It’s that time of year when people start thinking about what their New Year Resolutions are going to be for 2019. Most of these will include something related to losing weight. “New Year New Me” is a nice concept, but I’ve never believed in it. I set goals throughout the year and tick them off as I go rather than make grand goals at the start of the year and forget about them until December 31st.
January is a busy time for gyms. 12-week challenges are very popular, and often incentivised with prizes for losing the most weight. I won’t lie, I’ve done a 12-week challenge before, in 2014. It does work. You do lose weight… but it’s not sustainable. I’ve since studied Certificate III and IV in Fitness; not to become a personal trainer, but for my own interest and knowledge.
First of all, why 12 weeks? That’s usually how long it takes for the body to significantly change. At 4 weeks, you’ll start seeing an improvement (so don’t feel discouraged when after 2 weeks of hard work, you still seem to look the same, or even gained a bit of weight). By 8 weeks, your nearest and dearest will notice. Finally, the 12 week-mark is when acquaintances will see the change.
The formula for weight loss is simple: calories in vs calories out. If you want to lose weight, you must consume less food and drink than the energy you are expending. Most people prefer to restrict their intake because they don’t like exercise. For me, I love food, so I’d rather eat whatever I like and then burn it off later. I think the secret is to eat food that you love (that doesn’t have too many calories), and to do exercises that don’t feel like you’re exercising. My follow up post will share some ideas that can help with this!
I first need to answer the question I posed in my title: why 12 week transformation challenges don’t work in the long term. 12 weeks is quite short. For 12 weeks it’s easy to put yourself on a strict diet, and commit several days a week for some intense exercise, particularly if you have a trainer to push you. You know that there’s an end date, so you deprive yourself from foods you like and work your butt off during gym sessions knowing it’s going to be over in 12 weeks. It’s a relatively short-term commitment that produces impressive results, which is what entices people to join in the first place – I mean, some of those “before” and “after” photos are wow!
Once those 12 weeks are over and there is no longer the weekly weigh-ins or someone overseeing your program, you don’t have the same motivation. You lose the accountability factor because you have no one to report to or to praise you for your past week’s weight loss. And food? Gee didn’t you miss your favourite guilt foods like chips and ice cream? It’s so easy to cave into your cravings because no one’s watching. Also, you feel like you deprived yourself so much and since you worked so hard, you think, “treat yo’self”.. and before you know it you’re back at the same weight and shape.
Often, you gain back more weight than before you started the program. The extreme diet required for rapid weight loss causes biochemical changes in your body called the “starvation response”, and when you re-introduce food again your body tends to store more fat and sugar than it normally would, in preparation for your next starvation period. Whilst your body is very clever, it can’t tell the difference between your next fad diet and famine. This is a primitive function of the body, based on the days when food was scarce and not readily available or abundant like it is now for first world consumers.
One of my good friends loves these challenges. He looks great after 12 weeks, and then gains the weight back on, and then does another challenge, looks great again, and then piles the pounds back on… etc. etc… Our group has tried to tell him that this yo-yoing diet is unhealthy and that he needs a more sustainable routine, but it just falls on deaf ears. The thing with making lifestyle changes is that you need to want to change. No one else can convince you… so until our dear friend wants to commit to a more sustainable routine, he’ll continue this “weight cycling” process.
Rapid weight loss/gain can cause permanent changes to your skin. When you gain a lot of weight, your skin stretches beyond its elasticity. What can then happen is, you get stretch marks and a layer in your skin called the dermis becomes very thin and loses its elasticity (exactly like when you overstretch an elastic band). When you lose the weight, the skin doesn’t bounce back because it’s lost its elasticity – hence you are left with excess skin, which will not go away on its own and will need surgery to remove.
The weight cycling process also affects your mood. When your weight bounces back up again you feel depressed because you no longer look like you did at the end of your last 12-week challenge. Every kilogram that you gain feels like a failure, and you’re just waiting for that next challenge to come along to give you the kick up the butt you need because you didn’t have the self-motivation to start with.
For long-term health and happiness, we must commit to a routine that is sustainable and easy to incorporate into our every day lives. I will next be writing a post on how you might be able to achieve that based on my experience over the last decade.
Take care,
Miko xx
