You May Want to Lose Weight, But Are You Ready?

Being brutally honest about your readiness levels can save you from the cycle of constantly starting a new diet.

You may want to lose weight. It’s a very common goal — and for many, has been intensified by the pandemic. We’ve been more sedentary, live with far more uncertainty, and are even more stressed than usual. Gyms have been closed. We’ve been moving less from being stuck in our homes and perhaps we’ve developed a habit of leaning on food for comfort more than we normally would. The end result is many people feeling uncomfortable in their bodies.

Is this relevant to your ability to adhere to a diet? Absolutely. Changing habits, dieting and trying to adopt an exercise regimen are all added stressors. People sometimes get confused by the word stress as if it is an inherently bad thing. It is in fact, a necessary thing. We need stress as human beings — it’s just dose dependent. Uncontrolled levels of stress that are never managed can manifest some serious issues. Just like uncontrolled levels of inflammation that are never managed can do some serious harm to our health.

Take exercise for example: if you never stressed your muscles, they would never be become stronger or bigger. When you train them with appropriate intensity, they will be put under mechanical stress, face some trauma and even have some micro-tears. This will result in inflammation. The inflammation can signal tissue repair and regeneration. So this acute inflammation can result in muscle gain and strength increase — which is a positive thing in most cases. Now, long term chronic inflammation is not ideal and can play a role in some serious health problems. Once again, the context of that inflammation or stress is required to assess whether it is contributing to more harm than good.

Back to stress — stress is an accumulative thing to look at. By that I mean the totality of the stress in your life. Work stress, emotional stress, financial stress, relationship stress, exercise stress and any other stresses all add up. Entering a diet would contribute to it even further. Your body will be under stress from being in an energy deficit, and your mind might be under stress from the cognitive restraint you’ll have to impose. Am I saying you shouldn’t diet? Nope. That would be quite hypocritical as I am currently on a diet as I write this. My point is to help you realize that dieting is not a casual thing to do. Assessing readiness levels and reflecting on how conducive your current environment is to diet can be the difference between success and failure.

What might readiness look like? For starters, you’ll want to make sure you didn’t literally just end a diet. From my personal experience (unless you’re just coming off a diet break) you’ll want to wait some time before entering an ambitious fat loss phase again. I took 6 months off in between this fat loss phase and my previous one. There was two reasons for this. I wanted to recover from the previous diet — by that I mean bring my maintenance calories back up and feel like my appetite was fairly regular again. Secondly, I wanted to mentally feel comfortable again with the idea of entering a fat loss phase. When I say that, I mean I didn’t want to have any dread toward it. If I did, I may have not been mentally ready.

Readiness may also look like your environment being suited for you to focus on your diet and committing to your training programs. One where you can prepare more foods, plan more in advance and have relatively less distractions. Holidays, vacations and busy social periods don’t usually fit this criteria. Which typically makes them ineffective times to dive into a big fat loss phase. They may be better suited for maintenance — which is more than OK. Respecting and practicing the skill of maintenance is something you’ll want to focus on if you want to maintain any results you achieve long-term, anyway.

So once you’ve assessed whether you’re mentally/physically ready for a diet and whether or not your environment is suited for it, then I would encourage you to take that information and move forward with whatever direction fits best. I hate to break it to you, but the best path forward for you at this exact moment might be focusing on getting your workouts in and practicing one health promoting habit at a time. Maybe that’s getting more protein in per day. Or adding in a serving of vegetables with your meals. Or adhering to a regular sleep schedule. Habits like these will pay dividends in the future. They just won’t have you hitting your unrealistic goal by the time you’re on the beach this year. Which is totally OK. As my partner likes to say “all bodies are beach bodies.”

If you do feel mentally/physically ready and your environment is relatively (to your life) conducive to successfully being able to adhere to your diet, then have at ’er. You have every right to feel confident about the likelihood of success assuming you follow the plan.

If you don’t feel ready, thats also totally fine. If you respect your reflections and wait until you’re actually ready, I’ll bet that you’ll be better off in the long run. You prescreened yourself and were honest with your conclusions. There is never anything wrong with that. It takes some serious humility and honesty — which is not easy to always practice.

If you don’t feel ready but wish to “grind through it” anyway, I want you to reflect on this. Have you ever met someone who was always on a diet? For years? Hell, maybe even decades? I know I have. One thing I can say about the people I’ve known like this is that I haven’t known them to ever reflect on whether or not they were in the right headspace. They’ve always said they were ready to diet. So they always were on a diet. This nonchalant approach to dieting can be a dangerous one. Dieting is literally entering a controlled starvation to help break down and utilize stored energy via fat cells. Just because it’s been normalized, doesn’t make it casual.

So in an attempt to avoid either shifting the same 10 pounds around or starting a new diet every Monday for the next decade of your life, assess your readiness. Be brutally honest about it. Fuck the shame you might feel if you realize you’re not in the proper space to execute the plan you wanted to. Give yourself the same advice you’d give a friend. If they were too stressed to overcommit to a diet, you’d give them nothing but support and assure them that there was nothing wrong with that. You’d maybe even commend them for being honest and meeting themselves where they were at. Do the same thing for you.

Remember, there are plenty of casual activities to engage in. Going for a nice walk is casual. Reading a book is casual. Grabbing a drink with a friend is casual. But entering a controlled (but safe) starvation in an attempt to drop and keep off body fat is not. That goal requires strategy, consistency, moderately hard work, and the patience to endure it.

Not so casual, is it?

-Coach Dylan