Weight loss ramp up and long game
Weight loss takes time, and sometimes there is a bit of a ramping up phase that happens. When people start to change and improve their habits, it can be a slow start because of the necessary nutrition skills needed to determine proper amounts of food to eat and understand hunger and fullness.
Most of the time, individuals aren’t 100% aware of all of their food choices in a day and they eat on autopilot, grabbing a quick snack here and a quick bite there without ever actually thinking about it.
When it comes to behavior based nutrition coaching, the initial few weeks are more about understanding your eating behavior and recognizing WHY you eat what you eat in the quantities that you eat them. When you learn this, it makes long term weight loss much more successful.
There are ways to bypass the ramp up phase when starting though, and they require an additional investment of either money or time. Both of these approaches have worked with hundreds of previous clients. These approaches work so much that there are businesses popping up in all major cities to provide these services. I work/have worked in the first service for about 4 years, so I see the impact they can have in a very short amount of time.
The first way to bypass the ramp up phase is to sign up for a meal plan service where they send you pre-made and pre-portioned, calorie controlled meals. Your job then is to eat the meals and avoid your normal snacks, beverages and desserts. These meals cost more than your typical home made meal because these companies often charge 3-4x the cost of the food to get it out to you ready to eat. The companies grocery shop for you (getting the right ingredients), prepare them so they are tasty (know great cooking techniques), portion them out (using a food scale or pre-measured scooper), and deliver them to you (making sure you have something healthy to eat). This approach BYPASSES several necessary nutrition skills needed for successful weight loss progress. It costs money, but saves you a lot of time and effort. For anyone that has signed up for a meal plan service before, you know that some meals are great and some are just okay, but they don’t really match your unique palate exactly.
The second way to bypass the ramp up phase is to do the meal prep yourself, which means spending a few hours cooking days worth of meals. Your coach has probably given you a meal template or will get one to you if you ask and some quantities of items to eat at each meal, so now you get to construct all of the meals for the next few days based on the template. Your job then is to just eat the meals you made and stick to the plan. For anyone that has done meal prep, they know the first time doing it can take an entire weekend day to prep 5 days of food ahead of time, but gets easier and faster the more you do it. This can be a harder task to complete than signing up for a meal plan or meal prep service because of all of the nutrition skills needed to be successful. Those nutrition skills are: choosing the right ingredients (ones that don’t spoil quickly and will reheat well or can be eaten cold), knowing how to cook them healthy, knowing what portions of each you need, and knowing what kind of sauces and dressings to use that won’t derail your progress.
Bypassing the ramp up phase with a weight loss program can put you into a better spot after a few weeks because you have already had some success with changing your habits and behaviors, provided you don’t rely entirely on the meal prep service or stick to the exact meal plan. It might be attractive to rely on those approaches, but our goal with the weight loss program is to help you LEARN what YOUR body NEEDS to look, feel, and perform better so you won’t need to rely on those options in the future. As life starts to get busier, meal prep can sometimes take a backseat to just eating for convenience or getting some calories in.
I find that either approach works and can be cycled back and forth as needed. However if we look at why those two approaches work so well is that they are planned out ahead of time and then executed. This should be the goal of any weight loss program: to set a plan and execute the plan. If the plan doesn’t work, you change the plan. The only way to know if the plan works or not is to take good notes and be compliant to the plan.
Sticking to the plan and being compliant to the plan are often the hardest things to do, but are the most rewarding. Since there are more things going on in our life than the gym and food, we need to find a way to eat that isn’t going to be a second job to us that we can do on autopilot. In order to do that, we need to understand our behaviors and habits around food and modify them a little at a time until they become second nature, and that takes time.
Shanti Wolfe | Director of Nutrition
