If you’ve lost weight before and regained it, you’re not alone.
I know that cycle from my own experience with bodybuilding, yo-yo dieting and spending the majority of my adult life obsessing over my body. In more than 15 years of coaching, I’ve also seen how hard it can be to maintain an exercise and nutrition plan that leaves you hungry, exhausted or trying to fit unrealistic training around everyday life.
And this is where I think the weight-loss industry gets it wrong.
A crash diet or extreme exercise program can absolutely produce a result in the short term. The problem is that getting weight off and creating a lifestyle that allows you to keep it off are two very different things.
Long-term weight-loss research consistently shows that weight regain is common, and physiological changes following weight loss, including increased appetite and changes in energy expenditure, can make maintenance more challenging (Hall & Kahan, 2018; Sumithran et al., 2011).
So a sustainable approach starts with a much better question:
What changes can you realistically keep doing and building on?
Why weight loss can be difficult to maintain
Energy balance is absolutely part of weight change. But simply being told to “eat less and move more” doesn’t explain how to make those changes work in real life.
Picture this.
You’ve had a bit of a rough trot of events. You’re not fit. You’ve been eating some garbage for a while, not drinking enough water, you’re stressed, your sleep isn’t great and you’re feeling really off.
So you go to a trainer and suddenly you’re thrust into four weeks of intense training and told to eat 1,800 calories per day of high-protein foods you don’t even particularly like to get this result you are desperate for. So you just do it, without question.
You now have to:
- Find energy you already feel like you don’t have to train.
- Suddenly perform substantially more physical activity while simultaneously eating less.
- Deal with hunger, fatigue and soreness while your body is adapting to a completely new workload.
- Start weighing, measuring and counting food, potentially multiple times per day.
- Find a way to recover from significantly more exercise despite potentially already having poor sleep, low fitness and high life stress.
- Somehow maintain motivation while juggling work, family and whatever else is going on in your life.
- Follow a rigid plan that may give you very little opportunity to say, “Actually, this isn’t working for me.”
And then when you can’t maintain it and somehow you are made to feel like you failed the plan.
NO.
THIS IS NOT HOW THE PLAN HAS TO BE.
Research into lifestyle interventions has found that lack of time, negative mood, physical limitations, lack of enjoyment, environmental pressures and unrealistic expectations can all interfere with adherence. Importantly, researchers have argued that these barriers need to be addressed and lifestyle interventions individualised accordingly (Burgess et al., 2017).
That is exactly why I prefer a different approach.
Before asking your body to do more, let’s help you feel better!
One of the first things I want to establish is enough energy and nourishment to actually participate and function in your life.
How on earth are you meant to output a tonne of effort in training when you already feel completely depleted? Moreover, how are you meant to sustain the brain power and focus needed to just get through your day, let alone get through your workouts if your metabolism is cooked?
For many people, a great place to start is eating an abundance of nutritious, minimally processed foods, increasing fruit and vegetables, getting appropriate protein and an abundance of carbohydrates (that’s right, an abundance!), drinking adequate water and creating meals that actually leave you satisfied.
My clients are often surprised by how much food they can eat when we change what makes up the plate, rather than simply making the plate smaller.
Foods with a lower energy density, particularly foods naturally higher in water and fibre such as fruit and vegetables, can allow people to eat satisfying volumes of food while consuming less energy overall. Systematic review evidence supports lower-energy-density dietary patterns as a useful strategy for weight management (Pérez-Escamilla et al., 2012).
This is why sustainable weight loss should NEVER feel like perpetual starvation.
Hunger matters. Fuelling your body adequately matters. Your ability to function WELL matters.
After weight loss, the body can respond with biological changes that encourage increased food intake. In a well-known study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, changes in several appetite-regulating hormones and subjective hunger remained present a year after substantial diet-induced weight loss (Sumithran et al., 2011).
So when someone tells me they are starving all day on their weight-loss plan, my response isn’t automatically:
“You just need more discipline.”
I want to know why.
What are they eating? How much are they eating? How satiating are their meals? What is their activity level? How are they sleeping? What does their working day look like? What is happening with their stress? Can this person actually live like this?
