Weight Loss - Keeping it off

Of all the arguments for weight loss and strength training, here is the best reason.  Strength training is what helps us maintain the weight loss.  Again, it doesn't significantly increase our BMR, but it helps.  Like I've said before, if you want to loose weight, you need to change.  Permanent change yields permanent results.  Temporary change (Fad diets) yield temporary results.  Which one do you want?  Change is usually challenging, but is also very gratifying when made permanent.


Losing weight is easy. Keeping it off is the real challenge. Most people do not successfully maintain their weight losses, and some individuals regain even more weight than they lost. Naturally, this is a discouraging scenario, and recent headlines which claim that being overweight or obese is primarily a genetic issue might make it seem like there’s nothing you can do about it. Why bother changing your current diet or exercise routine if any positive results are completely out of reach?
Before you succumb to the dubious doctrine of genetic pre-destination and give up on your weight loss goals, there are a couple of basic dieting principles that you should know about. These are not hard and fast rules, but if you’ve had trouble with weight loss in the past, then you may want to consider adopting a new approach.
Principle #1: Create a caloric deficit with your diet
Exercise is critically important for weight loss and maintenance but unless being an athlete is your job, exercise doesn’t burn as many calories as you think. It’s much easier to create a caloric deficit with your diet. To illustrate: a large McDonald’s french fries containing 500 calories can be ingested in about five effortless minutes. However, burning off those 500 calories will require about 5 miles of walking/jogging/running. This is why anyone who thinks they can just add 500 calories here and 300 calories there throughout their day, because they’re going to burn it off with exercise later, is basically guaranteed to fail their weight loss goals.
It would serve you better to think of exercise as a necessary component in support of your reduced calorie diet. Lose weight with your diet. Strength training provides the stimulus to maintain muscle mass so that the majority of your weight loss comes from stored body fat. Adding some cardio can help to mobilize some of that body fat, as long as cardio sessions aren’t too lengthy or intense. The more fat you have to lose, the more cardio you may be able to do, but that doesn’t mean you should adopt an approach like they use on the Biggest Loser show.

When you’re on a diet, working out to the point of exhaustion is unnecessary and counterproductive

Even if you have the available time and the extraordinary dedication required to create a large caloric deficit with exercise, that’s not necessarily the ideal approach for weight loss. Recovering from a high volume of physical activity is harder, maybe even impossible, when you’re at a caloric deficit because of the stress it places on your body. This is usually more of a concern with women who obsessively try to obtain their weight loss goals by combining a severely restricted diet with an excessive amount of exercise. Lyle McDonald explains Why Big Caloric Deficits and Lots of Activity Can Hurt Fat Loss:

Dieting in general is a stress.  And of course training is a stress.  And the more extreme you do of each, the more of a stress occurs.  And I suspect that a lot of what is going on when folks try to combine excessive caloric deficits with massive amounts of activity is that cortisol just goes through the roof.
Chronic elevations in cortisol can cause a lot of bad things to happen [such as] water retention [and] a drop in metabolic rate due to leptin resistance… For a lot of people… the combination of excessive caloric deficits and excessive amounts of activity seem to hurt rather than help fat loss… Some folks can get away with it but, for many, it tends to backfire more than anything else.

In light of this, an appealing solution may be to lose weight solely through diet, as is often promoted on TV. Can you lose weight without exercising? Sure, you can, but your chances at keeping it off are very slim. What the mass-media advertising and entertainment outlets won’t tell you is that in the absence of exercise, especially some form of resistance training, you are just about guaranteed to lose muscle mass, which sets you up for rapid weight gain once you come off the diet. They also won’t tell you that exercise becomes even more important after the diet…
Principle #2: Maintain your weight loss with exercise
You can’t stay on a diet forever, but you can’t just go back to your sedentary, overindulging lifestyle, either. If you don’t want to squander all your hard work, then you need to make some effort to maintain your weight loss. In reality, this is the hard part of any weight loss program, mainly because most programs don’t offer any guidance for life after the diet. For one thing, you still need to be mindful of what you eat. That doesn’t mean you have to obsessively calculate calories for every single meal you eat for the rest of your life, but you do have to exercise some self-control if you want to maintain your weight. Sorry, that’s just the way it works!
Even more importantly, however, you simply cannot reduce your levels of physical activity because of a phenomenon called adaptive thermogenesis. Your brain defends against weight loss, partly by lowering your resting metabolism, and to an even greater extent by reducing your daily level of spontaneous activity. This is a non-conscious process and even if you diligently take the time to exercise, you can still end up burning considerably less total calories if you’re completely sedentary throughout the remainder of your day.

