Weight Lost In Translation
AND CONDEMNING YOU TO DIETARY HELL
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
~Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
Language and meaning are powerful drivers of behaviour. If your understanding is flawed, inescapably, your behaviour will be also.
Few people in the modern-day enjoy anything close to a comfortable relationship with their body and mind simply because much of what we think we know makes that impossible.
As I’ve claimed, our troubles are sure sign of a disconnect from reality.
In the absence of influence and distraction, we would come to a clear understanding of cause and effect where our bodies are concerned, instead, we are chock-full of physiological fairytales. Sometimes subtle distortions that, nevertheless, shape your fitness, dietary and lifestyle behaviours.
And one, in particular — a case quite literally of semantics — that causes untold misery:
WEIGHT LOSS ≠ FAT LOSS
To first address the obvious: Yes, losing fat will — often, not always — correspond to a loss of weight. All well and good. But losing weight may, or may not, mean the desired loss of fat.
But before we get into it, note what follows is not specific to those seeking fat loss. It may not be you at the moment, but statistics show it likely will be at some point. In either case, those same statistics promise you know at least one person trapped in this vicious circle right now.
For over 13 years I’ve coached hundreds of people through fat-loss, none of were unscathed from repeatedly banging their heads on this particular brick wall. And often for decades.
So serious, so absurd, is this situation that it’s difficult not to sound like I’m encouraging you to drink the Kool-Aid here, when, in fact, I’m urging you to stop.
This is your ticket out of that certain dietary hell.
Losing fat is a complex, multi-factored and nuanced process — this describing only the biological and social mechanisms let alone the behaviour change required to make it sustainable.
You can go here to get a closer look at that image, but you shouldn’t need to zoom in to appreciate that whatever the path to success here, it’s not coming from a box or a bottle.
Losing weight, by contrast, may not be easy but it is simple. It is absolutely one hundred per cent guaranteed every time you starve people. I’ll direct those claiming otherwise to historical photos of the Bataan Death March or other such atrocities in which you’ll find exactly zero examples of a slow metabolism or unfavourable genetics.
Although many perpetuate this misnomer, the diet industry exists solely on the back of the lie these are synonymous. And so, in various imaginative ways and means, they starve people.
If you don’t lose weight, it’s your fault. You overate. File your complaint with the First Law of Thermodynamics.
If you do, you attribute your weight loss to the product, plan, or potion, but the only mechanism involved is good old-fashioned starvation (caloric restriction). Your purchase was merely a means to this end.
It has, however, delivered on its promise. You’ve lost weight.
You see that as success. And how could you not? — that’s what you think you want. Death or illness notwithstanding, you stop the diet and go back to a reasonable, healthy, caloric intake. You’ll eat the same way you did before because you don’t know any different — starving didn’t teach you much.
And you gain all the weight back. And more. Which is to say, more fat.
An outcome you have assured through the loss of lean muscle (aka youth), an unwinnable tug of war with your metabolism, and a voluntary famine that, were it not doing so beforehand, now promises your brain will store every calorie it can. In the only way it can.
But, the most perfect thing of all — for those who sold it to you — is that you never connect the dots. When all the weight and more comes back, you mistakenly attribute it to a failure of yours and not the inevitable consequence of your purchase.
Both the ‘success’ of the product/plan and the subsequent ‘failure’ of your acting outside that guidance are now confirmed.
Bringing us to the best bit:
You return to the same, or equivalent, product, plan or potion because that represents your most recent ‘success’.
And a cycle — that can have no other end — begins.
As a business model, you have to admit, it’s a cracker.
‘Valued customers’ never realising that in their every contact with the diet industry, in all its many guises, they’re playing a physiological shell game: what cup is the money under?
None of them. On their side of the equation. On the other, it’s worth USD 300 billion, annually.
But that’s not the full cost. When the downstream effects of repeated weight-loss attempts and corresponding inevitable fat gain, metabolic disease and the full suite of ‘lifestyle diseases’ are calculated, you can safely add trillions.
All because one tiny detail, one subtle difference is — precisely that distance — removed from reality.
The industry concerned is primarily responsible but, in many respects, we have ourselves to blame. Miracle claims are, evidently, super successful at luring the unwary:
5-minute abs!
30 days to a new you!
Six-week physique!
Claims that dissolve with even a basic understanding of how the body works so, certainly, it all hinges on ignorance.
But this market of the unwary is massive. We are ripe for exploitation, but — in the absence of knowledge — this domain is also peculiarly unique in that we suspend common sense and fail to revert to the other axioms we’d be quick to apply in any other facet of life.
You know the ones: things looking too good to be true; worthwhile things taking time; you get out what you put in — yes, those.
Less motivating than miracles, certainly, but when you believe time and well-directed effort don’t apply here and that your body is somehow an exception to these universal laws, you are paying those playing you for a fool.
But then any shift away from the outright deceit of these products and potions leaves us no better off. The classic cardio and caloric restriction combination is perfect for weight loss.
