The internet is full of terrible health and fitness advice.

Thankfully, most of it is benign bullshit. It’s the advice that’s mostly pointless, but not actively harmful. For example, adding a slice of lemon to your water first thing in the morning to ‘detox’ or doing fasted cardio to burn more fat.

Then there’s the advice that actually does harm. Things like cutting out whole food groups, or training with ridiculous volume because someone skimmed a study and missed the point completely.

But there’s a third type of advice that’s particularly insidious–comforting half-truths.

They contain just enough truth to sound correct, while leaving out just as much context, so the message ends up being misleading.

But misleading isn’t what makes this type of advice so harmful; it’s the fact that it makes the person receiving the advice feel better about themselves while they stay stuck.

In my opinion, the most popular comforting half-truth is the “you can’t lose fat because you’re eating too little, so you need to eat more.”

The comforting part of this claim is how it absolves the individual of any responsibility. Of course you’re not overeating–you’re just eating too little, which has ‘blocked’ fat loss, and the only solution is to eat more food.

The reason this sounds so convincing is because there is some truth to it.

If someone’s been dieting too aggressively, a higher calorie target might improve adherence. Or, if they take a diet break, they’ll likely experience more energy, which translates to more movement and better training performance, all of which can increase energy expenditure. More food will also improve mood, sleep, and make them feel less like a bag of nuclear horse manure.

As a result, it’s not uncommon for people to eat more and find they suddenly start dropping fat and looking leaner.

But it wasn’t because eating more helped them unlock some metabolic loophole that Big Diet doesn’t want you to know about, it’s because – drumroll please – eating more improved their adherence to the diet, which meant they were finally in an energy deficit.

However, this doesn’t mean that everyone who starts eating more will suddenly lose weight. In fact, for most people, this advice does the opposite.

Case in point: Laura, who had worked with a few coaches before working with me, said:

“I have worked with other coaches who would consistently give me higher calorie targets (based on arbitrary minimums) even when I wasn't losing fat. I have also been told that I couldn't lose fat and build muscle at the same time. With Aadam, I could do both. And Aadam gets the science. There's no 'maybe you're not eating enough to lose weight' or other junk 'science' in his program. He knows what works and tells it like it is.”

Well, we just wrapped up Laura’s cut, and she hit her goal weight and body composition.

So what was different this time around?

I didn’t bullshit Laura.

When her progress slowed down, I didn’t tell her it was because she was “eating too little.” Instead, we first confirmed she was tracking accurately. Once the tracking accuracy was taken care of, I wasn’t afraid to drop her targets.

For instance, over the entire cut, Laura averaged just under 1,000 calories, even dropping to ~800 near the end.

I’m sure the reaction to that last paragraph spanned from 'Wow, that’s really low!' to 'What!? Was this guy starving her?'

And if that was your reaction, that’s the problem.

Up until now, I haven’t told you anything about Laura other than showing her progress. So you’re making an assumption based on a predetermined idea of what you think is too low.

So, here’s Laura’s context: She’s almost 60. She’s only 4’11”. She weighed just under 120 lbs when we started. She plays tennis at a pretty high level and was strength training, though not as consistently as she'd like. She wanted to get leaner, build muscle, look and feel good in tennis clothes, and improve her performance on the court.

When Laura started with me, she wasn’t tracking her nutrition, and “had a little confusion about how much to eat. I'm old, I'm short. It's hard to know where the sweet spot is for me personally.”

So this wasn’t about taking a 200-lb guy and putting him on ‘poverty’ macros for a sweet before-and-after photo; it was taking a woman whose maintenance at the start of the diet was already 1600, and helping her make progress based on her goals and her body.

I made this point in another article, but it’s worth repeating here.

At a maintenance intake of 1600 calories, she started her cut at roughly 1200. Once you account for the usual drop in expenditure that comes with dieting, it shouldn’t be shocking that her intake eventually had to come down to 800–900 calories per day for her to keep making progress.

That sounds extreme because people fixate on the absolute number. But the math isn’t fundamentally different from a guy maintaining on 2500 calories needing to drop to 1700 as he gets leaner.

In both cases, the deficit is about 800 calories. But people see 800 calories and lose their minds. They see 1700 calories per day, shrug, and keep it moving.

Unsurprisingly, everyone has different caloric needs, and Laura’s energy, hunger, and training performance were fine throughout.

In fact, she even won two tennis league matches near the tail end of her cut.

Now you know why I get so pissed off when I see fitness folk telling people they can’t lose fat because they’re eating too little. My frustration just happens to present itself with an unreasonable amount of snarkasm™.

But these people ^^ aren't the only ones to blame.

This advice keeps spreading because it’s the version people want to hear. People don’t want to hear that their tracking might need work, that they might need to eat fewer calories than they'd hoped, or that progress might require changing habits and giving up some things for a while.

So, here’s your reminder: Stop looking for the easier version, and you might actually start making progress, just like Laura did.

“I feel confident in my clothes, I’m moving faster, jumping higher, and hitting with more power on the tennis court. Being happy with how my body looks and feels is the best, though.”

–Aa

P.S. How did you find this week's instalment of the Vitamin?

​👍 Loved it | 👎 Hated it​