How To Lose The "Covid-19" Weight You Gained During Lockdown
A large percentage of the population has gained unwanted weight during Covid lockdowns in Ontario.
Photo by Andres Ayrton from Pexels
Photo by Andres Ayrton from Pexels
Some of these people were in decent shape, would exercise regularly and would consider their nutrition habits average or above average. Then when lockdowns hit, they could no longer go to the gym, likely dealt with a stressful work or home environment or a combination of each. This mentally and emotional drains someone making it difficult to find the motivation to do at home workouts, cook the right food while balancing work a family life.
Take this idea a step further and consider that many people tend to eat more when stressed. This is partly due to craving and overconsuming an abundance of sweet, high calorie and highly processed sugars foods. There is some research suggesting that sweet, sugary and high glycemic foods produce a rewarding effect in your brain. Subconsciously satisfying your taste buds and relaxing your super stressed state.
There is no problem with this in moderation, but if you keep relying on that feeling guess what happens? You can literally become addicted to those foods and cravings will go through the roof. It can actually add more stress to your system because you have to put extra effort into changing your eating habits and slowly weaning off that reliance on food to solve your stress issues.
So what’s the solution here?
Well one thing is for sure:
It’s not much different than a regular weight loss program. The only difference is that we KNOW the Covid-19 weight gain stems from either lack of exercise or reliance on eating more highly processed sugars to cope with stress. Or a combination of both.
This is good to know because we now know how to tackle it head on. This takes the guess work out.
Step 1
Get your butt back into the gym. Gyms in Ontario are open again, this of course includes us. We do personal training and small group training, indoor and outdoor options available.
Chris training Kat with Barbell Front Squats.
This may seem obvious but I’m going to briefly explain why exercise is so important to a weight loss program.
Exercise helps you burn more calories which is what needs to happen for your body to lose weight. Food in = energy in. Exercise = energy out.
Exercise itself releases hormones that make you feel great afterwards! This means you’re less likely to rely on sugary foods to “satisfy your stresses”.
Exercise builds confidence, whether it’s from the more “toned” physical shape or from the good feeling you get. Either way, in the words of the great Deion Sanders “When you feel good, you play good”.
Step 2
Don’t go looking for a magic diet. There’s no such thing. We can’t hammer this point home any harder.
This is because the general idea of weight loss is this:
Food = energy. When you eat more calories than you expend (via exercise and resting metabolism) your body stores this excess energy as fat.
The same vice versa, when you expend more energy than you intake, you lose weight.
So looking at it from a bird’s eye view, it doesn’t f*cking matter if you do Keto, Intermittent Fasting, Low Carb, Vegan, juice cleanses, IIFYM (if it fits your macros), clean eating, etc!
They all try to accomplish the goal of: eat less than you expend. For example: Intermittent fasting does this by essentially making you skip meals so that it becomes difficult to eat as much as you did before. It’s harder to eat 4000 calories in an 8hr window than it is in a 16hr window. Same with Keto, most people eat farrrr too many carbohydrates so eliminating them from the diet almost completely will likely result in some weight loss. However, Keto is dangerous because it requires large amounts of fat and we’ve noticed through coaching that it is easy to have too much fat! This is because most fats are in liquid form and it’s so easy to put too much oil in your cooking and then boom, you just ate more calories than usual therefore not hitting your fat loss goals.
My point is that there’s literally nothing special about any diet. It doesn’t matter at all, all of those diets are just marketing terms to try and simplify the weight loss process by forcing you to only eat a certain way. It’s completely unnecessary. There are better ways to overcome your weight loss through proper nutrition.
We like to coach the Precision Nutrition way. This is because it’s VERY SIMPLE and it doesn’t completely restrict your food choices. It also allows for some specificity if needs be. For example, if you don’t find the simple method is working very well. We can try the more advanced method. Just know, it’s not necessarily a “better method”. It requires more calculations and the need the either weigh your food or follow more precise food serving sizes with all the labels you cook with or eat out from. More than 80% of our clients have seen the results they wanted from just using the simple method so we recommend that first.
This diet is also great because there are no restrictions to foods you love. If you love croissants we’re not gonna stop you from eating them! Just know that you have to keep your daily caloric intake in check so if you have one, make sure it’s within the average limit we calculate for your individual needs.
Step 3
Consistency.
For some reason, no one wants to hear this word. Likely because when you click on an article or video you’re looking for the “quick fix”. Like I said at the beginning, there is no sustainable quick fix. Look at the people from “The biggest loser” and other extreme diets. Within a year they’re back at their starting weight. You can’t use these in the long term. It’s unhealthy and it won’t satisfy your weight loss needs.
Consistency is what you need. Depending on much overweight you are or how much you weigh, healthy weight loss can be between 1-3lbs a week. Let’s say you gained 15lbs during covid lockdowns. 3lbs of weight loss a week would take you only 5 weeks! BUT THAT 5 CONSISTENT WEEKS OF BEING 100%. Let’s say you were 75% consistent with exercising and eating for your goal. That means it’ll probably take you a bit longer, maybe 6,7 or 8 weeks. The point is, consistency is the key.
We try to make everything as clear cut as possible for our clients. It’s no wonder why we’ve helped hundreds of clients through the years reach their goals and be at peace with their exercise and nutrition habits. If you’re interested in losing weight, getting leaner and healthier WE CAN HELP.
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