absolutely love pasta, does going on a low-carb diet and cutting out pasta sound like a diet you are going to be able to stick to? Of course not. If breakfast is your favourite meal does skipping breakfast with a protocol like intermittent fasting sound like a diet you can stick to? Probably not. It doesn't matter what diet your friend used to lose a heap of weight or your neighbor’s second cousin used. If you want to lose weight and keep it off for good, you need to eat in a way that is sustainable for you.
When you understand this, it becomes clear why so many people jump from fad diet to fad diet, losing the same bit of weight and gaining it back again. This is called yoyo dieting and the more you do it, the harder weight loss gets. Willpower will get you so far but if you are cutting out all the foods you enjoy, eventually you will fail. It leaves people thinking there is something wrong with them when Mrs Jones down the road had success with the same diet. Little did you know that particular diet may have required very little effort for Mrs Jones to adhere to, so it was right for her, yet it cut out everything you enjoy so it was wrong for you.
People, who have sustainable success in weight loss don't ask: What is the best diet for fat loss? A question that eliminates all other ways of eating as inferior, a question that leads to answers like overly restrictive diets or fad diets, labelling foods as good or bad, or labelling entire macronutrients and food groups as good or bad. They ask much better questions, like:
How do I become a person who nourishes my body?
What is a nutrition protocol that I can adhere to?
How do I develop a better relationship with food?
Could I see myself eating this way for the rest of my life?
What are the foods that I absolutely cannot go without, what are some ways I can include them in my diet without overconsuming them?
You will see that these questions provoke thought, and they lead to actionable solutions, like working on the habits you need to develop. They don't eliminate anything entirely and they are individual to you.
If you see a diet being sold as superior for fat loss for any reason other than it helps create an energy deficit, then approach it with caution. There are many other health reasons, cultural reasons, and personal reasons why any given diet might be appropriate for someone, but it doesn't mean it's right for anyone else. If you are completely unsure of what a sustainable nutrition protocol might look like for you, then hire a professional to help you out. It's an investment in yourself that will pay dividends in the long run.
The fact that we still have TV shows running segments on "the best diet for 2023" does not present a solution but in fact the opposite, it is the very problem.
What type of exercise burns the most body fat?
This is another very common question when starting out with exercise. That people spend far too much time on. Again, it's the wrong question! People tend to massively overestimate the energy they burn from exercise. This is a big driver behind people searching for the type of exercise that burns the most body fat (or energy). Unless someone is spending many hours training exercise only burns a small portion of daily energy expenditure. Many people start out a weight loss journey thinking they need to exercise it all off. They go from doing minimal exercise to choosing the most rigorous form of exercise and smashing themselves into the ground. Just like the restrictive diets, this simply isn't sustainable. They may train hard every day of the week, for several weeks, but eventually, it will become unsustainable, and they will burn out.
The biggest problem with this "all or nothing" approach, is that it leads to an unhealthy relationship with exercise. People tend to think exercise needs to be about punishing themselves and burning off body fat. You start out with this mindset and for some time it can even motivate you to train. Although eventually, the motivation wears off, the training overstresses your body and you quit. You then feel like a failure when you can't maintain working out every day. The more times you fall off the exercise wagon from an unsustainable approach, the more you start to despise exercise. Even worse, is you also start to diminish your relationship with yourself. Just like with each failed diet attempt, you start to not trust yourself to see things through. Little did you know that you were setting yourself up for failure in the first place. This is the exact opposite approach to people who manage to maintain their weight loss for life.
Burning energy is a benefit of exercise, but in my opinion, it is a nice side effect, never the main reason to train. Outside of someone trying to get ready for a bodybuilding show where getting extremely lean is the goal, which isn't my thing, I don't see any other reason why burning energy would be the main reason to exercise. The main reason to train is to improve. It can be strength, speed, endurance, mobility, flexibility, or aerobic capacity. When you approach your training with the goal of increasing performance the results are measurable, they are objective. When setting up a training protocol the thing that is much more important than how much energy it burns, is the adaptation the exercise causes. For example, consistently lifting weights sends a signal to the body to get stronger, and the adaptation is to grow more muscle. Extra muscle burns extra energy even when you aren't training. So, one adaptation to lifting weights is that you create a body that burns more energy 24/7. That's a handy adaptation when you are trying to lose body fat and keep it off for life, wouldn't you say?
