Why Calorie Deficits Don’t Work For Weight Loss Nutrition, Exercise & Calorie Deficits

So today we are talking about why calorie counting doesn't work and that's not to say that calorie counting doesn't work but if you are looking to lose weight, maintain weight or gain weight obviously calories matter and you often hear people say calorie counting didn't work for me. So in today's video we're going to talk about three reasons why calorie counting doesn't work and how you can avoid these pitfalls and make it work for you. All right so before we get into the first of those three pitfalls I'm just going to do a super brief background on energy balance and energy expenditure. If you feel like you have enough knowledge on this topic then you can head to the time stamp that I've popped below otherwise let's quickly chat about calories. Just on a quick side note this video is relevant to any goal whether you want to gain weight, just maintain your weight however in just the sense of this video I'm going to phrase it around weight loss because I know that's what a lot of people are here for. Okay so fat loss, you can't even think about the term fat loss without hearing the word calories come up and when we talk about calories simply it is a unit of energy. So you might hear me talking about calories and energy interchangeably throughout this video but essentially I'm talking about the same thing. The science of weight loss and weight gain in principle is very simple, if you consume through what you eat and drink more than what your body is burning on a regular basis your body is going to simply store that energy as excess body fat over time and vice versa if you consume less energy than your body is burning in a day then your body is going to need to take that energy from somewhere else and it will break down the fat storage and use that as energy over time. So if you want to lose body fat you need less energy coming in on a consistent basis than your body is burning and we term this a calorie deficit. So you want less calories in than going out. So if we want to create a deficit between what we have coming in and what we have going out obviously we need one key piece of information and that is how many calories our body burns per day. Now we term this the total daily energy expenditure and it's made up of four things. I'm not going to go into too much detail, I do have some more videos which I will link down below if you want a little bit more background on it. But essentially if we consumed the same amount of calories as our total daily energy expenditure we would expect maintenance of weight. So we wouldn't expect you to gain weight or lose weight over time. Now we are going to talk about this in a little bit more detail later but calculating your TDEE is not a perfect science. So it's always going to be a ballpark number that you can use to create your deficit and work from there. So once you know your total daily energy expenditure you'll use this number to then make sure that you are consuming less energy than that on a regular basis and then hopefully over time you will see weight loss. Now there is a lot of ways that you can create a calorie deficit and there is no one right way that's going to suit everybody. It really is very individual. But obviously you can focus on energy going out or energy coming in. Traditionally we focus more on nutrition, so energy coming in, as it's easier to control, easier to manage and also just easier to do sustainably for a long period of time. Regardless of the method you choose to do, you often find somebody who has tried something similar and said calorie counting didn't work for me or creating a deficit that way didn't work for me. And I've picked three of the super common reasons that we hear this time and time again and how you can make sure it works for you and avoid those pitfalls. Now I just want to sneak in a really quick point about what we do want to achieve when we're looking at calorie counting or creating a deficit and the key thing that I want you to focus on So regardless of what option you choose, it needs to be working with your specific lifestyle, your mindset, your preferences, your goals. Again, there is no right or wrong way but the key thing is it's something that you can stick to in a sustainable and healthy manner that's not going to overrun your life with any more stress or add any misery to your life. We want things to be easier, not harder. All right, moving on to point number one and this is so common, I see it nearly every single day and that is overestimating calorie expenditure. As we just spoke about, a calorie deficit is vital for successful fat loss and we base this calorie deficit off our total daily energy expenditure. So you'll have to bear with me here because there's kind of two points to this one point but they're both to do with TDEE and the first one is calculating your total daily energy expenditure wrong and therefore not having a deficit at all. So when we want to calculate our TDEE, there's a couple of different options. Firstly, we will often use something called the Harris-Benedict formula and this will give us an idea of your BMR and then from there, we multiply that number by an activity factor which will then ultimately give us what we think is your TDEE. Now again, this is not a perfect science so that's something to bear in mind. The second option is using an online calculator where you put some of your metrics in and it'll come out with a number and these also use the same formula. Now there is absolutely no problem with this at all. The problem comes when people take that number as gospel rather than just a ballpark figure or an idea. What we want to do is take that number and use it as a starting point to give us an idea of where we're at and then pick a deficit from there, see how our body responds over a period of time and then from our body's response, manipulate what we need to. As an example, and we'll use really simple numbers here, if the total daily energy expenditure came out at 2,000 and you decided to consume 1,600 calories per day and then you found after six weeks, you'd had very, very minimal fat loss then that would suggest that your total daily energy expenditure is actually a little bit closer to 1,600. So from there you might want to reduce your caloric intake slightly or you might want to increase your activity level or both of them at the same time. Now another level of complexity to this is that we are choosing the activity factor by which to times our BMR by and we might pick the wrong one. If we overestimate our activity levels we're going to get inaccurate total daily energy expenditure numbers and that ultimately can mean that we think we're failing if we're not losing fat So in terms of overestimating our activity levels when calculating our TDEE, it could ultimately mean that the number that we are getting for our TDEE is well and truly above what is maintenance for us. So what we now think is a deficit actually means maintenance and therefore we don't see fat loss and think that we failed. Now the other point to this point is people using fitness trackers to determine how many calories their body is burning through exercise and then consuming those calories