Why Your Weight Loss Journey Shouldn’t Start With Weight Loss

If you’ve been trying to lose weight, I want to challenge the way you think about starting your weight loss journey. Because I think one of the biggest mistakes women make is starting with weight loss.

They start with: “I need to lose weight.”

And then everything they do revolves around the number on the scale. They find a diet. They eliminate foods. They start exercising. They pick a calorie number. They try to be perfect. And they make weight loss the measure of whether they’re succeeding. But your weight loss journey isn’t supposed to start with losing weight or a calorie deficit.

It begins with building a healthier lifestyle. And I know that might sound counterintuitive because if your goal is to lose weight, shouldn’t you just start losing weight? Here’s why you can’t start your weight loss journey with losing weight and a calorie deficit.

Weight loss and healthy living aren’t the same thing

You can lose weight without becoming a healthier person. Think about that for a minute. You can eat very little. You can follow a diet. You can cut out entire food groups. You can exercise excessively. You can track your calories and make no changes to how you live. And yes, you might lose weight. But none of that necessarily teaches you how to live differently.

And that’s the problem I see so often. A woman loses the weight on some diet, but she hasn’t built the foundations to maintain it.

She hasn’t learned how to eat in a way she can sustain. She hasn’t learned how to navigate restaurants. She hasn’t learned how to handle vacations. She hasn’t learned how to eat through the holidays. She hasn’t learned how to manage emotional eating.

She hasn’t learned how to create meals and prep them with enough protein and fiber. She hasn’t learned how to exercise consistently. She hasn’t learned how to get steps and build an active lifestyle. She hasn’t learned how to pivot when life gets busy. She learned how to eat less and lose weight.

But she didn’t learn how to live as a healthy person. And those are two different things. You don’t just lose weight. You become someone who lives a healthy lifestyle. You become the person who get steps daily. You become the person who plans meals and goes to the gym. You don’t become those things by simply losing weight.

This is why you need two plans. When you go on a weight loss journey, you need two plans. You need a weight loss plan. And you need a lifestyle plan.

Your weight loss plan is what creates the calorie deficit. That’s the physiological piece of weight loss. Humans need to consume fewer calories than their body uses over time to lose body fat. But what often gets missed is that a calorie deficit is not a lifestyle.

You don’t want to spend the rest of your life thinking about how to eat less and stay in a calorie deficit. Eventually, you need to transition out of weight loss and into maintenance. And if you haven’t built a foundation of lifestyle skills before losing weight and while you’re losing the weight, you simply fall back into the same lifestyle that caused the weight gain in the first plan.

Your lifestyle plan is what teaches you how to actually live.

It’s learning how to:
Build balanced meals
Eat enough protein and produce
Incorporate foods you enjoy
Plan and prepare meals
Navigate eating out
Handle weekends and vacations
Exercise consistently
Get your steps
Manage stress and emotional eating
Stop thinking in terms of “good” and “bad” foods
Recover from an off day without turning it into an off week
Create routines that make healthy choices easier

Those are the skills that make your weight loss sustainable. A calorie deficit doesn’t give you those skills neither does a GLP-1. A weight loss medication can’t strength train for you or get steps for you. That is a part of building a healthy lifestyle.

So why build the lifestyle before the calorie deficit?

Because if you start by saying, “I have to lose 30 pounds,” your brain immediately starts looking for the fastest way to get there. And that’s where diet mentality takes over.

What can I eliminate? How little can I eat? How quickly can I lose this weight? How can I be perfect?

When weight loss becomes your only goal, it’s very easy to sacrifice the health behaviors that you actually need to keep weight off. You need to build the foundations first. Learn how to eat balanced meals. Learn how to incorporate protein and fiber.

Learn how to eat fruits and vegetables regularly. Learn how to stop making foods off limits. Learn how to cook. Learn how to plan. Learn how to move your body. Learn how to exercise. Learn how to get steps. Learn how to create routines. Learn how to navigate real life.

Then you can use a calorie deficit as a tool within that healthy lifestyle.

That’s a completely different approach. The calorie deficit becomes something you’re doing within your healthy lifestyle, rather than your entire lifestyle becoming one giant calorie deficit. And I think that distinction is incredibly important for women to understand.

Think about what happens when you start with weight loss

Let’s say you decide you want to lose 40 pounds. You put yourself on a 1,400-calorie diet. You make a list of foods you’re not allowed to eat. You start exercising six days a week. You track everything. You tell yourself you’re going to be perfect. And maybe you lose some weight and you’re thrilled.