In the perfect world, I'd have everyone do the type of exercise that is going to cause the adaptation they are after. But, this isn't the perfect world! The thing that is far more important is choosing the exercise modality that gives you the best chance of sticking with it. Of course, you will optimize your results with the help of a coach, and you will learn how to train appropriately, safely, and for your specific goal, but it is not a barrier to becoming a person who exercises. If you are wanting to get started with exercise, follow these 3 simple tips.
1) Choose the exercise you most enjoy or are most likely to stick to
2) Start by doing only slightly more than you are currently doing
3) Repeat rule 2 consistently over a long period of time.
Once you've become a person who exercises, the world is your oyster with how you'd like to train.
Jason Phillips from Nutrition Coaching Institute always says: “Education drives compliance”. The more you can start to learn about the real benefits of different types of exercise, outside of just burning energy, the better relationship you will start to develop with exercise, and the more you can enjoy it, for what it is doing for you. Rather than being on the monotonous grind of chasing the energy burn.
Your workouts should build you up and leave you feeling energised, not tear you down to the point you can't recover.
The Instagram Workouts
When you see your favourite Hollywood star, with your dream body, doing a workout on Instagram the temptation is to do that workout. You think, "That's how they train, they have the body I want so that's how I need to train". What you fail to take into consideration is:
That is not the workout they were doing when they were at your stage in the journey.
It has taken many years of consistency in their training to build up the work capacity to get to where they are now.
Their body needs that sort of stimulation to cause an adaptation because it is still only slightly more than what they did last month
For you, who may have been doing nothing last month, that same stimulus is way more than you were doing.
Your body doesn't need anywhere near that level of stimulation to cause the same adaptation.
In fact, it will often overstress your body and negate some of your progress due to the recovery demands being so high.
The appropriate stimulus for you is doing slightly more than you currently are.
I'll let you in on a little secret from a personal trainer who programs workouts for people. The exercise you do is not the most important part. A poor program done consistently will yield greater results than a perfect program done inconsistently. Don't get hung up on the type of exercise you need to be doing, get hung up on how to become a person that exercises! This is where people who have achieved lifelong results are asking these better questions.
They don't ask: What is the exercise that burns the most fat? They ask:
What habits do I need to develop to become a person that exercises?
What is my current level of exercise and how can I improve slightly upon that?
How can I become 1% better than I was yesterday?
What is the adaptation that I am after and what type of exercise will lead to that?
How many days a week can I stick to right now?
What form of exercise most aligns with my main goal?
Is there something I'd like to train for?
What is the easiest habit for me to work on now so I can stack some small wins?
When you ask these types of questions, they lead to a healthier relationship with exercise. The answers you find don't eliminate any form of exercise or set you off on an unsustainable path. They make you look honestly at where you are right now, and set you up to start stacking some small wins. A little momentum can take a person a long way and I believe you have it in you to succeed. When you start asking yourself whom you need to become, rather than what you need to do, you will see many possibilities for the 1% improvement you are after. Stacking those tiny improvements for days, then months, and then years is how you truly achieve sustainable success in fitness and in life. I'm on a mission to help get people off the hamster wheel and form exercise habits that are sustainable. You have a far higher chance of maintaining weight loss results if you can make exercise a part of your life. So, like creating any habit, when you are first getting started the key is to make it easy. You can always build up once you've built the habit and have some momentum. Going too hard, too soon, and quitting, takes far longer in the long run.
Many people tell you to find the exercise you love, which certainly does help, but I can tell you from first-hand experience. You do not need to love exercise to make it a part of your life. I don't love working out, it's difficult and some days it's the last thing I feel like doing. I don't do it because I love exercising. I do it because:
I love is the benefits I get from it
I love the way it makes me feel
I love the feeling of being stronger than I used to be
I love the accomplishment you get from doing something difficult
I love the way it makes daily tasks easier
I love the energy it gives me
I love the transferrable life skills it teaches me, such as discipline.
If you can upgrade the questions you are asking. You might just find the answers that will lead you to the results you desire.
Whom do you need to become to achieve the results you desire? What is the easiest thing that you can start tomorrow that will move you 1% closer to becoming that person? Upgrade your questions, get yourself off the fitness hamster wheel, and on your way to a fitter and healthier life.
You can do it!
Cheers, Robbie
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