Learn Good Nutrition Practices Before You Enter A Fat-Loss Phase

Today, I’m going to be making the case for you in this video that the best time to learn good dietary habits and practices, is not actually when you’re in a deficit. It’s important to learn good nutrition practices before you enter a fat-loss phase. The best time to learn good nutrition practices is not actually when you’re trying to actively lose body fat. This may come as a surprise to a lot of people. We do help a lot of people with their nutrition and their dieting habits in our coaching practice, and a lot of people naturally have body composition goals of some sort, and within those, they will have fat loss goals that they’re trying to achieve. You may be surprised to learn, that very often with these fat loss clients, we will sit them down and discuss that while they have fat loss goals, what we’re going to do is not actually tackle the fat loss initially, and we’re actually going to spend some time just at maintenance calories. We are doing this to allow them to learn good nutrition practices, and actually build some good nutrition habits (we discuss how to set up a good diet here). As a result, these clients end up actually getting better results than if we were to just jump straight into a deficit.

 

Learn Good Nutrition Practices

 

Now when we have a new client and we’re going through their questionnaire, obviously, that will determine where we start somebody, so this may not necessarily apply to everybody. But in doing the questionnaire and talking to the clients before they sign up, we’re going to assess where their current dietary practices are, where their current nutrition habits are, where their overall skill when it comes to implementing nutrition is, because of course that’s often what people want help with. They hire us as coaches to help them with these things, but if someone is not in a fantastic place with their nutrition habits and that’s what they need help with, then it doesn’t make the most sense to just go into a calorie deficit right away.

So, while it is somewhat counterintuitive to say to them; “okay, well we’re actually just going to wait and then we’ll get stuck into it in a few week’s time”. But really, this is a good way to set yourself up for longer-term success in the phase of improving nutrition, before getting into that calorie deficit, and moving towards the actual end results that you want. The reason for this is you just have so much more leeway, so much more flexibility with the diet, and you can actually make more mistakes when your calorie intake is a little bit higher. You’re just aiming at weight maintenance. You don’t have this pressure to be seeing the scales move or the measurements move every single week while you’re trying to learn good nutrition practices.

It’s just much easier to start working on these basic nutrition principles when you aren’t in a deficit. Are your meals set up in a decent way? Are you eating several meals per day? Are those meals well-balanced? Are they high enough in protein? Are you choosing higher-fibre carbohydrates? Are you eating fruits and vegetables? And this is not stuff that we expect people to just have fully dialled in right away from the get-go, but these are things that you develop and you build on over the course of a few weeks and you get those habits into a better place. And then when you actually have those habits in a better place, and you have spent the time to actually learn good nutrition practices, you have a much better time dieting and you are more likely to have success in the actual dieting phase. Because then if we spend, say, four weeks working with somebody on their overall nutrition habits and we get those nicely structured, then they have such an easier time transitioning into that deficit because they’re already eating higher quality meals, they’re already eating meals that are quite filling, they’re already eating plenty of fruits, vegetables, fibre and protein.

And so when you do this, it just means that moving into the deficit then is so much easier, and it’s a lot smoother. You have all these good nutrition principles set up, and you’re not dealing with issues like excess hunger, which is obviously going to come about in a deficit if your diet is not set up that well. If we have someone starting with us and their diet is not in a great place when they start, and we put them into a significant deficit because fat loss is one of their goals, they’re going to have a more challenging time and they’re trying to juggle all these balls at once. Like they’re trying to increase their protein intake, and they’re trying to learn how to improve their fruit and veg intake, and they’re trying to just improve their overall nutrition habits, and they’re also dealing with being a bit more hungry, and it’s just a bit more challenging for the clients.

Whereas if we can spend a bit of time just at maintenance, working on these habits, then they can really get stuck into the fat loss phase after that, say, two to four week period where we are solely focused on nailing good nutrition practices. They have all those habits locked in, they’re feeling good about themselves as well because they’re hitting the targets, they’re building a bit of momentum, and then they can really dig into the fat loss phase as a result. If you don’t do this, it also just means that the person has less flexibility in their approach. It’s a little bit harder to manage stuff like meals out, it’s a little bit harder to manage social events. But during the period of time at maintenance, it is much easier to show them how to manage these different things and get some really good systems in place. They’re not in this position where it’s a little bit trickier, where they might be a little bit hungrier, until they get their diet set up properly, and they have this sort of pressure or stress of like trying to get it right and trying to see the changes week on week.

