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Correct nutrition and calorie control is an absolutely vital part of Personal Training.  It’s the key to successfully reaching weight loss and body fat reduction targets, and is essential for a healthy lifestyle, optimum sporting performance and improving lean muscle.

Unfortunately, it’s also the area that most people struggle to get right so I thought I’d share some of my wisdom with those of you who are looking for basic facts and information on weight loss, and help you to avoid some of the most common pitfalls and misconceptions.

I have worked with thousands of people on life style, diet and exercise programs.  Many of them have been desperate to lose weight and have struggled for a long time despite their best efforts.  These people nearly always tell me “I hardly eat anything and I’ve tried everything but I just can’t lose any weight” - or words to that effect. 

To find out why this is so often the case, we first need to understand how the human body gains and loses weight, and establish a few scientific facts with the help of the laws of thermodynamics.

Simply put, these scientific laws govern how a system will react to changes in energy intake or output.  In our case, the system is the human body, energy intake is calories consumed from food, and energy output is the amount of calories burned through daily living and any other activities we carry out.  It can explained by the following three simple equations;

If energy in (calories consumed) = energy out (calories burned): no change in weight.
If energy in (calories consumed) < energy out (calories burned): there is a weight loss.
If energy in (calories consumed) > energy out (calories burned): there is a weight gain.

We now know why these people haven’t lost weight.  The laws of thermodynamics tell us that they must be consuming at least as many calories as they’re burning, since their weight has not reduced.  Similarly, we know that at some stage in the past, they must have continually consumed more calories than they burned for a period of time, as they gained the weight that they now wish to lose!

If any of you are thinking “yeah, but I’ve got a slow metabolism so this doesn’t apply to me” here’s another scientific fact; every human being is born with the same metabolic rate.  There’s no such thing as a genetically slow metabolism - we all effect our metabolic rate by the way we live and eat, be that positively or negatively.  Genetic body types exist, genetically low metabolisms don’t.

If we now take a moment to reconsider the original statement, it could well be true that these people haven’t actually consumed a large quantity of food, it just means that they’ve consumed too many calories.  I’ll explain;

One of the big problems we have today is that there are literally millions of tasty, convenient, calorie-dense foods which are all too readily available.  This makes it really easy to consume a lot of calories without eating a lot of food, and being completely oblivious to it.  When coupled with the fact that daily calorie requirements are becoming less and less due to reduced activity levels thanks to modern living, we can see why so many people struggle with weight loss.

Unfortunately there is no secret to weight loss.  Regardless of what the latest “diet” or magazine tells you, they do not change scientific facts and “diets” are basically various theoretical ways of reducing calorie intake, which rarely work since they are often unhealthy and almost always impractical.

To control or lose weight long-term in todays society takes discipline, an open mind and genuine desire along with structured exercise, an active lifestyle and of course, correct nutrition and calorie control.

The good news is that I can help you to learn more facts about weight loss and establish nutritional habits that will stay with you and allow you to control your weight for a lifetime.  There’s no reason why anyone should waste weeks, months or even years struggling to lose weight, or throwing money at hopeless fad diets as so many unfortunate people still do. 

If you think that none of the information in this article applies to you because you’re really active, and you easily do as much as you did 10, 20 or even 30 years ago so you need the calories to give you energy because that’s what you did when you were younger and ate cream cakes every day without gaining a pound – you’re seriously wrong! 

Likewise, if you’re struggling to lose weight but you think you do enough to easily burn off everything you eat because you’re taking regular exercise, you’re also wrong!  Don’t believe me?  Come back and read my September article on Lifestyle and Activity!

All the best! - Rob Nash