back or adding that on to their total daily energy expenditure and we see this in MyFitnessPal because it always adds on calories burnt through exercise into your daily allowance so you get your daily calorie goal based on what your goals are but then they'll also add in any calories burnt so you get to eat back your calories. Now I've said this in a video before there's a couple of reasons why eating back calories isn't ideal and a huge part of that is the mindset and relationship between exercise and nutrition but putting all of that aside and looking solely at fitness trackers calculating how much energy is burnt they aren't that accurate and there's been quite a few studies done now into the accuracy of these fitness trackers and while they're good at calculating your heart rate or even the amount of steps you're doing in terms of calculating the amount of energy you're burning throughout the day through specific exercise and non-exercise as well they are really not that accurate and can be anywhere up to plus or minus 30% of what you actually are burning. So that's kind of what it says on the tin These can be a guide but they're not an accurate representation of exactly how much energy your body is burning so if you choose to then consume those calories back or incorporate that specific number in your total daily energy expenditure it may be incorrect and essentially just leads us back exactly where we were with the previous point. Also if you're interested in any of those studies I will link them down below and you can go and check them out. Okay so point number two is Now this one is super super common and often it is done completely innocently regardless of whatever method you use to calculate how many calories are coming in so whether you are using the plate method whether you're reducing portions whether you're putting it into a calorie tracker we can very very often overlook some of the smaller things that we consume so that could be a bite of bread here a squeeze of sauce there a sip of a drink here and suddenly these things start to add up and they add up quicker than we may think and I've always said this if I calculated in my head how many calories I was consuming throughout the day and actually somebody tracked every single thing and they weighed it out and they did the exact numbers I think there would be a huge disparity between what I think I consume and what I actually consume and every now and again I test this I try to add it up in my head as the day goes on and I track as well and I'm always always wrong I mean have you ever actually weighed out what a portion is for cereal or for peanut butter or for jam or butter or anything like that trust me it's it's not a portion not in my books it's not a portion now there is absolutely no problem with this at all but the issue arises when we have our total daily energy expenditure so for this example let's say 2000 we choose our deficit which we're going to say is 1600 we think we're consuming 1600 but actually we're consuming 1800 maybe some days we're consuming 2000 which brings us to a much smaller deficit or maintenance which means fat loss is going to be slower so ultimately over time we see slower fat loss or no fat loss and again we think we failed rather than being able to identify maybe we're actually consuming a little bit more than we think we are again that is not a problem at all if you can pinpoint it and go ah that is why no problem it's when it starts to mess with people's mindset that's when it becomes the issue so as you can imagine if you take 0.1 and 0.2 a combination of underestimating how many calories we have coming in and overestimating how many calories are going out this can sometimes lead to not seeing the results that we expect to see and that is when we hear it doesn't work for me I'm failing, I'm just going to give up and that brings us on to point number three which is focusing solely on daily calorie allowances our TDEE changes every single day how active we are, our energy levels, our motivation what we're doing with our lives changes every single day so it's totally realistic to expect that the amount of energy we expend every day is also going to fluctuate so when we create a calorie deficit we often think of how many calories we need to consume in a day because we're talking about our total daily energy expenditure but if that is changing then shouldn't our deficit change as well? it's just the thought that's not often out there that we could potentially look at calories as a weekly target a monthly target or a daily target and use them all interchangeably because ultimately we're looking long term which is what we want it doesn't matter what's happening day in day out but more so on the larger scale it really isn't any wonder that we think this way because we're often bombarded with daily health recommendations and daily calorie allowances on packaging and you often see lots of numbers thrown around just eat this many calories per day and you'll be fine so it's totally reasonable that we'd see a fixed number every day as a standard that we need to set ourselves but maybe think about having a bit more of a flexible approach and this may help in terms of being sustainable for the long term as an example and I do this with clients quite a lot if you looked at your calories as a weekly target rather than a daily target you're still looking to get the same amount of calories in per week and creating a deficit throughout the week however being a little bit more flexible in your approach just means it will fit in with your lifestyle a little bit more so say you have a social event on the Friday and the Saturday night so you know you're going to be consuming a little bit more maybe you're going to have a few drinks and you're going to be a little bit less active so they're going to be your bigger days in terms of calories and then Monday, Tuesday maybe you don't feel like you need as much so you're going to pull back a little bit or maybe you just wake up on Monday morning and you're just having a really crappy day and you just feel like today I'm just going to eat a little bit extra I'm not going to really move I'm just not in the mood that is totally okay because you have that flexibility to not have to stick rigidly to a daily allowance now this is not me saying that you have to take a weekly approach or you have to take a daily approach but it might just be something to think about in terms of having a little bit more flexibility and finding a way that works better for you rather than the rigidity of having to hit the same number day in and day out so that is it I really hope this video has helped I hope it made sense and that I was able to get it across in relatively a simple way now there are loads of other points I could have added to this video but I wanted to keep it as short and sweet as possible and really talk about the three that I see the most commonly as a personal trainer but if you have any more you can drop them down below open up a discussion ask any questions of course I will always be in the comments checking it out and otherwise thank you so much for watching this video and I will see you guys in the next one have an amazing day and don't be mean to yourself