Every Saturday, The Smartest Coach in the Room delivers helpful takeaways on the hottest nutrition and health topics and the world’s most effective coaching techniques. (Did some amazing friend forward this to you? Subscribe here.)
Why Weight Loss Can Be So Frustrating*
Ever know someone who’s “eating perfectly” but still not losing weight?
It’s possible. “But it’s not what happens most often,” says Brian St. Pierre, MS, RD, PN’s director of nutrition. “And by ‘most,’ I mean 95 to 99 percent of the time.”
St. Pierre says that, almost always, the person is eating more than they realize, or their calculations weren’t accurate in the first place (for a host of reasons). Or both.
Here’s a fun example…
Let’s say you’re trying to lose weight and are shooting for 2,000 Calories a day. You’ve calculated that’d be 500 fewer daily Calories than what you’d need to maintain your weight.
So if you’re consistent, that’d put you in a 3,500 calorie deficit over the course of 7 days. Hypothetically, that’s enough to lose one pound a week.
(In reality, weight loss math doesn’t work that cleanly, but it’s good for illustrating our point.)
That’s with no... hiccups.
Maybe you’ve got a great routine down, and you’re consistently eating about 500 Calories at three meals a day, plus a servings of fruit and nuts for a snack. That leaves enough room for two glasses of wine (one with dinner and one after).
You like eating this way, and it feels pretty sustainable.
Perfect. Except a couple of things…
Your two glasses of wine are actually 8 ounces each (200 calories), instead of the standard 5 ounces (125 calories). Those liberal pours give you an extra 150 calories a day.
On the left, 8 ounces of red wine. On the right, 5 ounces (a “standard serving”). Clearly, the shape and size of the glass add to the degree of difficulty in estimating portion size.
On Saturday night, you have friends over and grab curbside from the Cheesecake Factory. You order the Thai Coconut Lime Chicken, which sounds reasonable and looks pretty healthy.
From the menu description: Tender pieces of chicken, snow peas, shiitake mushrooms, onions and garlic in a Thai coconut-curry sauce with cashews and pineapple. Served with white rice.
But… it’s 1,980 Calories. And because your friends overstay (okay, you encouraged them!), you have four “glasses” of wine instead of your usual two.
The upshot: Despite your consistent eating, you end up with a 70 Calorie deficit for the week versus your planned 3,500 Calorie deficit.
Disappointing, for sure.
This is a pretty simplistic example, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that happens to many folks who struggle to lose weight despite feeling like they’re eating exactly how they planned. Because they were—almost.
* We acknowledge this is sort of a dumb headline. There are many, many reasons weight loss can be frustrating, and this is just one of them.
10-Second Takeaways
People tend to think they eat less and burn more than they do—sometimes by as much as 50 percent.
Lighter folks trying to gain weight often have the opposite problem: They overestimate their food intake and underestimate their expenditure.
When you undereat, especially over a longer period, your metabolism may decrease and your appetite may increase. That changes your “weight loss math.”
Your basal metabolic rate—the energy you need just to fuel your organs and biological functions to stay alive—can vary by 15 percent. For your average person, that’s roughly 200-270 calories.
Sleep deprivation can cause a 5-20 percent change in metabolism (the equivalent of 200-500 Calories).
For women, the phase of their menstrual cycle can affect metabolism by another 150 Calories or so.
Smartest Thing We’ve Heard This Week
“I was driving my little boy to school, and I saw this quote by Walt Whitman, and it was painted on the wall there. It said, ‘Be curious, not judgmental.’ I like that.”
—Ted Lasso (Season 1, Episode 8)
[We like “Be curious, not judgmental” a whole lot, too. It’s great coaching and life advice. One nit-pick, though: Snopes.com—per an English professor at the University of Iowa—points out there’s no record of it ever coming from Walt Whitman.]
SUPER COACH SECRETS
Coffee Really Can Make Everything Better
Have you tried “habit-stacking?”
The concept, developed by BJ Fogg, PhD, author of Tiny Habits, is pretty straightforward.
It goes like this: You already have a lot of daily habits that are strongly ingrained, such as brushing your teeth or making coffee or emptying the dishwasher.
So, to habit stack, you take a new practice you’d like to start, and “stack it” on top of one of your current habits. This makes it easier to take hold.
For an example, check out how Erin Weiss-Trainor, PN Super Coach and our Education Product Leader, recently implemented this approach—on herself. Her anchor habit: making coffee. “That’s a habit that never changes for me,” she says.
Not actually Erin, but the coffee-drinking manners seem about right.
Here’s a look at Erin’s morning routine (she works remotely) before and after habit-stacking.
BEFORE ✅ Get up
✅ Start coffee
✅ While coffee is brewing: scroll through emails, Slack, social media
✅ Take coffee, go right to desk, and start working
✅ After finishing coffee and checking off a few tasks: eat, get dressed, go back to desk
AFTER ✅ Start coffee
✅ While coffee is brewing: (NEW) Make protein + greens + creatine shake
✅ Take coffee and (NEW) read 10 pages of non-fiction. Then (NEW) drink shake while (NEW) doing 15 minutes of mobility work
✅ Get dressed, start workday
You can see there’s some pretty serious progress there. But we’ll let Erin give you the deep analysis, in her own words.
“I was very consistently—surprisingly so—able to change my routine and add 4 new habits (replacing some old not so great ones).
The barrier for me was feeling some urgency to get to work.
I started with just coffee and reading—which only delayed me starting work by 15 minutes and replaced the mindless social media scrolling. (Win-win.)
Once I realized the world wasn’t going to end by not getting to my desk right away, I felt more comfortable taking another 15-20 minutes to have my shake and work on my mobility.
Pretty soon, I also found myself getting up a bit earlier so that my start time at my desk wasn’t far off from before. This wasn’t intentional, though—it just sort of happened!”
Ask PN
Got questions about nutrition or coaching? Send them our way, and we might feature the answers in upcoming newsletters.
This question comes up all the time in our Facebook communities. And the truth is, it’s hard to get a straight answer.
That’s because…
(Yes, we know: Just what everyone loves to hear.)
It depends on who you are, what you do, and where you live—and what level of risk you’re comfortable with.
But as a quick answer, here are the top 5 types of coaching insurance, and who might benefit.
▶ Professional liability insurance, also known as errors and omissions insurance, kicks in if you need to defend a malpractice suit or license complaint. This may offer the best match for nutrition and health coaches.
▶ General liability insurance protects you from third-party claims. So if someone trips over a kettlebell in the gym you own and gets hurt, or they damage the space you rent, this type of insurance would cover the fallout. General liability insurance may make the most sense if you’re working with clients in a physical space.
▶ Cyber liability insurance protects against any fallout from client data breaches. If you coach online, you may want this type of insurance.
▶ Commercial property insurance covers the contents of your commercial office space or gym from things like water damage or theft.
▶ Commercial auto insurance covers anything that happens while you’re driving for work. It might come in handy if you ever drive clients in your own car (for example, to go work out at a nearby park), or if you’re transporting lots of heavy workout equipment in your car on a regular basis.
That’s just for starters, though.
If you want go deeper, we’ve put together an article that tries to answer all the questions we get, and walks you through a three-step process to choosing a policy that’s right for you. Read the complete article here.
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