The Weight Loss Trap (Why Losing Weight Isn’t Enough)

Chasing a lower number on the scale is a trap.
If you've played the game of yo-yo diets and weight loss..only to gain weight back..you know what I'm talking about.

Focusing on weight loss, instead of building muscle and chasing performance, could be the one thing keeping you from the body you actually desire.

If you want to avoid being skinny fat or rocking a dad bod, your focus needs to involve chasing performance..not just losing weight.

We see too many people spin their wheels trying to lose weight only to continue to be unhappy with how they look.

Why focusing on losing weight kept me stuck for over a decade

I know hyperfocusing on weight loss doesn’t work, because that was me for a long time.

I was always slightly overweight growing up.
At a young age I learned how to diet (which I later realized caused a lot of problems for me physically and psychologically)

Thankfully I found myself to be pretty good at football, and because of that I quickly fell in love with the weight room.

I added a significant amount of muscle in my teens through my college football years, but because I was a bit undersized for my position, there was always a pressure to gain weight.

Between being an overweight kid, and always feeling like I needed to maintain or add weight to my frame, I still had a deep desire to get lean following college football.

I just wish I understood at the time what was really needed to get there.

Right idea, wrong approach

The problem wasn’t my goal, the problem was my execution.

Any time you focus on the number on the scale alone, you’re setting yourself up for failure from the start.

The scale is a great tool for tracking average weight, but it’s just one of several data points you should be tracking.

Because it doesn’t tell the whole picture, and can actually cause you to get off track if you’re not careful.

In my head I thought getting from 205 lbs down to 190 lbs would be the transformation I needed.
And if I got down to 185 lbs, I would magically be movie star ripped (I was wrong on both)

As I lost more and more weight, I only ended up disappointed that I still didn't look the way I wanted.

There are plenty of things I wish I would have known sooner, but the number one thing would have been the importance of adding lean muscle and continuing to train for performance (and not just losing weight)

Because I was consumed with a number on the scale, I stopped lifting heavy (and even stopped lifting altogether at times), I was usually focused on eating less and exercising more, and I found myself following unsustainable workouts or diets that kept me stuck.

The key to your desired body composition involves more muscle and better performance. Not just weight loss.

This is important for three reasons:

1. More muscle actually makes losing weight (and more importantly, losing fat) even easier. This is because more lean muscle is the number one thing within your control to improve your resting metabolism.
2. When you set a performance goal, the number on the scale usually solves itself. 99% of the time performance goals (better mile or Murph time, increasing your squat or deadlift, doing more pullups) are more satisfying to reach. They're also easier to see progress in along the way, keeping you motivated. And to cap it off, our athletes love the way they look once they achieve these performance goals, making a weight loss goal no longer important.
3. Weight loss does not equal better body composition. If you lose a lot of weight, but don’t add muscle in the process (or you don’t already have a lot of muscle on your body), you’re going to be disappointed with the way you look, and you might sacrifice overall health along the way (especially if you ignore #1 and #2)

If your goal is to be lean athletic then weight loss is not enough.
You need muscle and performance.

There are other problems beyond how you look with focusing on losing weight alone:

Calorie deficits and chronic dieting cause physical problems

Spending too much time dieting can cause:

• A poor environment for muscle building
• Decreased physical performance
• Decreased energy, mood, or cognitive performance
• Decreased sex drive
• A negative impact on cortisol, testosterone, and other hormones

If you spend too much time dieting or focused on weight loss, you’ll sacrifice performance in the short-term and health in the long-term.

This gets even worse when it’s coupled with the next problem.

Restrict - binge - restrict cycles cause psychological problems

This goes something like this:

• You want to lose weight, so you get extra strict on limiting calories or certain foods or adding in crazy workouts
• You find it’s not sustainable. When life gets busy, you get stressed, or your willpower is depleted you give into cravings. This often comes with a ‘screw it’ mentality that leads to binging out on the foods you were restricting for so long
• You feel guilty or gain weight back that you lost, so you jump back into another cycle of restriction or over-exercising

And the cycle continues.

This is not only extremely unhealthy emotionally and psychologically, but is leading to more fat gain.

• When you’re in a significant restriction cycle, you’re sacrificing muscle and hormonal health
• When that’s suddenly followed by a binge cycle, your body is even more sensitive to storing fat, so you quickly gain all the weight back you lost (or more)
• You not only got minimal results when in a restriction cycle, due to a poor environment for muscle building and hormones, but you lost muscle along the way making your next weight loss effort even harder

There is a better way if your goal is sustainable fat loss (and not just short-term weight loss)

If you do want to lose weight, but you don’t want to sacrifice your health, performance, or muscle in the process...focus on these things:

• Don’t cut calories too much (or for too long). If you are set on a weight loss goal, cut calories by 10% of your maintenance calories, and don’t diet for longer than 6-12 weeks at a time (in most cases). If you feel like you're spending the majority of your year dieting, you're doing something wrong.
• Focus more on strength and performance. Follow a program that focuses on adding muscle and improving overall performance. All of our programming tracks (which you can try out for free right here) address adding strength and focusing on overall performance.
• Eat to fuel your body and your workouts. This Monday we'll be dropping a podcast on how to fuel like an athlete (even if you don't consider yourself one). This includes getting enough protein, calories, fat, and fiber. We'll walk you through each of those step by step, and give you a tool to know how much you should be eating.
• Reframe your goals. Think about getting lean instead of getting light. Being strong instead of being skinny. Set goals that focus on performance within the gym and overall body composition, not just on weight loss.