If you want to reduce your body fat percentage, build muscle mass, reach a goal weight, or improve strength in the gym, tailoring your nutrition to your goals is absolutely essential to achieving those goals.

After over seven years working as an online nutrition coach (and years in the fitness industry before this!), I want to share four major nutrition mistakes we often see as coaches working 1:1 with our clients. These mistakes aren’t because our clients are uninformed or wrong; they’re just often things we have been told (incorrectly) most of our lives.

Diet culture is a system that places value on our weight and size over our health. Diet culture is supported by a multi-billion dollar industry that pushes weight loss through every medium possible.⁣ Diet culture tells men, women, and children that they are not small enough, strong enough, or lean enough. ⁣DIET CULTURE IS HARD TO IGNORE.⁣ Anti-diet culture is not the same thing as anti-dieting, and let’s talk about why.

I’ve been my dad’s nutrition coach for a little over two years now and while working with ALL of my clients is rewarding, working with my dad has been especially rewarding in its own way. And while you may think I’m here to boast about how I’ve helped my dad lose a bunch of weight and finally get back to his high school football weight and body composition, I’m actually here to tell you that he hasn’t changed much physically and hasn’t really lost any weight at all.

We already know that a calorie deficit is the most important factor at play when it comes to pursuing fat loss goals. But, for most, staying in a consistent calorie deficit is a lot more challenging (and far more complex) than just “eating less and moving more.” One roadblock I see hindering progress over and over is not being in the right place to commit to these goals from the start.

Individuals who strength train gain muscle, lose fat, look leaner, improve their health, and are more athletic than the general population. The reason we talk about strength training as nutrition coaches is because, alongside digging into our nutrition more, adding resistance training can aid in the pursuit of these goals.

Many of us believe that the smaller we are the more acceptable we are. And the smaller we are the happier we are. But here’s the thing: Weight loss isn't therapy. Therapy with a licensed mental health practitioner is therapy.

For many, our nutrition history has been very confusing. There has been so much right or wrong thrown our way via marketing; so many “good” foods and “bad” foods as decided by some particular fad within diet culture; fleeting trends with changing definitions of what’s right and wrong; and certain thoughts and feelings we’ve attached to certain food choices. So, how do we go about breaking these habits of guilt and shame around our food choices?

What if we acknowledged that you can still have your “hot girl (or guy) summer” WHILE starting to initiate the changes you may desire to make starting NOW? And what if I told you that as you begin those changes NOW, you may be able to develop multiple hot girl summers in a row without a quick fix?

One of the best things we can do for ourselves is to eliminate the fixed mindset that medication means weight gain, and to instead shift our focus to prioritizing our mental health so that our physical health can follow. We need to reprioritize and recognize that the benefits of stable mental health outweigh the desire to lose weight.

I believe it can be really helpful to understand what our body’s physiological response to stress looks like and how it relates to food (including digging into why stress eating can feel so good). From there, we can get into a few practical exercises to help manage our physiological response to stress to help interrupt the physical urge to stress eat.

I had an overwhelming response to my call for your nutrition questions, so here are some of those great questions answered in part 2 of this Q&A series. Nutrition can be confusing and overwhelming, and I hope some of these responses help clear up some questions you’ve been wondering about as well!

Here at KLN, we don’t do meal plans. A meal plan doesn’t give you an alternative when it’s girls night, when you’re out for drinks after work, or when you’re on the road with your family. Most of all, a meal plan doesn’t take into account that life is chaotic and constantly changing.

When considering fat loss, the number one thing we talk about is energy balance. In order to lose fat, it’s necessary to eat a calorie deficit (eating less calories than you expend). However, our bodies aren’t made to exist in a calorie deficit forever.

Elevated stress levels and lack of adequate sleep can mess with the regulation of hormones that impact hunger levels and fat loss rate, and can also lead to mood problems that impact decision-making skills. This can create a one-two punch that makes fat loss much, much harder than it needs to be.

This fixation with the scale is a pattern we see with clients often. It’s natural, but it’s also preventable. Rather than just suggesting that you don’t let the number on the scale bother you, today’s post dives a little deeper into how you can make the most of this (often inaccurate) measure of progress and other ways to determine the true changes you are experiencing on your fat loss journey.

Most of the calories we burn in a given day aren’t during our workouts, and the majority of the differences in most people’s activity levels are unlikely to be just from that hour or so most of us are used to spending in the gym.

Most people have some time in their life when they think they performed or looked their absolute best, and then wonder why they weren’t able to hold onto that forever.  But, if you take a moment to reflect on all of the pieces of the puzzle that had to come together for that brief moment, it’s unlikely that everything can stay aligned that way for long.