Most people regain the weight they lost because they resume a sedentary lifestyle

An interesting study which sought to measure adaptive thermogenesis found that individuals who have lost 10% of their body weight expend over 400 calories less per day than individuals who weigh the same, but have not lost any weight. This is why it’s so hard to keep the weight off, and why most people who lose weight end up regaining it. James Krieger expands on these research findings in his article, Why Is It So Easy To Regain Weight? and highlights the solution:

The good news is that, since the reductions in energy expenditure are primarily due to decreases in activity, one can make conscious choices to increase physical activity… In one study, subjects who exercised enough to expend 1000 calories per week regained most of their weight, but subjects who expended 2500 calories per week maintained most of their weight loss. Similar results have been observed in other studies. Subjects in the National Weight Control Registry, a database of individuals who have maintained at least a 30 pound weight loss for over a year, expend an average of 2620 calories per week in physical activity.
Remember that physical activity doesn’t have to include formal exercise. NEAT [non-exercise activity thermogenesis] makes up the majority of your activity energy expenditure, and thus has the greatest ability to impact it… Thus, anything that you can do to accumulate physical activity throughout the day will dramatically improve your chances of maintaining weight loss over the long haul. Even small things, like parking a car further away from a destination, or taking stairs rather than an elevator, can add up if accumulated throughout the day. But because activity can decrease on an almost unconscious level, you need to make a deliberate conscious effort to get as much activity as possible in throughout your day, every day.

This will logically require an increase in activity once the diet is over, which is where the overwhelming majority of dieters veer off course. But, how do you determine your daily caloric expenditure without access to a lab? One option is to wear a Bodybugg armband which estimates your caloric expenditure for you, as long as you understand that it can only provide an estimate. I don’t have any experience with such a device, but I can point you to one review by Leigh Peele and another by Lyle McDonald, both of which offer some pros and cons worth considering.

Find ways to include more activity throughout your daily routine

Personally, I don’t see any pressing need to purchase a Bodybugg. Having a number to start from is indeed helpful, but a caloric recommendation can be calculated easily enough by hand without having to add another electronic gadget to your wardrobe. Either way, you will still have to determine whether you are maintaining your weight or not, and then adjust your activity accordingly. Again, you can’t ignore calories, but the most important step you can take to successfully maintain your weight loss is to increase your level of physical activity. If you slowly start to regain weight, then simply increase your overall daily activity a little more to stabilize your weight.
Sustainable weight loss is within your reach!
Without even going into the specifics of various exercise programs, caloric recommendations, healthy food choices, diet breaks, or the psychological and social challenges to changing behavior patterns (losing weight is simple on paper but that doesn’t mean it’s easy in real life), the two principles covered in this article should provide just about anyone with an effective outline for a weight loss and maintenance plan.
To summarize: Diet and exercise are both vitally important for weight loss, but you can place a greater emphasis on one over the other depending on where you are in your weight loss program. To lose weight, focus on creating a caloric deficit with your diet, and support that diet with moderate physical activity and exercise. Then, maintain your weight loss by increasing the volume of your total daily activity, and support those efforts by keeping your caloric intake within maintenance levels.
Hopefully, this sheds some light on a potentially frustrating endeavor and puts your weight loss efforts into proper perspective. Please feel free to share any comments, questions, or personal experiences below…