But, as Brad Schoenfeld, Ph.D. tells us:
If you do not lift weights, you will lose muscle as you're losing body fat.
[ If I might humbly amend Schoenfeld’s comment, it’s important to note that ‘lift weights’ can include your body weight, and — given accuracy of language is the subject here — it would be more precise to say ‘resistance training’. ]
In a caloric deficit, you cannot build muscle, but you can minimise the loss of it through strength training and protein intake. You signal you need it. And you provide the raw material.
But when you run, cycle — whatever form your cardio takes — without resistance training, you not only give your body no reason to hang on to metabolically expensive muscle, you give it a reason not to — it’s just extra baggage. So it won’t.
And even those rightly dismissive of miracles and prepared to knuckle down and do the work end up creating the very same physiological conditions for more fat and less muscle. Led unerringly down the same weight-loss garden path, by misleading, or, at best, incomplete advice.
Here too, all the while misinterpreting it as success.
But this is to be expected because, even in light of industrial-scale deception and not-accurate-enough advice, we round out our perfect storm at the opposite end of the spectrum with the well-meaning and best-intentioned using the same language. And thereby only legitimising it further.
Doctors and dieticians, especially, are obliged to make this finer distinction — do no harm, right? So why leave your patients ripe for the picking?
Convention aside, I suspect this comes down to the PC brigade deeming the word fat too saddled with insult. We can’t have that sort of threat being thrown about willy-nilly when we can so easily swap it out for the more neutral and innocuous-sounding weight.
An imprecision leaving the door ajar just enough for the unscrupulous to worm their way in. And profit from pain under the pretence of care. To develop a product or service eliciting weight loss and set up shop in a booming market full of those mistakenly led to believe — often by their doctor — that losing weight is the desired, healthy, outcome.
All avoided by our simple commitment to call a spade a spade.
A paradigm shift substituting ‘weight-loss’ for ‘fat-loss’. And, as a fantastic silver lining, the diet industry is then left holding the bag, with a collection of crap none of which can be sold under any pretence to that (fat loss) end.
Indeed, simply by accurately describing the desired outcome, another word changes to be that much more precise: we can sub out the word industry for scam.
There’ll be a few die-hards, no doubt, but, over time, more and more will make the finer distinction and that industry will no longer be worth anything close to billions. And costing so much more.
The fitness industry needs to do the same — a segment already does: bodybuilders are fat-loss experts. They use the term ‘cutting.’ And nobody is under any illusions as to what is meant by it: fat loss. While retaining muscle. So let’s not pretend we have to discover the answer here.
The solutions to an accurate definition of the problem are well-known.
You can read an article by BowTiedOx on the process here in which the word ‘fat’ features 21 times, and with only a single, passing reference to weight loss. When that sort of hit rate makes the leap into all media we might hope for a different outcome.
But, this weight-loss brainwashing across generations, an environment of ever-available hyper-palatable foodstuffs and increasingly sedentary lifestyles have us swimming against a strong tide, so, frankly, I don’t think it goes far enough.
It’s a good start but we can be more accurate still. And by doing so, further address the problems of sarcopenia (the loss of lean muscle with age) and skinny-fat (lean size but with comparatively high levels of body fat and associated health issues).
The aim should only ever be a healthy size — as determined by measurements, not weight — and as HEAVY as possible. So you enjoy a healthy level of lean muscle that demands a higher maintenance level of calorie intake, protects from injury, and supports all-around good health.
Certainly, there are weight-specific problems — like joint health and the corresponding workload for the heart and lungs — but, here too, the answer is still fat loss. For the nit-pickers I’ll further concede these issues may equally apply to the musclebound, but, the exception only proves the rule. In any case, losing muscle is easy.
We can further underline the undesirability of the old way of thinking by flipping the script entirely, all while zeroing in on the truth.
So, first, free yourself. Use scale weight to help gauge progress but only in combination with, and in the overall context of, other factors.
Here’s your takeaway: a new mantra.
The only reference to weight with regards to your ultimate goal is — ‘as heavy as possible’.
“I aim to be (insert goal here e.g. I am size x, waist measurement is x or whatever) and as heavy as possible.
All fine in theory, but to actually wrap your head — and subsequently your behaviour — around this, demands you swim against the tide of a lifetime of societal conditioning.
Try saying it out loud — as heavy as possible.
Heresy. An archaic term but an apt one. Because it is only a sharpening resolution of reality that has ever charted our progress, our evolution from myth to science. We once prayed to pagan gods for a bountiful harvest. Until we knew better. To continue this nonsense of weight loss is to remain firmly in the realm of superstition.
Unenlightened. By choice.
Only the deceitful benefit from this laziness of language. Dieting to lose weight is a dead end. The intent to lose fat — aside from immediately invalidating everything but the desired outcome— demands a more holistic approach and further opens the discussion to more positive, healthy behaviours like strength training.
A shift to solutions in the true sense of the word.
As Naval Ravikant warns:
As long as we are mistakenly led to believe that weight loss is the goal, we’ll continue to choose the ways and means that get us there.
And to no good end.
- OLI