But then something happens. You go on vacation. Or you have a stressful month. Or the holidays come. Or you simply get tired of eating the way you’ve been eating. And suddenly, you’re no longer following the plan. Because the plan was designed to help you lose 40 pounds. It wasn’t designed to teach you how to live until you’re 85+ years old. That’s the missing piece I see over and over again for women.

The goal is to become the person who can maintain the weight and lives a healthy lifestyle.

You are not healthy because you lose weight. You are healthy because you live a healthy lifestyle and have a healthy body composition.

I want you to start thinking about weight loss differently. Instead of asking: “What do I need to do to lose 30 pounds?”

Ask: “What does a woman who maintains a healthy weight do consistently?”
That’s a much more powerful question!

Because now we’re talking about behaviors. We’re talking about skills. We’re talking about your daily life. We’re talking about who you’re becoming. And that’s where lasting weight loss really happens. Because ultimately, you don’t want to become someone who is really good at dieting. You want to become someone who doesn’t need to constantly diet.

And this is actually how I lost my 80 pounds.

This isn’t just something I teach my clients because it sounds good on paper. It’s exactly what happened in my own journey. My 80-pound weight loss journey didn’t start with me waking up one day deciding I needed to lose 80 pounds. It started with a 10-minute walk.

At the time, I was working as a consultant and staying at a hotel near Redondo Beach. I wasn’t feeling great about myself. I wasn’t feeling great about my life. And one day, I decided to go down to the beach and walk for 10 minutes.

I wasn’t following a program. I wasn’t trying to lose 80 pounds. I wasn’t thinking about calories or even weight loss. I didn’t wake up one day and say I’m going on a weight loss journey, oh no.

I just wanted to do something that made me feel a little better. And that 10-minute walk did. So, I went back the next night. And then the next. Eventually, I started walking a little farther. And I noticed I was sleeping better. I felt better. I had more energy. And something interesting started happening.

Because I was feeling better, I started wanting to take better care of myself. I started eating things like hard-boiled eggs and fruit. I started eating more vegetables. I started cutting some meals in half. My clothes started getting a little bigger.

And notice what was happening. I wasn’t dieting or tracking calories. I was building a healthier lifestyle before I ever tried to lose weight.

Then later I added the weight loss plan.

Many months later, I was reading a nutrition magazine and came across an article about calories and calorie deficit. And that’s when I learned that if I wanted to intentionally lose weight, I needed to pay attention to how many calories I was eating. So, I downloaded an app and started tracking my food. But because I had already started changing the way I lived, tracking wasn’t about suddenly putting myself on a restrictive diet.

It was a tool. I didn’t eliminate bread. I didn’t eliminate pasta. I didn’t eliminate dessert. I started learning how to make the foods I enjoyed fit into my calorie budget. That distinction mattered. Because I wasn’t learning how to survive a diet. I was learning how to eat.

I started cooking. I didn’t know how to cook before this. But I learned that cooking is actually pretty simple if you can follow directions. So, I started trying recipes. I subscribed to nutrition and fitness magazines, collected recipes, experimented. I was developing skills that I still use to this day.

Many of you are going to message me asking me what app I used. Don’t do that. That is exactly your problem. You’re focusing on the weight loss before building your foundations, your healthy lifestyle which is exactly the point I’m making with this episode.

Then exercise became part of my lifestyle.

A few months later, I decided I should join a gym. I remember telling myself well, fit people go to the gym so I should go do that if I want to be fitter. And let me tell you, I was incredibly self-conscious walking into that gym.

I remember being aware of my thighs bulging through the buttons on the sides of my gym pants. So, I got on the treadmill and only did that for a few weeks then eventually, I tried the elliptical and only did that for months. While I did that, I watched people use the weight machines.

And I thought: “I’m gonna try that.” So, I did.

I started lifting weights. I used the elliptical. I continued walking. And slowly, exercise became part of my life. I was building a new way of living.

Again, there was no massive transformation overnight. I wasn’t suddenly this person who ate perfectly and worked out every day. I built it over months and years. One behavior at a time.

And eventually, I lost 80 pounds.

But here’s what I think is most important about that story. I didn’t lose 80 pounds and then figure out how to live. I learned how to live before and while I was losing the 80 pounds. That’s the difference.

