How to Start a Sustainable Weight Loss Journey
- May 10
- 8 min read
No matter what we are trying to do or change in our lives, we want fast results. We want to make more money now. We want to afford a nicer car this year. We want our house completely decluttered and cleaned in one weekend. And when it comes to losing weight, we want to see results fast. Diet culture and the fad diet craze have convinced us that we must be skinny and that we must be skinny now. It also sets us up for failure every single time.
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Diet Culture
We have ideologized being thin. The standard for beauty is extreme thinnest. An unhealthy, unattainable thinnest for most people. We have equated being skinny with being beautiful, healthy, and simply better. But skinny isn’t always healthy; in fact, often the people we idolize for their shape have suffered disordered eating or extreme, obsessive exercise.
Body Shaming. Along the same lines, not only do we prize the thinnest, but we also vilify weight. We shame others, as well as ourselves, for not having the “perfect” body, despite the fact that many of us have a perfectly beautiful body.
We moralize foods, labeling some foods as bad and feeling guilty when we partake.
And we promote fad diets, many of which are technically forms of disordered eating. We are pressured to lose an unrealistic amount of weight in an unrealistic amount of time and in an unsustainable way.
Fad Diets
I feel like the promise of quick and easy fat loss is the most detrimental concept out there. Fad diets overpromise and then totally underperform, making us feel like we are failures. Of course, we all wish we could get super-fast results. That’s why so many people are lured into the idea of fad diets.
Not that you can’t lose weight with some fad diets, but it’s not sustainable long term (and often would be unhealthy to try), and these diets will eventually fail us in a way that leaves us regaining all the weight we so diligently lost.
I consider a fad diet to be the equivalent of a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s any diet that promises fast and easy results, that vilifies any one food group or macro (think keto), requires you to eat a very limited variety of foods (think grapefruit diet), or any diet that requires you to ingest large amounts of supplements or food replacements or weird concoctions made from random kitchen ingredients.
Note – If you are morbidly obese or working with a doctor or nutritionist to overcome a health issue, you might find yourself on a prescription diet that has an element of what I mentioned above. That is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the diets that we "average Joans" will try out of desperation to quickly shed excess weight.
Some fad diets are just ridiculous. Currently, I keep seeing advertisements for a baking soda diet that promises you can lose about 45 lbs in 2 months. And there is another that recommends eating a ton of gelatin. Yeah, I understand the draw! Who wouldn’t want to be able to say their excess fat “just melted off”? But do these diets work? No.
A rather popular fad diet, one that is much more common and not nearly as horrifying as the gelatin diet, is a ketogenic diet. Keto is an extremely low-carbohydrate, high-fat, high-protein diet. You can lose pounds with this diet. However, when you cut out carbohydrates, you are also removing fiber (a very important part of healthy eating) and cutting out all the nutrients found in vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. The extremely high fat and high protein can cause or exacerbate certain health problems. Yes, you can lose weight following a keto diet, but it is not considered a healthy way to eat long-term. When following a keto diet, you aren’t really learning how to feed your body in the future, which means when you stop the diet, the weight is likely to return.
Do You Really Need to Lose Weight?
Before we go any further, do you really need to lose weight, or are you just falling victim to diet culture? I ask you to really consider this because I know so many people who talk about their weight being a problem when they are actually healthy, active people. The problem is simply that their body doesn't match what the media has convinced them it should be. Is that you? If it is, maybe you simply want to focus on improving your lifestyle a little, not necessarily on losing weight. For you, I would recommend checking out my 90 Days to Holistic Wellness series on YouTube.
Buckle In
If you are considering starting a weight loss journey, or maybe you’ve been on a weight-loss rollercoaster for years, I ask you to subscribe to my Blog or my YouTube channel so you can follow along with this new series on healthy weight management. It's a process to create long-lasting change, and you need to be committed!
I want you to avoid fad diets and instead learn how to feed your body in a healthy, sustainable way. While it will take work and dedication, it should NOT be an exercise in deprivation. I want you to enjoy your favorite foods and move in a way that feels good to your body. This weight loss journey is not about self-loathing or self-abuse. This time, we are coming at it from a place of self-love and self-care. That is the energy we are going to bring to it. It’s not going to happen overnight. We are going to take it slow so that it sticks. We are going to learn to take care of our bodies.
How to Begin
The first steps actually have nothing to do with losing weight and more to do with understanding where we are and what got us here. Please, don’t skip them. We don’t want to jump right into weight loss. If we do that without learning a bit about ourselves, we will likely end up right back where we started, and we don’t want to do that, right? So, please promise me… you’ll follow along with me here. No jumping ahead.
