Honesty is the best policy

I often get emails or see trainees who are frustrated and pissed off. They aren’t achieving their goals and they tell me they have “tried everything”.

They’re about ready to throw in the towel on exercise and nutrition. They feel that nothing is working. They start to buy into the idea that “diets don’t work so there’s no point in trying”.

I was that trainee, once.

The most annoying thing was that I could not figure things out. I ate well. I felt I was active.

Yet I was 50 lbs overweight and at 5 feet tall, that’s significant.

The worst part was exactly this “what the hell is wrong” part.

I felt doomed by genetics. I felt out of control. I felt disempowered.

I knew that crash dieting wasn’t a solution but I didn’t know how to change my eating (or that I should change my eating – I thought I was eating perfectly well).

I wanted to feel good. But I didn’t.

And no amount of rationalizing or raging against the beauty conspiracy did the job.

In over a decade of experience as a trainer and someone on the journey of physical culture what I have discovered is that human perception has only a loose connection to reality.

We do not see ourselves — or others — as we really are.

We may see ourselves as fatter or thinner, healthier or less healthy, more or less muscular, etc. etc. but in any case, unless we are highly experienced professionals, we are generally not very good judges of our food intake, activity levels, degree of fitness, or body composition.

I’ve had emaciated women insist they were too big, or show me imaginary giant biceps. I’ve had very overfat women insist that their thigh size was due entirely to freakishly muscular quadriceps even though the skinfold caliper demonstrated a fat measurement of 50 mm.

I’ve had people insist they were eating a perfect diet until we went through day by day, meal by meal and discovered forgotten Starbucks Frappucinos, glasses of wine, 3 pm handfuls of jellybeans, inappropriate portion sizes, and a host of other mystery ingredients.

“Exercising regularly” suddenly becomes “well, I did skip Thursday, and I guess I was booked that other evening so I didn’t go, and then there was that Doctor Who marathon on TV over the weekend that I couldn’t miss…” Either that or “busting ass in the gym” really means “a single tiny drop of sweat wiggled its gentle way down my temple”.

Studies of human behaviour demonstrate time and again that humans consistently overestimate their activity and underestimate their food intake.

It’s not that humans are stupid or lying (well, some of us are :)).

It’s that we’re not as good as we think we are about recording reality.

If you’re a fixit type of person, you will know the danger of “eyeballing” things.

A good carpenter or dressmaker knows: measure twice, cut once. No matter how great you think your ability to make a straight line, a perfect square, or precise 3/8” cut is… it’s not as good as a machine’s.

(There’s a deck out there in Toronto with a jellyfish-shaped edge that testifies to some hubris in this regard. I ain’t sayin where and I ain’t namin’ names. But I am saying, after that edging, we did the rest with proper chalk lines.)

Looking back now on myself a decade earlier, my errors are obvious to me as an experienced trainer. It wasn’t obvious to me at the time, of course.

However, if I’d sat down and done a good honest accounting of things, I’d have figured things out a whole lot sooner.

Allow me to debunk some common assumptions.

You very likely have quite normal genetics and metabolism. You are very likely average in most ways.

First, most people have never seen a truly lean, freakishly fit, elite athlete or bodybuilder. They have no accurate concept of what “lean” or “muscular” really looks like.

Many women tell me they “bulk up easily” but in reality, they don’t look very muscular at all. I’m still waiting for the day when I meet the next Kim Chizevsky. You probably aren’t any kind of muscle-bound weirdo.

Sorry. I know you want to be special.

Genetics is not a destiny. It’s a blueprint for how your body might behave under particular circumstances.

Genetics says “If you eat more energy than you expend through activity, you will gain weight”.

However, genetics also says “If you eat less energy than you expend through activity, you will lose weight.” There are no giant bodybuilders nor obese people in Siberian gulags.

Genetics works both ways. In most people’s cases, they have great genetics – for life on the savannah 20,000 years ago.

Metabolism encompasses all of the body’s functions, not just the speed at which food is processed.

Most people, unless they have some kind of major disease, don’t have “slow metabolisms” (and if you have said disease, you probably have doctors inspecting your pituitary right now, so you probably already know about it).

Neither do people magically have “fast metabolisms” – again, if they have mysterious powers of high idling speed, they’re either a toddler or also sitting in the doctor’s office discussing their rapid heart rate, diarrhea, and hair loss.

Basal metabolic rate (BMR) is how much energy it takes to keep you alive: to keep your brain thinking deep thoughts, your liver churning through that margarita, and your heart to beat its little thud-thud-thud. Most of your body’s energy intake goes to support your internal organs.

BMR depends a lot on age and sex. An 80 year old woman has a slower BMR than a teenage boy.

