It’s that time of year again:  New Year’s resolution time!  Perhaps you’ve decided to make one or more for yourself in 2019.  It’s perfectly natural to feel like we’re ready for a fresh start when we turn the calendar page.  (To read more about why this is a good time to start new habits, check out this post and this post).  Or perhaps you’ve sworn off making resolutions, as you’ve eventually discarded more resolutions than you’ve kept. 

Regardless of how you feel about resolution-making, odds are that you’ll hear a lot of talk about them in the next few weeks.  One of the most popular New Year’s resolutions will inevitably resurface: losing weight¹.  It seems that this is a reoccurring goal for us each year, which is why we thought it would be a good time to discuss a recent article from the Huffington Post entitled “Everything You Know about Obesity is Wrong”.  This article definitely gave us some food for thought regarding some misunderstandings about obesity and the consequential misguided attempts to treat it².

Misunderstandings about Obesity

When thinking about obesity and weight loss, we tend to simplify things a bit too much.  For instance, you may have heard about the equation consisting of calories in and calories out.  Calories in refers to the calories you consume through eating and drinking, while calories out refers to the energy you expend through exercise and generally moving throughout the day.  If one side of the equation is larger than the other, we’re either losing weight or gaining weight, and if both sides of the equation are equal, we’re maintaining our weight.  We can sum this up below:

Calories in > Calories out = Weight Gain

Calories in < Calories out = Weight Loss

Calories in = Calories out = Weight Maintenance

Pretty simple, right? Sort of.  Actually, calories in is much more complex, starting with the fact that our food labels aren’t 100% accurate.  So, we may not know exactly how many calories we’re consuming.  Even if we did know the exact amount, our bodies vary in how many calories we absorb once our food has been digested.

Calories out isn’t as straightforward as it sounds either.  Though it does consist of the calories we expend during exercise, it also includes the calories we expend just to keep ourselves alive (also known as our resting metabolic rate), calories we expend digesting our food, and calories we expend doing non-exercise activity (think fidgeting or doing dishes).

So, when someone decides they would like to lose (or gain) weight, it’s not necessarily a simple task of eating less (or more) or exercising more (or less).  Not to mention, we all vary in how our bodies process food and how high or low our resting metabolic rates are³.

Another misconception about obesity is that losing weight is something we can fully control.  If the equation really was so simple as eating less and exercising more, then this might be true.  However, to think this way means we forget that our lives aren’t just affected by our own personal decisions, beliefs, and behaviors, but also by things out of our control, like our genetic makeup, our socioeconomic status, our environments, our access to healthy food and safe places to exercise, our education level, our relationships with significant others, friends, family, our jobs, our free time (or lack thereof), and so on.  We also can’t forget that when we alter one side of the equation or the other, our bodies can respond by changing up our hormone levels.  Once again, we find the equation is not so simple.

A final misconception is that being thin does not necessarily equate to being healthy.  Much like judging a book by its cover (something we all teach our kids not to do), judging a body size for its level of health can lead us to incorrect assumptions.  For instance, one can have a high BMI (a measurement of weight to height) but have a low body fat percentage and excellent bloodwork.  Conversely, one can have a low BMI, but have a high body fat percentage and bloodwork indicative of disease.  Recognizing that weight is not necessarily synonymous with health is a helpful way to correct this misconception.

The problem with the above scenarios is that they can lead us to make harmful judgements about ourselves or others.

If we think we simply don’t have the willpower to make changes if we want to lose weight, or we look at others and assume they don’t have willpower or are unhealthy without actually knowing the status of their health, we reinforce the notion that we all must look a certain way to be healthy and thriving.

 

Next month, we’ll discuss the second part of our review of this article regarding the misguided actions to treat obesity that come from the above misconceptions.  We’ll also dive into how wellness coaching is an excellent alternative to these actions and highlight how 2019 could be the year you stick with your resolutions (if you’re making them!).

If you simply can’t wait until then, you can learn more about wellness coaching here and here, as well as a method to help new habits stick.  As always, feel free to reach out to us with any questions you may have!

We wish you all a very healthy, happy, and thriving 2019!

Written by:  Brittni Paris, SFC Wellness Coach & Blogger

 

Sources:

¹K McGrath. (2018, December 13).  What will consumers buy in 2019? Retrieved from:  https://www.offers.com/blog/post/new-year-purchase-predictions/

²Hobbes, M. (2018, September 18).  Everything you know about obesity is wrong.  Huffington Post.  Retrieved from:  https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/

³B St. Pierre. (No date).  Can eating too little actually damage your metabolism? Retrieved from:  https://www.precisionnutrition.com/metabolic-damage

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