I was doing a discovery session with a potential client and she was clearly very, very, very frustrated with her previous weight loss attempts.

Her husband was losing weight. Her friends were losing weight.

She told me, “I’m eating eating healthier than they are but I’m not losing the weight”.

“I'm doing everything right,” she added. “It's not working and I don't understand why it's not working.”

The first clue arrived almost instantly.

“Maybe I need to go back to another diet”, she said with a disappointing air of resignation in her voice.  She was really frustrated that she was doing so much work and seeing so little result.

Start With The End In Mind

When we're evaluating something like this, we need data. We need to understand from the client what they're doing compared to what they should be doing. We need to understand the underlying causes to try to find out what's going on (or, what’s not going on).

Then she says, “I'm not losing despite having a good metabolism”.

“What makes you think you have a good metabolism”, I asked somewhat surprised.

“Well,” she said, “I eat a lot of food, all the calories, and I don't gain weight.” After a thoughtful pause, she sighed, “I just can't lose weight”

She's four kilograms overweight. Because she's eating a lot and she's not gaining weight, she thinks she has a good metabolism.

Our bodies have a “setpoint”; a certain weight that we struggle to get below. If we do, through sheer willpower, we just return to that setpoint weight after a while. Our weight doesn't necessarily go up, but it doesn't go down. Our body just loves to be at that certain weight.

If your focus is on exercising more or eating less and you don’t consider the underlying cause of your condition, you’re not going to get results.

What's behind the setpoint is insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is a situation where the hormone insulin is no longer working and the cells in your body won't let fuel in. One of the functions of insulin is to let fuel into the cells. If the fuel can’t get in, our cells will be starved of fuel and that extra fuel that you do consume is being stored as fat.

Then what happens is a compensatory thing; the body compensates and makes more and more and more insulin and, the more insulin you have, the more of a setpoint you're going to have. No matter what you do, if you exercise six hours a day, the weight just simply doesn't come off. You’ll plateau and just be stuck at a certain point.

The plan we set out for her was working to start with. And then she noticed that it sort of stopped working. Turns out that she was eating a lot of “natural” energy bars with fruits and nuts and with dairy as the fat.

We’ll come back to her story in a minute but I want to say something about a very large farmer who wanted my help.  Now, when I say “large”, he was my height but probably three times my weight.

I suggested that our first step would be to look at what he was eating.  I said to him that we could probably start off by switching his breakfast out for a Himalayan coffee.

“I don’t eat breakfast”, he said with absolute sincerity.

“Oh”, I replied. My shock was obvious.  I wondered if there was something more seriously wrong with him for his body to be so far out of whack.

“I stop at the shop and grab a couple of energy drinks on my way to work and they keep me going until lunchtime”.

It was almost exactly what my frustrated plateau lady was doing - having small snacks that were labelled as “heathy” several times each day but not counting them as “eating a meal”. To really budge that setpoint it is critical to eat the right things at the right times.

We need to be very cautious about who we take advice from. We all have a friends or a personal trainer or even our doctor, all giving advice. What was happening to our frustrated client was she's getting data overload from too many sources. She doesn't know what's vital, what’s true or what’s trivial or what’s false. She was getting suckered by slick marketing with cool looking packaging wrapped around products with misleading words like “natural” and “organic”.

If you try to do research or find weight loss secrets on the Internet it is very difficult because you don't know who to believe. Even if the information is credible, those people on YouTube and Instagram have no idea about your specific details so might be giving good information but it might only be part of a solution for your own specific circumstances. Alternatively, they might be talking absolute shit.

Our first step is always to hyper focus on fixing insulin resistance.

Lots of our clients freak out and say they can't give up their energy drinks and “health” bars and dairy, especially long term!!! She was no different.

“It wouldn't be enjoyable,” she complained.

I said, “Don't focus on the long-term healthy eating plan right now. We have a big present-time problem. We need to fix that first.”

Once we fix the immediate issue, then we can actually think about what the client should do as a maintenance or long-term plan.

We need to fix the underlying cause. To do that we must do first things first. Bite-sized pieces, if you’ll pardon the pun.

There are tests that can be done to track your insulin resistance and for some clients this makes sense.  The one simple way to know if you're on the right track or not is your hunger. Is your hunger going away or not. If your hunger is going away that means your insulin resistance is improving. If you can't survive between meals, we know you still have a problem with insulin resistance.

Again, insulin resistance is a situation where insulin is not allowing the fuel in so your cells  are starving all the time. That's going to make it really hard to lose weight and reset your set point. All we're trying to do is switch from sugar fuel to fat fuel, step-by-step, so you're at a place where it's going to be really easy. Your hunger will go away. You will have energy. You will feel good.

You will lose weight.