I built the lifestyle. Then I learned how to use a calorie deficit within that lifestyle. And those two things worked together. The weight loss plan helped me lose the weight. The lifestyle plan helped me become the person who could maintain it. And that is why I believe the two plans are so important.

Your starting point doesn’t matter as much as you think.

Now, you may be listening to this thinking: “But Megan, I’m nowhere near where you were.”
Or: “I don’t exercise.”
Or: “I don’t know how to meal plan.”
Or: “I have no idea how many calories I should eat.”

That’s okay. You don’t have to start where I started. And you certainly don’t have to change everything at once. Where you begin doesn’t matter.

Pick one thing. Maybe it’s a 10-minute walk. Maybe it’s adding protein to breakfast. Maybe it’s eating a fruit or vegetable with lunch. Maybe it’s including carbs at breakfast or lunch. Maybe it’s cooking dinner twice a week. Maybe it’s learning how to build one balanced meal like breakfast. Maybe it’s going to the gym once a week. Maybe it’s paying attention to your portions.

Pick one thing. Then build it. Because the goal isn’t to create a temporary version of yourself who can lose weight. The goal is to create a lifestyle you can actually live with.

Stop making weight loss the first goal.

If you’ve been dieting for years, this may feel completely backwards. But I want you to stop thinking that the first thing you need to accomplish is losing weight.

Instead, your first goal can be: “I’m going to start becoming a healthier person.”
And then, once you’ve started building those behaviors, you can create the calorie deficit that allows you to lose weight. That’s not avoiding weight loss. That’s preparing for lasting weight loss.

Because eventually, the calorie deficit ends. The diet ends. The weight loss phase ends. But your lifestyle doesn’t end. And that’s why the lifestyle has to be something you build from the very beginning. Your weight loss plan gets you to your goal weight. Your lifestyle plan helps you stay there.

And if you’ve been losing and regaining weight for years, maybe the missing piece isn’t another diet. Maybe you simply haven’t been given a plan for what comes after the diet. That’s the work I help women do in my nutrition practice. Not just figuring out how to lose weight but learning how to become the woman who can actually build it and maintain it.

And if there’s one thing I want you to take away from this episode, it’s this: Don’t start your next weight loss journey by asking, “How can I lose weight?”
Start by asking: “How can I build a healthier life?”

Because that’s where lasting weight loss begins.

One of the biggest challenges I have is helping women understand that I don’t just help them lose weight. I help them build a healthy relationship with food and build a life that they don’t need to start over every Monday with.

I get messages consistently from women who I can tell are still in this mind frame of thinking that a nutritionist like me is just going to give them a calorie number to see how compliant they can be.

There are some nutritionists who do that, but I don’t. I help women build a healthy lifestyle that will support long-term weight maintenance. Yes, that involves a weight loss plan and a calorie deficit, but we don’t start with that.

We start with building the foundations first of a healthy lifestyle. That’s the first plan and until a client is good at those foundations we don’t even talk about weight loss or a calorie deficit.

It’s unfortunate to see how many women think their health journey is about eating less and losing weight. I used to have this mindset too, but losing weight alone doesn’t make you healthy. It’s the habits, behaviors and skills you develop that make you a healthy person. You can be skinny and still unhealthy. You can still have an unhealthy relationship with food. You can still be out of shape or have osteoporosis.

For example, one of my clients recently went on vacation. She told me she got to the airport and didn’t sit at the gate because she knew she wants to get some steps before sitting on an airplane. So, she paced around the airport until her flight took off. She also packed oatmeal, bought a yogurt with 30 grams of protein, packed fruit and a protein bar. And on her vacation, she made protein the first thing she put on her plate.

That client is thinking differently. She’s taking the foundational skills her and I have worked on building and learning, and she applied them to her real life – the vacation. She didn’t go on vacation to escape from them, and she didn’t have to start over when she got home because she’s built them, she feels better when she does them and they are not complicated.  

The women who work with me transform from the inside out because they are learning to think differently, they learn the skills and they start applying them in their normal life. They become someone who is living a healthy lifestyle, not just dieting or following a calorie deficit number.

That is true transformation and that is how you achieve weight loss results that last. Because weight loss results don’t last without a lifestyle plan. So, if you’re interested in getting weight loss results that last, you can schedule an assessment call with me, and we’ll chat about how I can help you do that. The link is in the caption for you.