You Must be Using Ozempic!

🗣️ "Level with me... You're using ozempic 💉, aren't you?!"
🗣️ "😂 no, no, no. I train consistently and I don't waste my calories."
🗣️ "I equally train consistently and I've dialled in my diet but nothing's changing 😔. C'mon, just tell me the truth!"

👆🏿a restructured and remixed transcript from a recent conversation I had with an acquaintance. "What could it be? Why am I not losing weight despite putting in the same work you do? And this belly?" - A summary of follow up questions. I suggested three possible reasons, in my opinion, that are generally applicable across the vast majority of us that are seemingly doing all the right things, but just not moving the needle on the scale.

Reason #1  - Diet Quality
How do you know if your diet is dialled in? Are you tracking it? Or are you arriving at the assumed conclusion because you've had a few apples 🍎 in recent times? The point is, many us are not fully alive to the quality of our diet. The fix? Track it and score it. An effective way to improve your diet quality is to score the quality of your current diet and continue to score your diet quality as you make efforts to improve it. How? Matt Fitzgerald, in his book Racing Weight, developed a simplified diet-quality scoring system which I have since modelled in Excel for my personal use and I'm more than happy to share with you here. 

Reason #2 - Excessive Dieting
Diet hard and long and you will effectively be pulling the handbrake on your metabolism. The fix? Gradually bump up your food intake, ideally with fiber and fruit. Do everything you have been doing but fuse in more fruit and fiber such weetabix (Shoprite), muesli (Woolworths) and psyllium husk (Umoyo). When it comes to fruit I'm loyal to the streets so whatever fruit is in season and sold by the roadside, I buy and consume every chance I get. Mangoes 🥭 and masuku are not safe around me this time around, nor are avocadoes 🥑 (technically a fruit).

Reason #3 - Overestimating Caloric Burn from Exercise and then Celebrating Too Early
It's either you 🧠🥵 or the technology ⌚️ 🤳🏿 you're relying on that's misleading you and not as accurate as you think. Most people are overstating the number of calories they're burning from exercise, and that creates unrealistic expectations on 'body transformations'. And sometimes it extends to the diet - "I was on the stair-master for 45 minutes surely I deserve cookie 🍪 for my efforts." That kind of self-sabotage means work done is equal to zero.

That's my 2 cents on the matter, and I'm far from a little guy so the ozempic suggestion is pure comedy to me.