​Do you struggle to keep on top of nutrition when you attend social events during a fat loss diet? Then this article is for you.
 
I’m going to cover two of my clients’ favourite go-to strategies, which also happen to be two of my personal favourites, when eating out without tracking calories. So far, they’ve been applied with great success to a range of different social events, including:
 

• Weddings
• Summer barbecues
• All-you-can-eat buffets
• Birthday parties
• Work lunches and dinners
• Restaurant meals with friends
• Special date nights

 
Here’s why these methods work, even without being meticulous about your calories:
 

• They’re simple to understand and remember
• They’re easy to put into practice
• They rely on basic healthy nutritional habits that you’ll have already been working on to make your diet both sustainable and successful

 
Are you sold on the idea yet? Then let’s get into it.

How do you take a break from your diet without losing progress?
 
Why would you even want to, if you haven’t reached your fat loss goal yet?
 
First of all, if you’re serious about dieting, it isn’t easy to do. Taking a one- or two-week break every six to 12 weeks of dieting, can give you some much needed respite to regain momentum and motivation to stick to the plan. (If you’re on a longer-term fat loss journey, lasting months or even years, you may want to consider maintenance phases in addition to diet breaks. Read this article to learn more.)
 
Moreover, life happens. You may go on holiday, move house, change job, or experience other life-changing circumstances, during which trying to diet is only going to backfire. This is a great time for a diet break.
 
Last but not least, you won’t be dieting forever (I hope). Once you reach your goals, you’ll need to maintain those results. This will be much easier to do if you practised maintenance in a previous diet break or two.
 
In this article, I’ll break down what to do, so you can enjoy your diet break without losing progress, by answering the following questions:
 

1. What can happen to your weight during a diet break?
2. How do you know how many calories to eat?
3. What foods should you eat?

In Part 1 of this article series, I explained:
 

1. Why your bodyweight is a useful tool in a fat loss or muscle gain phase
2. How to track and collect bodyweight data

 
In this second part, I’ll explain how to interpret and utilise your bodyweight data from the beginning to the end of a fat loss phase in order to diet and maintain the results successfully.
 
As stated in the previous article, the only data that matters in the context of muscle gain and fat loss is your bodyweight average per week and/or per month, which is what I’ll be referring to in the rest of this blog post.

​To achieve any goal, you need to collect and analyse data.
 
Without it, you wouldn’t know
 

• If you’re making progress
• The rate at which you’re progressing
• What is working
• What is not working

 
In other words, without data, you can’t make the right adjustments to your plan.
 
You could still accomplish your goal, but you’d probably run into one of these two scenarios:
 

1. You can’t maintain the achieved results because you made excessively drastic decisions that you can’t sustain in the long term
2. You take an unnecessarily long time to reach your target because your decisions were too conservative

 
However, having data isn’t enough to secure effective and efficient results. Inconsistent and unreliable data, or data that you’re interpreting incorrectly, can be just as damaging as the absence of it.
 
For example, with fitness goals such as fat loss and muscle gain, a common mistake is to focus too much on day-to-day fluctuations on the scale, which are normal, and too little on your average weight increases or reductions over a longer period of time, which is what matters most for these fitness endeavours.
 
This multi-part article series will provide you with the knowledge to assess your bodyweight data in order to achieve fat loss or muscle gain.
 
In Part 1, we’ll delve into:
 

• Why you need to weigh yourself
• How to weigh yourself to get consistent and reliable data
• How to record and assess this data

 
In the rest of the series, we’ll cover how to adjust your diet and training protocol in response to changes in bodyweight.

95% of diets fail, so diets don’t work.
 
… Or do they?
 
If you take a look at the scientific literature, there’s actually plenty of evidence to the contrary. For example, we know that diets inducing a caloric deficit are effective for fat loss regardless of whether they’re high in fats, carbohydrates, or protein.
 
In other words, any diet can work as long as it involves a caloric deficit.
 
The real problem is maintaining the resulting weight loss.
 
For instance, a review of nearly 30 long-term studies on weight loss and maintenance in the American population showed that more than half of the weight lost was regained within two years, and 80% was regained within five.
 
For this reason, experts consider maintenance of 5 to 10% of your weight loss “a great achievement”.
 
But why is it so hard not to put weight back on?
 
When a new client signs up for online coaching to lose fat, what often stands out to me is their mindset: In their experience, a diet is a short-term, excruciating “eat chicken breast and a green leaf for every meal” endeavour, not an attempt to change their lifestyle for the better in the long run.
 
After a few weeks or months of this torture, they go back to the same way they were eating before, regain weight, start another diet, and so on.
 
This vicious cycle is unfortunately common because most diets give you rules to stick to, whether you like them or not, instead of habits that you can incorporate into your long-term lifestyle.
 
This article is perfect if you haven’t had much luck maintaining fat loss after your previous diets, because it does exactly what those diets didn’t do: It teaches you five habits you need to have in place not only to lose fat, but to keep it off, too.
 
If you’ve been spinning your wheels with countless diets for as long as you can remember, you don’t want to miss this one.