So we find that if we can spend a bit of time, developing these good habits before we actually start dieting for fat loss, the client finds it easier. They feel good about the fact that they’re doing well, they’re hitting the targets, they’re learning a lot about their nutrition, and then they’re raring to go. Then when you do make that transition into a calorie deficit to support their fat loss goals, they just have a much easier time of it because they’ve already established those habits.

This is where so many diets go wrong, and what you see with unsustainable dieting practices, they don’t build any good nutrition habits. If someone does like a very aggressive six-week transformation or whatever you want to call it, they don’t learn much in terms of habits. They don’t put new structures in place, they don’t put new scaffolding in place for their diet and lifestyle, which is how I refer to it. The dietary practices just end up being built on a house of cards that naturally just falls away once the willpower and the period of time that they spent in this really aggressive deficit is over.

That’s why we like to go about teaching our clients good nutrition practices this way. It makes for a much more sustainable approach and they end up in a much better place with their nutrition overall because they will basically have this template for healthy eating that is working for them. Then you just make minor tweaks to that to create the deficit and it ends up being a case that it’s a very similar pattern to their diet that they’re now doing even though they’re in a deficit. But there might be just some slight modifications to portion sizes, or there might be some slight modifications to food selection, or they’ll be having black coffees maybe instead of lattes, for example. But the overall template looks very similar and therefore they know they can be consistent with it and get a really good result from it.

This can be particularly important, especially when we consider our clients’ history. Very often, new clients of ours have had exposure to really poor dieting practices, really poor nutrition practices, and they may be coming from a place where they’re not in a very stable place with their nutrition, with their dietary habits. I work with a lot of people with a history of disordered eating, and I have to help them navigate that. So it makes sense for us to just spend a little bit of time in the more relaxed maintenance phase, and then we can make sure their habits are in a good place. This is especially important, because, in a lot of cases, many of my clients are coming from this position of using unsustainable methods or they just haven’t developed the habits, they’re going for fat loss the whole time. They might end up binge eating as a result of their poor dietary practices and focus on fat loss, and they end up putting the weight back on as a result of the binging. And it just becomes a very stressful situation and they can oftentimes just need a break from that and to bring in this maintenance phase where they just learn good nutrition practices, rather than just focusing on driving calories as low as possible, which is the place where a lot of people are coming from.

 

Learn Good Nutrition Practices Summary

Those are the main points, and hopefully you can use this information to help you with your diet set up and implementation. I will add as well that for myself as a nutritionist and a coach, in my own dieting practices that’s basically what it looks like. If I’m in a maintenance phase or if I’m in a surplus, my diet doesn’t look hugely different. There’ll be some different foods potentially in there when I’m in a surplus compared to in a deficit or at maintenance, but really the template, or the scaffolding, looks very, very similar. We build out a good system, and we just build on top of that, depending on the exact goals.

Thats it for this article, I hope you enjoyed it, I hope it was helpful, and I hope it gives you something to think about in terms of how you approach your diet. If you’re a coach and you’re helping people with this stuff, you can be a bit apprehensive about taking this approach with a client because, you know, if they’re signing up with you and they’re essentially paying for you to help them with their fat loss goals, and you say to them, look, we’re going to spend two to four weeks not doing that, you could imagine that to be a point of contention. But if you explain to the client this is why I want to do this, if their history is relevant as well, you can explain that you’re taking that into consideration and then the client-coach relationship develops. They’ll trust you and what you’re doing, hopefully, and they’ll see good results in terms of putting their diet structure together. And then, of course, you can kick it up into gear to go after the fat loss when you’ve spent a bit of time making sure that their nutrition habits are in a good place. If you are a coach and you want to improve your coaching practices, or you are someone who wants to become a nutrition coach, then you may be interested in our nutrition certification course. If you need help with your own diet, then please don’t hesitate to reach out for coaching.