Change your mindset to lose weight, says Dr Ali Novitsky, an obesity expert and founder of wellness programme, The Fit Collective, as she shares her top tips for sustainable weight loss.
Words: Dr Ali Novitsky. Images: Shutterstock
By 2027, it’s estimated nearly one-third of the world’s population could be obese or overweight. As an obesity medicine physician, I know changing this outcome will take a collective commitment to creating healthier communities and empowering healthier choices. Here, I offer you my top five strategies that go against diet culture and are extremely successful for long-term, sustainable weight loss.
1. Scrap all-or-nothing thinking
All-or-nothing thinking is one of the greatest obstacles to weight loss. In diet culture, you’ve learned you have to be ultra-restrictive in your diet and overly aggressive in exercise regimens to see results. This puts a massive amount of pressure on you to be perfect. So, when you eat a cookie and then decide you’ve failed, you throw the towel in and eat the entire pack of cookies.
This undesired action then leads to disappointment and shame. You can’t have successful weight loss feeling pressured, shamed or disappointed. In fact, your weight loss routines will now feel like punishment and you won’t want to continue them. But when you become aware of how often you fall into the all-or-nothing thinking pattern, suddenly these thoughts are much less powerful and you can open up the opportunity to create new beliefs. To do this, you need new evidence to support your new way of thinking.
This is where the discomfort will occur and where growth will happen. But where to start? Identify one extreme thought you currently believe and try to find evidence for how it may not be true. Perhaps you believe that a long daily cardio session is necessary to lose weight. Are you willing to create evidence that less could actually be more? Challenging these beliefs will help you to find the middle ground, which will allow you to overcome all-or-nothing thinking.
2. Stay grounded
Emotional eating creates a conflict when trying to lose weight as it prevents you from being in a calorie deficit, and is a symptom of emotional dysregulation. Think of an electrical circuit; it’s grounded so there is not an explosion. You must stay grounded so you don’t have outbursts of behaviour that hold you back from your goals.
The first step is to become aware of your stress levels and the symptoms you experience at those different levels. For example, a stress level of six is when many people feel restless and have symptoms of pacing back and forth, snacking when they aren’t hungry, or having massive thought spirals that feel out of control.
However, when you identify your symptoms, you can have distraction or grounding techniques available to become more regulated. If you commit to a grounding practice each day (such as mindfulness or meditation), you will have lower stress levels overall and are less likely to indulge in overeating and overdrinking to numb uncomfortable feelings associated with high stress levels.
Eating and drinking for true hunger and thirst only, instead of due to emotional dysregulation, means you will be much more successful at long-term sustainable weight loss.
3. Exercise smarter, not harder
The amount of energy you need to burn for weight loss would take hours of commitment each week. For weight loss, the less is more strategy for exercise is key. Also, knowing which forms of exercise to prioritise is also important.
Your total daily energy expenditure comes from your basal metabolic rate, plus exercise activity, plus digestion of food. Your basal metabolic rate, or the amount of energy it takes just for our body to function, makes up 70 per cent of your total daily energy expenditure. For the average person, exercise makes up 20 per cent of your energy expenditure and another 10 per cent comes from the digestion of food.
The best way to create an energy deficit for weight loss is to enhance your basal metabolic rate by building lean muscle mass. The best exercise to help build lean muscle is strength training. Studies show that if you’re not resistance training while in a calorie deficit, you can lose up to 10 per cent lean mass – which you don’t want!
Some studies show a 10-minute session two-three times a week is enough to maintain lean muscle mass during weight loss. Strength training combined with at least 5,000 steps in each day is the regimen that I most commonly recommend to my weight-loss clients.
4. Choose a realistic eating plan
Hit your protein goal, limit your added sugar, aim for four alcoholic drinks or less per week, increase fibre and pick your treats carefully. This is good advice but can you stick to it?
To have sustainable weight loss, you have to be able to maintain it. I tell my clients that if they aren’t willing to stick to a particular change to their diet for at least 18 months, then it probably isn’t worth doing. From a metabolic standpoint, three hormones – insulin, ghrelin, and leptin – are responsible for how you lose weight.
Insulin helps you use glucose as fuel for bodily functions. Ghrelin is the hunger hormone that encourages you to eat. Leptin is the satiety hormone that signals when you’ve had enough to eat. The name of the weight-loss game is appetite regulation and maintenance of your basal metabolic rate. Eating adequate protein promotes lean muscle mass to keep your metabolism firing and normalise ghrelin levels so you don’t feel as hungry.
If you limit sugar, you’ll need less insulin to manage blood sugar, so you’ll be less likely to store body fat. Increasing fibre helps with satiety and because it lowers the glycemic index of food when consumed, you’ll also have less of an insulin response. Alcohol can’t be stored, so your body has to burn it off before it’s able to burn protein, carbs and dietary fat.
By limiting your alcohol intake, your body is able to use more quality fuel to keep your metabolism running.
5. No quick-fix medication
What about the weight loss medications in the news, such as Ozempic and Wegovy? In the obesity medicine world, we believe obesity is a multifactorial and heavily genetically determined disease. It’s important to understand medication for weight loss is by no means a quick fix.
In fact, it simply levels the playing field so people with obesity are able to successfully implement the lifestyle modifications necessary for long-term, sustainable weight loss. For example, leptin resistance plays a large role in the development of obesity.
Leptin is produced by your fat cells and when it is working properly, it tells your body it’s safe to release fat. But if you have leptin resistance, even though you have plenty of body fat, your body is unable to recognise this. So, despite a calorie deficit and strong exercise routine, you cannot lose weight. Weight-loss medications can help people with leptin resistance.
While medication can help some, for most people, weight loss happens when you create a calorie deficit over a long period of time. Successful weight loss is not just as simple as eating less and moving more.
However, if you are aware of your thoughts, committing to emotional regulation, hitting protein goals, limiting sugar and alcohol, being selective with treats, incorporating a strength-training routine, while getting steps in, and understanding that there is help out there, including weight-loss medication, then successful long-term and sustainable weight loss is possible.
Dr Ali Novitsky is the founder of The Fit Collective (thefitcollective.com), a health and fitness programme. She is Board Certified in obesity medicine, paediatrics and neonatology. She is also a nutrition and fitness expert. Follow her at instagram.com/alinovitskymd
