You Probably Don't Need To Lose Weight
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Takeaway Points:
For most people, weight loss should be a consequence, not a goal, of getting in shape.
The emphasize should be on developing new habits which are healthy for you, regardless of whether or not this impacts your weight in the short or long term.
Most people face serious barriers to weight loss which render it not worthwhile as a primary goal.
You Probably Don’t Need To Lose Weight
“Health” is a complex and multifactor quality, which is hard to really nail down properly for most people. The reality is that while weight can impact your health, it’s just one factor.
When it comes to getting “in shape” or getting “healthy”, there’s no single factor that you can focus on to drive all of your results. Instead, what’s required is a multi-factor approach that addresses as many of your lifestyle concerns as possible.
What You Can Control
Here’s a list of major concrete factors you can manage to improve your health:
Lift Weights
Lifting weights will increase your strength, muscle mass, bone density, and joint stability, all of which help you to live longer and age gracefully.
Do Cardio/Be Active
Cardio affects the body differently than lifting, and has its own unique benefits in terms of improving your cardiovascular function, as well as improving your body’s ability to manage energy.
Even if you don’t like higher intensity cardio, staying generally active (in the form of steps per day, or having a job on your feet or similar) will help.
Avoid Inactivity
Try not to spend too much time sitting down! Move around periodically and keep yourself moving as much as possible even during long work days.
Stop Smoking/Vaping
Neither of these are particularly good for you.
Minimize Alcohol/Substance Abuse
Same as above. On top of that, loss of inhibition can often lead to other negative habits, like mindless eating.
Eat Enough Protein
Most people need a bit more protein than the average intake to sustain good activity levels, and aren’t eating enough lean proteins.
Eat Enough Veggies
Most people aren’t eating enough veggies, which provide necessary fiber.
Veggies are also very low in caloric density, meaning that they’re a powerful component in helping manage hunger cues.
Limit Junk Foods
Junk foods tend to have high caloric density, making them easy to overeat, and messing with your hunger cues.
Get Better Sleep
Sleep is powerfully correlated with numerous health factors, and many struggle to get enough sleep, or reduce sleep quality by messing around with phones and blue light sources late at night when they need to be winding down.
Manage Your Social Risk Factors
There are a lot of other major risk factors related to public health concerns - whether you drive a car, whether you have access to health care, whether you have clean air where you live, etc.
These factors are often overlooked, but have a powerful impact on how long we live.
What You Can’t Always Control
While there are a lot of factors you can control, there are also a lot of factors that you can’t. You can control how much time you put into lifting weights, for example, but you can’t choose your genetics or where you were born. You may have some ability to manage your circumstances, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll always have every opportunity to manage your health possible.
For example, if you don’t have good healthcare, you may be able to find a better job that offers healthcare, or you may be able to earn extra income to offset costs, or you may be able to move to a different city or country in search of better opportunities - but these are all significant challenges that some people will be able to pull off and others won’t. We can’t expect, for example, that somebody would have the capacity to drop everything and move to another country for healthcare. If you live in a city that’s not very walkable and doesn’t offer public transit, you’re forced to make the tradeoff of driving a car even though this puts you at much greater risk of being injured or killed in a car accident.
Where Does Weight Fall Into This Equation?
Very often, weight is not a variable that’s easy to control. Carefully manipulating your bodyweight via diet and exercise is an incredibly complicated skill that took me over a decade of work in the fitness industry and recreational lifting/bodybuilding to really get a handle on - can I expect everyone to be able to do the same? Certainly not.
Often, weight is NOT a cause of ill health, so much as it is a symptom. When you are not managing the factors you can manage, you gain weight as a result of ill health, and not the other way around.
Often, weight is NOT something that you can manage. Many individuals will have genetic predisposition to gain weight, or low natural metabolisms, making it very difficult or nearly impossible for them to lose weight in a healthy way.
Often, individuals face discrimination and shaming for their weight, which makes it harder for them to survive. Doctors will often blame underlying health issues on weight so that they don’t have to look further, often resulting in failure to diagnose serious, unrelated health issues. Heavier individuals often face discrimination in terms of getting started at the gym. These hostilities create a hostile psychological environment that makes it hard to develop a sustainable habit, and easier to create a negative feedback loop that causes further lack of effort.
Often, there is an excessive focus on being “skinny”, or falling within a certain weight range. This weight range is not sustainable or healthy for many individuals, and attempting to meet it can cause eating disorders or addiction to exercise. The research supports that it is extremely difficult to lose very large quantities of body weight, and that most people do not succeed.
Often, it’s unclear how much “health” one gets out of losing weight. There is evidence that some weight loss can improve health markers, but this does not extend to the extreme weight loss required to become “skinny” for most people. It’s also hard to separate this from managing the other health factors above - most people lose weight by managing their diet, getting more active, etc., all of which have benefits independent of weight loss.
It is clear that there’s likely a much larger range of “healthy” weights than have been previously assumed, and that most of our efforts to shame and coerce heavier individuals into weight loss is misguided at best, and often outright harmful and actively causing ill health at worst.
What Should You Do?
The thing you should do is the stuff you can control. You can get more active, lift weights, manage your protein and vegetable intake, cut down on risk factors, improve your sleep, etc. - and as a result, you’re going to get in better shape and better health regardless. Over time, sure, you might lose weight, but this is a side effect and shouldn’t be the goal.
As a coach of over a decade, I’ve worked with clients on every end of the fitness spectrum, and I can say that very rarely have I worked with anyone who I might have considered being someone who needed to lose weight. I’ve certainly worked with plenty of folks who thought that they needed to lose weight, and what a diverse group of people they turned out to be! I’ve met a 100lb woman who came to me insisting she wanted to lose “just 5-10lbs” because she thought that this would get her to a place where she felt better about her body.
And the reality is that (almost) no one is a perfect “health robot”. I spent a decade neglecting my diet while training as a powerlifter because I didn’t want to do anything about it, and even when shifting to training more as a bodybuilder, I have plenty of negative habits that I worked around on a regular basis. Trying to force everyone to perfectly follow all of the arbitrary “rules” may work well enough for some small minority, but it certainly doesn’t work for everyone.
Instead, the goal is not to be perfect. The goal is to optimize for what is doable for you, within your circumstances, and with what information, time, and energy you have available to you, as well as what resources you can expend. This means accepting that you’re not always going to be perfect. You can hit a workout but maybe you go out for drinks. You can get your work in, but maybe you have a bad night of sleep here and there. You may not be able to live up to a perfect ideal, but you can always make improvements on existing habits, learn over time, and pick yourself back up when you get off track.
If you’re looking for a coach to guide you in the process, we’re currently accepting new online coaching clients. Our goal is not to get mad at you for not following some silly little diet, or shame you for not being able to hit every workout perfectly - it’s about being a guide and a resource in the process of optimizing for your own health, keeping you on track and helping you get realigned when you get off track. Our goal is to help you build strength, endurance, and muscle mass - and feel and move better in your body. Online coaching is much cheaper than in-person coaching, and you get to work with world-class coaches like us from anywhere in the world. Reach out and apply via our coaching page if you’re interested.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.
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