You can’t control your age or your sex (not without hormones and a little surgery anyway). But that being said, your overall energy needs also depend on your activity, and this you CAN control.

Hey! Don’t get down! There’s nothing wrong with being average.

An average person can accomplish amazing things with ongoing commitment to hard work and a healthy lifestyle.

You’re very likely not as muscular as you think you are.

Take a look at the photo below. This is a cross-section of a woman’s thighs.

The muscle tissue is the dark red stuff that looks like steak. The body fat is the light yellow stuff around the outside. The thighbones run through the middle — they’re the two small circles (grayish-white with an inner red dot).

The photo below shows a woman’s hips and pelvis in cross section. The front of her body is the top of the photo.

Nuff said.

You’re very likely carrying more body fat than you realize.

This isn’t a moral judgement. It’s just that the average woman is about 20 to 25% body fat, or more. (In the United States, recent data suggest that it may be more like 30-40% body fat on average.)

That means one-fifth to one quarter of her body is made up of fat.

For a 150-lb woman, that means 30 to 37.5 lbs are fat.

Go to the grocery store and pick up a block of butter. That’s 1 pound of fat.

Then grab a steak. That’s probably also 1 pound, but 1 pound of muscle. Get the idea?

A leaner-than-average fit woman might be 15-19%. Depending where she puts on body fat, she might never be able to see her abs, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t healthy.

The average fitness competitor is probably something like 9 to 12%, and only for the short period of competition and photo shoots.

Someone whose bodyfat is around 5%, such as a male bodybuilder about to go on stage, usually looks like they should be shuffling off this mortal coil. Really, they look like they have some horrible tropical parasite (and Oompa-Loompaism from the fake tanner).

This is all perfectly OK. Whatever choice you make will have trade-offs.

Whatever body part you think is hideous… probably isn’t.

Unless you’re that mole guy from Austin Powers, it probably looks quite normal. If you eat well and if you are active on a daily basis, you likely look just fine, no matter what the shit excreted by the media sphincter says.

Thighs are supposed to have some mass to them. Otherwise they wouldn’t be very good at holding you up, now would they?

Would you build a house that was held up by toothpicks? Would you put tiny little training wheels on a car? Shit no.

Adult women come in all shapes and sizes, and most of them are really quite presentable. And no, nobody is starting at your freaky nose.

Fun game! Gather your friends and rule out the obvious “hips and thighs” for women. Then ask what their least favourite/most angst-provoking body part is.

The answers will often surprise you – you will likely have no idea that they worried about the hated part.

As a teenager, my husband was convinced his feet were too small (too small for what is unclear, as he wasn’t prone to tipping over). He bought shoes two sizes too big, so in every photo he looks like he’s wearing big floppy clown shoes. Now he’s moved on to fixating about the idea that his wrists are too narrow. (???)

You’re likely not as fit and active as you think you are.

While we all like to imagine ourselves as ninjas, we probably aren’t pushing ourselves as hard or as far as our body can manage.

There are people out there climbing Kilimanjaro and swimming the English Channel while we’re patting ourselves on the back for walking 5 minutes to the car, or exercising twice a week (There’s a waiting list for swimming the Channel. No shit. Book now if you’re just starting swimming lessons).

Remember that humans evolved to be active pretty much all day long.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with walking 5 minutes, if that’s all you can manage. But strive for more, and more often. Push to the edge of discomfort and challenge yourself. Rattle your cage a little bit.

And commit to daily movement for life. That’s what gets results.

You probably eat more than you think you do.

An ounce of cheese, which is one serving, is the size of your thumb. A cup of cooked pasta, also one serving, is about the size of a tennis ball. Go measure it out with a measuring cup. I’ll wait.

Pretty surprising huh? I know, I know. There there. *patting you gently* Cry it all out. That pasta serving size was a trauma wasn’t it?

I took the picture here in the Amsterdam airport (which, by the way, has some of the most outstanding food in any airport I’ve ever been in, not that that is a huge accomplishment).

Look at the serving size. The bowl of soup on the right is a small. The bowl on the left is a large. The glass is a regular sized glass of juice – about 6 ounces. You can see the beer bottle and cap (right corner) for size comparison.

If you live in North America, compare these small (i.e. normal) portion sizes to the enormous quantities you get in restaurants and fast food joints.

In the U.S., restaurant dinners are typically served on platters, not plates, and come with unlimited quantities of things like bread.

A Super Big Gulp drink from the 7-11 is forty freaking four ounces. A medium-sized Frappucino is 16 ounces – 2 cups – and has 420 calories, with 51 grams of sugar.

Here’s 2000 calories. One meal.