Because hunger and deprivation can make adherence much harder, and adherence is ultimately where results live or die.
You also don’t need to go from zero to athlete overnight
After years of experimenting with my own body and working with clients, I do not recommend going from virtually no exercise to trying to train like an athlete five days per week.
For many people, it’s just too much change at once.
Depending on the person, beginning with deep-core activation, basic resistance exercises, walking, functional everyday movement, mobility and breathing work may be much more appropriate.
Then you can build.
Research supports gradually building physical activity in a way that feels achievable, rather than expecting someone to go from sedentary to training at a high intensity almost overnight. Strategies such as setting realistic goals and progressively increasing activity can help people build exercise habits they’re more likely to maintain (Carraça et al., 2021).
Exercise should suit:
- your goals;
- your current capacity;
- your experience;
- your recovery;
- your injuries or limitations;
- your energy;
- and, very importantly, your actual life.
Because the world’s greatest program is completely useless if you can only sustain it for four weeks.
Why crash diets work quickly… then fail.
Crash diets are appealing for one obvious reason:
They can work quickly.
Seeing the scales drop rapidly is incredibly reinforcing. You feel like you’re finally getting somewhere.
And physiologically, there is a fairly simple reason they can produce such dramatic short-term results. If you suddenly train a lot more while eating substantially less, you create a large energy deficit. Your body still needs fuel to function, move and train, so it has to draw more heavily on stored energy.
But here’s the catch.
The body doesn’t simply sit back and allow that energy deficit to continue indefinitely without responding.
What is sometimes loosely referred to as “starvation mode” is better described as a collection of metabolic adaptations to energy restriction. During significant weight loss and prolonged energy restriction, energy expenditure can decrease, appetite signals can change and thyroid hormones involved in metabolic regulation, particularly T3, can fall. Severe or prolonged low energy availability can also affect broader endocrine and immune function, recovery and physical performance (Mountjoy et al., 2023; van Baak & Mariman, 2023).
That doesn’t mean your body suddenly stops being able to lose fat, but it does mean that the harder you push the body into an energy shortage, the more physiological and behavioural pressure you may create to conserve energy and regain what has been lost.
Research into weight-loss maintenance shows that changes in appetite regulation, energy expenditure and other physiological systems can persist after weight loss and may contribute to the tendency to regain weight (van Baak & Mariman, 2023). This doesn’t mean everyone who diets will regain everything, but it helps explain why finishing an extremely restrictive program and simply returning to “normal” can be such a difficult transition.
Someone might finish a crash program lighter, but also exhausted, hungry, sore, relying on coffee to get through the day and desperate to stop living according to the plan. If the only thing holding the result together was severe food restriction and an exercise schedule they could never realistically maintain, what happens when they stop?
Often, the very behaviours that produced the rapid result disappear with the program.
The habits required to produce rapid weight loss can be completely different from the habits someone is prepared to practise for the next five, ten or twenty years.
So rather than making the entire strategy about doing more exercise and eating less food, I prefer to focus on improving what your body is capable of over time, building strength, preserving or increasing muscle, supporting energy levels and improving the quality of your nutrition.
If someone has struggled with their weight or metabolic health for years, I look at the bigger metabolic picture: their food intake, muscle mass, activity, blood-sugar regulation, thyroid and liver function, immune health, appetite, sleep, stress, recovery and health history. You’ll never see me instituting an aggressive calorie deficit with a client. In fact, I don’t even like the term, so I don’t even say it!
Instead, I focus on what the body can actually do with the energy it can produce, and that means building strength, preserving or increasing muscle, improving metabolic function and gradually increasing physical capacity.
This is why strength training is such a big part of long-term results.
Rather than just trying to force the body into burning more and more body fat by cutting more and more food, we want to build and preserve muscle. Skeletal muscle is metabolically active tissue, so having more lean mass contributes to your daily energy requirements and helps to support blood-sugar regulation and metabolic health. More importantly, strength training allows us to build a body that can do more: train harder, move more, become stronger and gradually increase overall energy expenditure over time (Müller et al., 2013).
