Why move more, eat less is not a sustainable way to lose weight and a better approach

Move more, eat less has been the equation for weight loss in the fitness industry for years. Everyone knows about it. Every year millions of people across the US use this equation to lose weight.

But 80-95% of them gain it all back within 5 years...

Doesn't sound like its a winning long term strategy, does it? Many people think that because they lost the weight in the first place that this strategy "works," but if it worked, they would be able to keep the weight off for 5, 10, 15+ years.

That's where the problem lies, this approach is a short term weight loss strategy, not a long term one.

Why doesn't it work long term? Because it is centered around two pieces that are not maintainable for 5, 10, 15+ years: increasing movement and restricting food intake. Our bodies are adaptation machines, so every time we increase movement and restrict calories, our bodies will eventually adapt to this. Our body does this by increasing calorie efficiency (a.k.a. improves how efficient we are at movement with the calorie intake we are at) and reducing our metabolic need for calories (a.k.a. slows our metabolism down which leads to lower caloric intake for daily functions), essentially we become a more efficient machine.

Being efficient is great when we have very little access to food or if we have to hunt our food, but it's not so great when we can get our groceries and takeout delivered to our door at just about any hour of the day.

If you follow this move more, eat less strategy long term, you end up eating very little and moving a ton to maintain your weight loss... and that's not something you can live with for the long term.

A better approach is to do this process in reverse: decrease your metabolic efficiency by building muscle. Muscle is inefficient: it requires more calories to maintain. You do this by strength training 1-3x per week and fueling your body with MORE food. You can't consistently build muscle without a calorie surplus. This doesn't mean you go and eat like a kid in a candy store, but you strategically increase your caloric intake incrementally as you build muscle.

This is the approach I use with clients. You will almost never hear me tell a client to restrict their caloric intake. Because restriction leads to rebellion (sorry Brits). I always tell them to fuel their muscle growth until they are in a place where they have a metabolism that is nearly twice as fast (inefficient) as it was when they started.

Essentially, they won't reduce or restrict calories until their metabolism is so fast that eating more is too uncomfortable for them. At this point we can decrease calories incrementally and see the fat shed of their body to reveal a sculpted, toned body underneath.

This is a long term, sustainable approach to weight loss. It's not easy, but it's simple.