THE PERFECT CLIENT
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I’m going to outline what a perfect client does when they come on board for weight/fat loss.
Why?
Just to show the reality of the situation.
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Most people are in the whole *Eat as little as possible so I can lose weight, then get really hungry and eat loads of high calorie foods*
thing.
Meal times are all over the place.
Exercise too little or too much.
Punish themselves for being in the shape they’re in.
Not sleeping brilliantly.
Stressed.
Got kids.
Struggling with nutrition choices.
Struggling with nutrition dogma – like not eating chocolate because they think its naughty.
All that kind of thing.
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What do we want to do with people in that situation so we can get them on track?
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1. We get them tracking their intake, so we can view their nutrition habits.
2. We get them exercising sensibly, so that they can work on recovery, which affects appetite, sleep, energy levels etc.
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Once that’s sorted, we then provide them a sensible calorie target that’s balanced.
I like to take a couple of weeks to do this.
However, as you can imagine, that can be a problem.
Everyone wants instant results.
Let’s pretend I’ve taken on a client who is female, which happens regularly.
She’s 100kg.
She believes she eats healthily but hasn’t lost weight for a long time and is desperately unhappy with her weight.
She doesn’t sleep well, which affects appetite.
She exercises all the time, doing numerous class after class.
She restricts her food all week, only for her body to absolutely scream “I NEED TO EAT RIGHT NOW” – then chooses without control, foods that are high calories.
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Now I take said lovely lady and say;
“Ok, you need to eat 2200kcals please.”
Every single person reacts and says “that sounds really high”.
This has happened so much recently.
Hence the post!
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It might SOUND high, but its the starting point I’d put them on to begin.
We work on appetite, meal times to manage appetite, stress, food quality, food volume, choices, habits, sleep, food preparation, hydration and try to get all those ducks in a row.
Then we work on increasing calories around menstrual cycles.
We look at training, maybe back off and increase activity, to de-stress the body, purely to improve appetite management.
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Once this is done, we then see where we are at in terms of body composition.
How we measure, in order of priority:
1. Pictures – as they always show more than any other metric
2. Measurements – again, fat loss is not ALWAYS weight loss, as if doing resistance work, you are likely to gain muscle – a good thing.
3. Weight.
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Then we make changes in food intake based on that.
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Habits ALWAYS trump calorie restriction, especially in the first period of dieting.
Getting your ducks in a row, should be a priority, not fat loss.
Dan
