Performance EDU Nutrition Blog Post - “Show Me”
More than 30 million Americans are obese and require medical intervention to for chronic disease caused by obesity like; cardiovascular disease, diabetes and high blood pressure. Likewise, there are countless Americans actively trying to lose weight at any given time, and some with success, but there are a great number that aren’t. Some of these individuals often resort to seeking advanced medical intervention despite a history of severe calorie restriction. From what we have always heard; “calories in versus calories out is the answer to weight loss”, what happens if that’s being followed and still not working for you? Well, numerous studies have been published on the “discrepancy between self-reported and actual calorie intake and exercise” and the majority of these studies tend to say the same thing; “due to an energy intake substantially higher than reported and an overestimation of physical activity.” This means that you are eating more calories than you think you are eating, and not burning off as many exercise calories as you think. The issue here is that most people need some education on serving sizes, portions, weights of food, and trusting the nutrition facts panel on some food items. The absolute best place to get that type of information is with a Registered Dietitian who are the only medical care providers qualified to teach nutrition.
Learning the necessary skills to log and report correctly to avoid “not losing weight despite a low calorie diet” requires practice, patience, and a qualified instructor. If you are logging your meals by yourself into a program like MyFitnessPal, how do you know if what you input into the system is accurate, and how do you know you logged the correct portion size? As a Registered Dietitian, my two favorite words combine to form a phrase that helps me to ensure that we are working to improve those nutrition skills and get you closer to your goals. That phrase is; “SHOW ME”. When you tell me that you aren’t losing weight despite following a low calorie diet, Show Me. When you tell me that you are eating “clean” and try to meal prep every week, Show Me. When you are telling me that you are following the plan we talked about and not seeing results, SHOW ME.
You have to show your work, you have to show me that you understand the assignment and tasks based on your ACTIONS. Just like in math class early in your school days, teachers asked you to show your work (how did you get this answer?). The reason is so that if there is the wrong answer given in the math problem, we can retrace your steps to see where the error occurred. Just like in improving your nutrition, the answer is your “outcome”. If you didn’t achieve the right “outcome”, we have to know where the error was and retrace some steps to correct it. By showing your work, we can achieve our intended “outcome” faster and with better accuracy.
How you are going to show your work is with the daily goals/habits we design together. You will be asked to log them daily either as a simple “yes” or “no” or something a little more specific like logging certain foods or logging all meals and drinks. Some habits may require more work but it depends on your intended outcome. To achieve a lofty outcome we either need a lot of one of
two things; 1) time or 2) effort. Losing a substantial amount of body fat in a short period of time means that you really have to give a lot of effort and a simple action item like: “one serving of vegetables per day” just won’t get you there. The type of action item that you need might be something like: “hit your macronutrient numbers with less than 15% margin of error”. It might also mean: “exercise for 60 minutes 5x per week”. If those action items are just a little too far out of reach, then we keep our same intended outcome of losing a substantial amount of body fat, but we just extend the time it will take to achieve it. Instead of 3 months to achieve, it might take 6 months to a year, depending on the level of effort and the action items.
My job as a coach is to help you set goals, and work towards the goals by providing the action items to do (that you can manage) that will get you there AND keep you accountable to doing them. My job is to worry about the outcome goal once we agree on it, and your job is to do the action items. We will build on them and change them as we go, so trust me to give you the right action items for you to reach your goal without completely upending your life, and I will trust you to always “SHOW ME” that you are doing those action items.