 

I see folks coming out of movie theatres with literal buckets of popcorn. I mean with little handles and everything. I imagine the wheelbarrow of popcorn will be next.

The point here is not to make you feel badly about going to a movie.

It’s to illustrate that in North America and, increasingly, the rest of the world, we have lost the concept of appropriate portion sizes.

And as a result, when combined with our generally poor human perception, we drastically underestimate our food intake.

Despite all of this, you can probably do more and get fitter than you thought was possible.

Seriously.

Go by the numbers

To some degree, all measurement techniques are inaccurate. But they’re a whole lot more precise than humans.

That’s why I use them most of the time instead of human observation. Tape measurements, caliper measurements, written records, portion measurements… all of these things are easily employed tools.

If you have a working simian brain, grade 3 literacy, and opposable thumbs, you can use some or all of them.

I know the frustration of “what the hell is wrong” well. I have experienced it and so have my clients. They come to me having “tried everything”.

When we sit down together I can usually figure out the problem within a few minutes.

Usually they are overestimating activity or underestimating food intake or both, but we don’t know until measurement techniques and a clear-eyed, honest accounting are applied.

Here are some strategies.

Important: The purpose here is knowing and understanding, not policing.

All you are doing is gathering data for analysis, like a scientist.

Before you can know whether you are on the right track, you have to get an accurate picture of where you actually are.

The scale

The scale is an OK tool of measurement for some things but not others.

I’d still use it but I’d start using tape measurements. See #2.

People like to hate on the scale a lot, and it is bullshit if you’re using it as your only indicator — as well as if you’re considering it any kind of useful judgement about your own goodness and badness.

However, I do like the scale as one possible method of learning about natural and normal physiological fluctuations, and exploring overall trends — in combination with other methods.

For instance, body weight fluctuates from day to day with hydration levels.

If you eat something a bit salty the night before, or you’re at a certain point in your menstrual cycle (many women retain water at ovulation and just before their periods), you can see up to a 5-pound jump in the scale weight. The next day, or within the next few days, it’ll be gone.

That’s kind of cool, isn’t it? I think so. Bodies are neat!

So I like to take multiple readings at the same time and in the same way (usually first thing in the morning after you’ve gone to the bathroom), and take the weekly average.

Over time, chart the changes if you like. You’ll start to see interesting, repeated ups and downs, and relationships between things (e.g. on Day 14 of your cycle there’s a blip up, and then Day 16 a blip down, etc.).

This also helps you understand your own normal cycles and fluctuations.

(And let’s be honest… who hasn’t gotten on the scale before and after a big poop, and felt secretly a little proud of unleashing a 3-pound turdbeast on the world?)

Tape measurements

We may not get noticeably heavier or lighter on the scale, but we may grow or shrink as body composition changes.

Thus, tape measurements of girth can also be useful data.

Take tape measurements of the circumference of your neck, chest, waist, hips, thighs, calves, upper and lower arms to track any changes in body composition.

Use several circumference sites because changes can occur at some places and not others.

The more data points, the more accuracy you have.

Don’t pull the tape so tight it can double as a tourniquet, or let it sag so you can add pretend inches to your mighty biceps. The only person you’re lying to is yourself.

Recording food intake

To get an accurate indication of what you consume: Write down everything you eat and drink, and measure portion sizes.

Use measuring cups. Seriously. I was shocked the first time I actually measured things.

Remember: until you learn exactly what four ounces or one cup looks like, EYEBALLING DOES NOT WORK.

You don’t have to get all OCD on this. Just try it for a day or two, and think of it like calibrating your perceptions.

Recording exercise / activity

Write down all activity: duration, intensity, type.

Get a snapshot

You don’t have to do this forever. Just play with it for a few days.

Gather data. Be a scientist.

If you can’t trust yourself not to get crazy about this, have a trusted someone-else do it for you. Preferably that engineer friend who is super sensible and also explains things like why airplanes don’t fall out of the sky.

It’s just numbers

Remember: The actual numbers themselves don’t matter. Who gives a fuck if you’re a 2 or 12 or 22 or 222?

All that matters is the data trend.

All that matters is understanding yourself and getting an accurate picture of reality.

Stay sane and objective.

Just record.

Be honest.

Don’t be either overly self-critical or overly lenient. Neither is useful.

Step back a little bit and observe yourself without judgement, but also without indulgence.

Measurement techniques do not judge.

They record only. They do not care.

They only know numbers. They don’t know morals, success, or failure.

At the end of the assessment period, review and evaluate the data. Very likely you will observe patterns or things that you can change.

And then, you can truly make some informed decisions about where to go next.

If you need help with this, consider getting coaching from the good people at Precision Nutrition.