“I’m eating really clean, but I just can’t lose weight”
“I eat well most of the time but the scales just won’t budge”
“I feel like I’ve tried every diet there is and none of them work, I don’t know what else to do”
These are just some of the common frustrations I hear on a regular basis.
Many women come to Alpha Fitness, fed up with trying to eat right for their goals of losing weight, toning up and feeling better about themselves.
Many of these women feel like they’ve tried everything with limited long-term success and are now just resorting to trying to “eat clean” or just choosing “healthy foods.”
Whilst this concept sounds good in theory, there’s a lot of grey area behind this idea of “clean eating” and if other more concrete nutritional principals are ignored — then just eating clean or healthy simply won’t work.
By the end of this blog, you will learn:
- What the heck ‘clean eating’ is and why it doesn’t work for many people
- The 2-step nutrition strategy to losing weight
- How keep your results in the long-term
- And much, much more!
You see, in our programs and challenge, like the 12-Week Tone Up we’re running now we emphasise how important it is for all of the women starting out understand exactly what to eat and how to eat, to achieve their goals.
By giving our clients access to our easy to follow meal plans and nutrition guide, that’s one way we really help to simplify the nutrition process when it comes to burning body fat and toning up.
Now, here’s the clean, lean and green stuff that you need to understand, in order to truly master your nutrition and escape the “clean eating trap”
Lesson 1: Understand that “clean eating” is just a health and fitness buzz word and could quite easily still lead to weight gain
What is clean eating, really?
Does it mean that your chocolate bar hasn’t been dropped on the floor and contaminated by the dust and dog fur hiding in your carpet? Perhaps it means you remembered to wash your hands thoroughly before you ate those donuts.
But seriously — the most accurate definition of ‘clean eating’ is to eat foods that have minimal processing. Whilst this sounds good in theory, there’s no clear definition of which foods are clean and which aren’t — I mean, how processed is too processed, for something to still be considered clean?
The biggest problem here when it comes to losing weight is that it doesn’t matter what kinds of foods make up your diet so much as HOW MUCH food (or calories) are making up your diet.
The inescapable truth of nutrition is that if you eat more calories than your body needs, you will gain weight and if you eat less than your body needs you will lose weight.
Lesson 2: Understand that the key to sustainable weight-loss is flexible dieting
A big problem with clean eating is that even though your chicken, rice and broccoli may be a “healthy meal” if you have no idea how much of it you’re eating, you can still over eat with it!
Flexible dieting might indeed sound like just another health and fitness buzz word BUT unlike “clean eating” there is a science to it.
All it really means is, tracking your calories and macronutrients (carbs, fat, and protein) and making sure that each of these, fit into your body’s individual requirements. The numbers of calories, and macronutrients will depend on your starting weight, level of activity, gender and ultimately your goals.
To start tracking, you’ll need an app like “MyFitnessPal” or some other tool to track your foods.
The best part about it is that you don’t have to cut out any of the foods you love! You simply need to factor them into your total caloric and macronutrient needs for that day/week.
Yep, have your cake and eat it too ladies!
Lesson 3: Your long-term results are up to you
Clean eating often fails because there are no clear instructions or parameters to meet, when people suddenly decide to do so. In the short term you’ll probably by default cut out a lot of high calorie foods, like the donuts, croissants, and bananas you were already eating and see some short-term progress.
That said, eventually habits start to slip and since you have no real recipe for success, in the long term you’ll start to sneak those delicious treats and the weight will creep back on.
With flexible dieting, since you aren’t sacrificing the foods you love, there’s no need to “cheat” or feel guilty about eating any particular foods.
So, if you want long-term results, with flexibility in your diet; practice tracking your calories and nutrients to meet your daily energy requirements — It really is that simple.
Even if you only track for a short period of time and then aim to eat similar foods without tracking, you’ll have a much higher chance for success than someone who literally has no idea about calories or macronutrients.
How long you want to keep experiencing results with flexible dieting is really up to you.
So there you have it, it’s really as simple as:
- Clearly define your goals
- Working out your calorie and macronutrient starting point
- Tracking your food
- Enjoy the long term results
If you want to find out how you can get started with flexible dieting and continue enjoying the foods you really love whilst still losing weight then send us a message and let us help you out.
We hope you got something valuable out of this,
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Happy Toning!