WEIGHT GAIN: THE MYTHS EXPLODED!

For most people, being overweight is not a nice place to find yourself. 

You feel uncomfortable. You feel unhappy. It affects your confidence and your relationships. You might even experience joint pain like back or knee issues.

If you can relate to some or all of the above, you’d probably like to do something about it.

But instead of just blindly following some diet guru, a one-fits-all meal plan from a magazine or advice from a work colleague whose weight has yo-yo’ed for the last 20 years, here’s my dream for you.

I would like to educate you so that you can not only change your body for the better, but understand how you did it, why you did and how to keep on doing it for the rest of your life so you never have to be uncomfortable and unhappy again.

In order to fix this problem, we have to look at how it happened in the first place.

How did you put on weight?

From a physiological perspective, the reasons why you gained weight are really simple. You ate too many calories for the amount you move.

Go back and re-read that one again.

You ate too many calories for the amount of energy you expend.

That’s it.

Before we go on, I just want to expand on this by exploding some popular myths around weight gain.

WEIGHT GAIN MYTH
You eat too late at night.

While this might not be optimal for good sleep patterns and your digestive system, this will not cause you to gain weight unless whatever you ate took you into a calorie surplus, i.e meant that you ate more calories that you needed

WEIGHT GAIN MYTH
You don’t eat enough.

While I’m sure there are busy times in work when you have to skip lunch, if you are carrying excess bodyweight, at some point you made up for this somewhere. It could be that you were snacking on biscuits while you were waiting for your dinner to cook, but somewhere along the line you caught up on and exceeded the number of calories you need for the amount you move.

WEIGHT GAIN MYTH
You ate too much fat.

Fat does not make you fat. It is excess consumption of calories that makes you fat. While it’s true that fat contains more calories than protein and carbs (nine per gramme versus four), it still cannot cause you to put on weight on its own.
However, you should be wary of snacking mindlessly on things like bags of nuts and nut butters in the belief that, because they have health-giving properties, you can’t gain weight from them.
Look at this picture of a handful of walnuts – 15g to be precise. Imagine you keep a bag of these in your desk drawer and indiscriminately pull out a handful every couple of hours. Maybe you do that five times a day. That is potentially 535 calories that could be going under the radar because you believe that they are healthy so can’t be contributing towards weight gain.

 

WEIGHT GAIN MYTH
You ate too many carbs

While it’s true that in the Western world, we do consume an awful lot of refined carbs, these on their own can’t make you gain weight. You only gain weight by over-eating calories. Obviously, it’s a lot easier to take in a lot of calories from these sorts of foods quickly (breads, cakes, biscuits, crackers, sweets, crisps, buns) than it is to over-eat chicken and vegetables.  Cutting carbs right out of your diet rarely works longterm as it becomes too restrictive and it’s not really necessary to lose weight.

WEIGHT GAIN MYTH
If you only eat clean food,  you’ll lose weight

Once upon a time when I started out, I used to preach the importance of clean eating for weight loss. And I still try to steer people towards eating lots of vegetables, lean meats, wholefood carbs and away from habitually eating refined carbs like bread, breakfast cereals, pasta, and very processed foods simply because these options don’t give your body the vitamins and minerals it needs for good health.
But I realised that the best diet for you is the one that you will stick to, that will keep you in a sensible calorie-deficit and that you will enjoy. There is no point in me telling you to eat your greens if the thought of broccoli turns your stomach! You might force it down for a while, but eventually it will trigger a binge.
These days, I tell clients they can have a little of the things they like and still lose weight if they are keeping track of their food intake.

 

WEIGHT GAIN MYTH

You’re overweight because you don’t drink enough water.   

Obviously it’s very important for your health to stay hydrated.  And there is some suggestion that being dehydrated can slow down your metabolism which could cause you to feel tired and maybe expend less energy. But it’s not going to cause you gain weight.   Weight gain happens when you put too many calories into your body for the amount you move.

 

WEIGHT GAIN MYTH
You gained weight because you skipped breakfast which caused your metabolism to slow down.