Resistance training itself has also been shown to improve markers of insulin resistance and glucose regulation, which is another reason I see muscle and metabolic health as closely connected parts of the process (Boyer et al., 2023; Paquin et al., 2024).
In practical terms, that can put you in a much better long-term position than simply trying to survive on less and less food.
The intention is to help you create a body and a lifestyle where you can eat a satisfying amount of food, remain active, maintain your muscle and still move towards a healthier body composition.
At the same time, we can use nutrition to support that metabolic picture by improving the overall quality and composition of the diet, supporting appetite and energy levels, and making food choices that suit the individual.
So instead of asking:
“How much weight can we make you lose in four weeks?”
I’m much more interested in asking:
“Can we build a stronger, healthier body and way of eating that still works for you two years from now?”
If your results depend upon training six days per week, weighing every gram of food, never eating at a restaurant, never having dessert and spending half your Sunday meal prepping, but you hate every second of it, we haven’t really solved anything.
That doesn’t mean discipline isn’t involved in changing our habits, but if the plan isn’t reasonable enough to fit into your actual life, it’s just not sustainable.
The intention is to gradually improve your strength, muscle mass, nutrition and everyday habits so that maintaining your results becomes part of how you live, not something you have to constantly fight to achieve.
No more calorie counting… PLEASE!
Some people genuinely enjoy tracking calories and find the data incredibly useful.
Fantastic.
But plenty of people don’t. I am one of those people!
I prefer teaching practical skills clients can use for the rest of their lives: building a satisfying plate, increasing colourful whole foods, understanding portions, choosing carbohydrates intelligently, reducing highly processed or sugary foods where appropriate and learning how to navigate eating out without feeling as though they’ve “ruined everything.”
There is absolutely an energy equation involved in fat loss.
But human beings aren’t spreadsheets. And calories aren’t the most important measure of food. I’m more interested in teaching clients how this food is going to support liver detoxification and immune health, or whether this food is going to make me feel energetic or sluggish 30 minutes after eating it. You can’t count those factors with calories alone!
Supporting someone’s physiological needs while considering their hunger, food preferences, stress, environment, activity levels, health history and lifestyle gives us a far better chance of creating behaviours they can actually repeat.
And repeatability is everything.
What if motivation wanes?
It will.
In fact, I often say that I don’t really believe in relying on motivation at all.
No matter how long you’ve been training, there will be days you don’t want to do it.
I’ve been training for years and I still don’t want to train probably half of the time.
These days are the days you’re forced into battle with your own mind. The only way to consistently win is to practice.
Dopamine is involved in the neural systems associated with effort, behavioural activation and decisions about whether a reward is worth the work required to obtain it. Both animal research and human research support a relationship between dopamine signalling and effortful behaviour (Ko & Wanat, 2016; Salamone & Correa, 2024; Treadway et al., 2012).
That doesn’t mean forcing yourself through every workout magically “creates dopamine motivation.”
Human motivation is far more complicated than that.
But it does reinforce something I’ve observed over and over again in coaching:
You cannot always wait until you feel like doing the thing before you do the thing.
Sometimes action comes first.
Sometimes you’ll win that battle and sometimes you’ll lose.
And that’s okay.
A sustainable weight-loss mindset accounts for the bad weeks, missed workouts, holidays, dinners out and moments of weakness.
Consistency doesn’t equal perfection.
It means keeping your toe dipped in long enough (with enough little deposits of effort over a longer period of time) for those deposits to finally add up to something significant.
Accountability matters too
Having a coach holding you accountable from week to week can be incredibly useful when the initial enthusiasm inevitably wears off.
Systematic reviews examining lifestyle interventions have found that adherence is an important determinant of outcomes and that behavioural strategies can improve participation and physical activity (Burgess et al., 2017; Carraça et al., 2021).
This is where coaching can make all the difference.
Sometimes you know exactly what to do.
You’re just locked inside your own head.
You’ve had a bad week. You’re frustrated. The scale hasn’t moved. You’ve missed two sessions and suddenly your brain tells you:
“Well, I’ve stuffed it now. I may as well give up.”