Before we can start, I need you to download a tracker app for your phone. This app is where you'll track all the relevant information we need to stay on track and know what's happening in our bodies. I personally use LoseIt!, but there are others, like MyFitnessPal. You need an app that tracks calories, exercise, and weight. Pick one and let's get started.
Once you have the app, we are going to start doing 3 things.
Action 1 - Log Your Food
Without making any changes, TRACK ALL YOUR FOOD for at least a week. Now, to be honest, we are going to be tracking for a long time, but this first week is the current state. This is what you are currently eating as part of your current lifestyle. Don't feel guilty about anything you log. There is no guilt. But you MUST be honest. Honesty is so important here. If you can't be honest with yourself, you will fail in this journey. And, it might be a little work at first. You may have to spend some time figuring out the calorie count of a particular dish you ate. You may have to actually weigh or measure what you currently eat to determine a serving size. But it's important to learn these skills because we'll be doing this for a LONG time.
An example of why we take the time to log current state: Recently, I noticed I had been slowly putting on pounds. I was quick to blame it on menopause. The blasted perimenopausal hormone shifts must be to blame. I was positive I wasn’t eating any differently. In fact, I do eat very healthy food. It had to be the hormones!! But then I did a little reality check. I downloaded a food tracker and honestly tracked everything I ate. It did take a little work; sometimes I’d have to look up all the ingredients I put in a dish to calculate the total calories and then divide them by the number of servings it made, but in the end, it was a rude awakening. My meals weren’t too bad, but I realized how often I was grabbing a handful of this, a bite of that, tasting this and that while I was cooking, helping myself to a couple of ounces of cheese just because I walked into the kitchen, grabbing a big handful of peanuts because I was bored, etc.
My eyes were opened. I couldn’t blame my hormones. That wasn’t the problem. I was the problem, and that was great news. That meant I could do something about it. Now, let me be clear: if you are of a certain age, your body might be battling you a little. Mother Nature wants us to put on a little extra weight before we become elderly. So before we move on to the second thing I want you to do, let’s talk about expectations.
Expectations
If you are in your 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, etc., you cannot expect to have the exact same body shape you had in your 20s. Even if you were to get down to the same weight, your body composition changes throughout life. Or maybe you have always been on the heavier side. Then, imagining yourself as a model-thin person is not going to help you. Think about what feels realistic and possible for you. What is healthy for your body?
Action 2 - Log Your Activity
TRACK YOUR DAILY MOVEMENT. You can use a pedometer app or simply your smartphone to track daily steps. Also, if you do formal exercise, log that in the app. We want a true assessment of your current activity level. Not how active you think you are or how active you want to be. Real data.
If you don’t do formal exercise AND you notice right away that your daily steps are below 5,000, find a way to increase them.
For women especially, most of weight loss is driven by what we eat, but activity levels also play a role. Let’s get up to 5,000 steps on most days as soon as possible, if you are physically able.
Before we move on, I want to note something about setting up your tracking app. This isn’t really important now, when we are just logging current behavior, but it will be important later. When you enter a workout, click the button at the bottom of the entry labeled “exclude from calorie total”. Once you are using the app to track your weight-loss calories, if you don't click that button, it will add additional calories for exercise. We don’t want that, and I will explain more about that in the next blog.
Action 3 - Log Your Daily Weight
TRACK YOUR WEIGHT DAILY. I know. It’s not all about the number on the scale. In reality, what is important is how we feel in our own skin. But you will want some way to measure your progress, and the scale is the easiest. Weighing yourself every day gives us valuable information. For starters, it's a good reality check on how much your weight naturally shifts day to day. We can average this week to calculate an accurate starting weight. Tracking our weight will provide us with data later on when we are trying to evaluate whether what we are doing is really working for us.
I always recommend weighing yourself naked, first thing in the morning. If you weigh yourself every day, you will begin to see your normal fluctuations. Every day, your body is just a little different. There are many things that can cause the scale to read a little higher – water weight, inflammation, undigested food, pending bowel movement, period bloating, etc.
And lastly, if you want to, this would be a great time to take some before pictures and or take some measurements. But if you don’t want to, that’s fine too.
Do those 3 things: track your food, track your exercise, and track your weight, to get a real, honest assessment of your current lifestyle before we talk about making any changes.
Parting Thoughts
Before you push back and tell me you don't want to do any of these things, let me push back and say that without this data, you will just be guessing at weight loss. You will never really be sure what you are doing is working, and when things don't go as planned, you won't have any data to help you troubleshoot the issue.
I understand the desire to simply implement a couple of small habits and hope for the best. Of course, you can go ahead and do that. But that is not what we are doing here. Here, we are trying to create new, sustainable behaviors to keep us healthy and feeling great for the long haul.
Stay tuned, I’ll see you again soon.
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