There is no need to eat breakfast to kick-start your metabolism. Your metabolism will speed up when you eat because the digestive process burns calories. It doesn’t matter what time of day you eat or how many times you eat.
Breakfast is a very personal thing which on its own has no bearing on whether you gain weight or not, as I hope you’re now learning having read down this far. The only thing that causes you to gain weight is over consumption of calories for the amount of activity you do.
If you like to eat breakfast, eat breakfast. Try and include a source of protein like eggs, protein powder, chicken, fish, steak (yes, despite powerful marketing by Kelloggs et all, you can eat the same food at breakfast that you eat at any other time of day!) to keep you full longer.
If you skip breakfast and have a healthy snack around 11am and that works for you, that’s awesome.
If skipping breakfast causes you to drop 700 calories on a Starbucks muffin and some sort of syrupy coffee at 11am, then this is probably not optimal behaviour. But again, as long as it doesn’t send you into a calorie surplus, that on its own won’t cause weight gain.

Moving on, let’s  touch on other things that CAN cause you gain weight but only because they influence your eating habits.

OTHER FACTORS

Stress

Chronic stress and associated tiredness can cause you to over-eat for many reasons.
*Your body needs to calories to fuel the production of stress hormones like adrenalin and cortisol which flood the body when you are stressed
You comfort yourself with sugary carbs because you feel unhappy, you need a boost of seratonin (happiness hormone) and the body needs carbs to make that.
When you’re stressed and tired, it’s often difficult to stay in a positive mindset that helps you want to make the effort to do the things you know will help you stay on track, like prepping your lunch. Instead you might reach for high calorie junk food because it’s easier.

Certain medications

Often medications like steroids and the contraceptive pill are blamed for weight gain. This is because both can increase your appetite which means you eat more and take in more calories than you need for the amount of activity you undertake.

 

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE GAIN WEIGHT?

Imagine you do a big shop. You get part way through the week and realise you’re not going to use all the food you’ve bought so you put it into the freezer for future use. When you run out of food, you can then go to the freezer and use up all of that lovely stored food.

This is basically what happens when we gain weight. If we take in more calories than we need, the body will turn that energy into something called triglycerides and store it in our fat stores until we need it. If we want to get the body to use that energy, we need to give it less calories than it needs to function (if you haven’t read the previous post on this, make sure you do!) so it will go to the freezer aka our fat cells where those triglycerides are stored and use our fat for energy.
Bingo! We lose weight.

The problem that most women have, is that we wait until we are backed into a corner by a looming birthday party we want to look nice for or a family holiday in two weeks and we cut our calories back way too far. We are hungry and miserable and can’t sustain this behaviour for long, so it all goes out the window after the even and we go back to square one, or in most cases even back to square zero.

Remember this: we were born with an infinite capacity to store fat. That’s why you see 500lb people on the Biggest Loser. As long as you keep over-eating, you can just keep piling it in to those fat stores.

SO HOW CAN WE FIX IT?

Stage one: Accept the truth.
Most people, pretty much everyone actually, underestimates the amount of calories they eat. Stop blaming other issues for our weight gain or lack of results and accept that if you are not seeing results, you are probably still eating more than you need for the amount that you move.

Stage Two: Accept that you need to keep a record
Start to weigh and track your food so that you can become educated about how your diet impacts on your health and fitness. myfitnesspal.com is the easiest way to do this because it’s all done for you, but if you can’t use or don’t want to, keep a paper diary or some sort of record. For a fiver, you can even buy specialist food diaries off Amazon. Less than the price of a bottle of wine!

Stage Three: Accept that the process is going to take a long time, up to a year to reach your goal.
Be patient and remember, the longer it takes the more it becomes a new set of habits and a lifestyle that’s going to be with your for the rest of your life. No more having to get holiday or Christmas party ready. You’ll just stay ready forever. What a lovely thought.

Stage Four: Accept the need to change
If you want to succeed you have to move away from the old dietary habits that haven’t served you well up to now.
Start prepping your food. Start making an effort to get protein in at every meal. Stop mindlessly shoving food into your mouth before you’ve even taken a minute to process what it is. Stop letting yourself go for hours without food, only to eat the contents of the cupboard the minute you get home. Your metabolism needs food, remember, and it doesn’t care whether it’s a family packet of crisps or a chicken salad. It doesn’t give a toss about you being healthy, it just needs to fuel the calorie machine. The longer you make it wait, the less chance you have of making good choices.
Next installment: Change the record: Why your own stories are stalling your success!