Having someone outside of that moment who can say:
No. You haven’t stuffed anything. Let’s work out what happened and start again.
…can be the difference between one difficult week and abandoning the whole thing.
Progress that fits real life
One of my clients came to me as a busy mum of two who also works full time wanting to lose weight. She had low energy and wasn’t feeling her best.
Over about 20 months, her training changed according to what was happening with family and work.
Some weeks included two personal training sessions.
At other times it was one.
Some weeks all she could manage was a home workout.
And sometimes, on weeks that were really kicking her butt, it was less.
But Ella also made steady changes to her eating habits, including choosing more colourful foods and reducing sugary foods, without cutting everything out.
Over that 20-month period, she still managed to lose 12 kg and several centimetres from her body, while also gaining strength, mobility and confidence in the gym.
In her video testimonial, she talks about not feeling deprived and having more energy.
Her experience is personal to her, of course, and individual results vary.
And THAT is sustainable weight loss to me.
It really goes to show the power of consistent deposits of effort over time.
Not a crazy crash diet.
Not an exercise program that takes over your entire life.
Not spending every waking moment calculating calories.
Not believing you’ve failed because you ate birthday cake.
Just repeatedly returning to behaviours that move your health in the direction you want it to go.
Long-term weight management research supports this broader view: weight regain is common, and ongoing behavioural strategies and long-term support are often required rather than treating weight loss as a short, isolated intervention (Hall & Kahan, 2018).
The best program is the one that is done NOT PERFECTLY, but consistently.
If you’re looking for sustainable weight loss personal trainer in Wynnum, Hemmant or Brisbane Bayside, I offer personal training and nutrition support that starts with your circumstances, your body and your life, not an arbitrary four-week challenge.
Book a free discovery call and let’s work out a realistic place for you to begin.
References
Burgess, E., Hassmén, P., & Pumpa, K. L. (2017). Determinants of adherence to lifestyle intervention in adults with obesity: A systematic review. Clinical Obesity, 7(3), 123–135. https://doi.org/10.1111/cob.12183
Carraça, E., Encantado, J., Battista, F., Beaulieu, K., Blundell, J., Busetto, L., van Baak, M., Dicker, D., Ermolao, A., Farpour-Lambert, N., Pramono, A., Woodward, E., Bellicha, A., & Oppert, J.-M. (2021). Effective behavior change techniques to promote physical activity in adults with overweight or obesity: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Obesity Reviews, 22(Suppl. 4), e13258. https://doi.org/10.1111/obr.13258
Hall, K. D., & Kahan, S. (2018). Maintenance of lost weight and long-term management of obesity. Medical Clinics of North America, 102(1), 183–197. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mcna.2017.08.012
Ko, D., & Wanat, M. J. (2016). Phasic dopamine transmission reflects initiation vigor and exerted effort in an action- and region-specific manner. The Journal of Neuroscience, 36(7), 2202–2211. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1279-15.2016
Pérez-Escamilla, R., Obbagy, J. E., Altman, J. M., Essery, E. V., McGrane, M. M., Wong, Y. P., Spahn, J. M., & Williams, C. L. (2012). Dietary energy density and body weight in adults and children: A systematic review. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 112(5), 671–684. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jand.2012.01.020
Salamone, J. D., & Correa, M. (2024). The neurobiology of activational aspects of motivation: Exertion of effort, effort-based decision making, and the role of dopamine. Annual Review of Psychology, 75, 1–32. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020223-012208
Sumithran, P., Prendergast, L. A., Delbridge, E., Purcell, K., Shulkes, A., Kriketos, A., & Proietto, J. (2011). Long-term persistence of hormonal adaptations to weight loss. The New England Journal of Medicine, 365(17), 1597–1604. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa1105816
Treadway, M. T., Buckholtz, J. W., Cowan, R. L., Woodward, N. D., Li, R., Ansari, M. S., Baldwin, R. M., Schwartzman, A. N., Kessler, R. M., & Zald, D. H. (2012). Dopaminergic mechanisms of individual differences in human effort-based decision-making. The Journal of Neuroscience, 32(18), 6170–6176. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.6459-11.2012