If losing weight was easy, there probably wouldn’t be a diet or weight loss industry.

Unfortunately, evidence indicates that most people who lose weight will put it back on within a year or two!

To lose weight and keep it off, most of us need to make long term lifestyle changes like being more physically active, eating more healthily and exercising.

Remember, you’ve had a lifetime of lifestyle behaviour and habits that have led you to where you are now. However, making and maintaining these changes are not easy for many of us to do, which is we tend to give up and go back to our old habits.

To help you create new habits and stick to these lifestyle changes, GutBusters programmes follow NHS and NICE guidelines to help provide you with the support, knowledge and skill’s to allow you to take back more control, lose weight, be fitter and maintain a healthy body weight.

We do this by focusing on the following five key areas:

• Giving you more knowledge of fitness, nutrition & weight loss
• Help you to lose body fat and change your body shape
• Provide you with support and guidance to be able to achieve your goals
• Delivering exercise sessions to help you get fitter & stronger
• Help you maintain a healthy body weight

Creating new habits and making long term lifestyle changes to improve your health, lose weight and get fitter doesn’t happen overnight.

For many people, replacing old habits with new ones can take many weeks and months before they become embedded. But, the longer you can keep to the new changes the more likely they are to become permanent.

This is why a 12 week programme gives you a much better chance of turning these changes into long term habits (it’s also a reason why many NHS or health services adopt 12 week programmes).

Our 12 week programmes are able to give you more support, cover more topics in depth, help you learn more about how to lose weight, stay at a healthy body weight, be fitter and establish your new habits.

However, we understand that 12 weeks can be a big investment of your time, money and commitment. That’s why we created our 4 week starter package. It allows you to try our programme to see if it’s for you and covers some of the key topics of weight management. If you want to carry on after 4 weeks, you can simply jump over to the remaining 8 weeks of the 12 week programme for £89.

Whichever one you choose, both the 4 and 12 week programmes offer great value for money.

It depends on your starting point and if you only want to get to a target weight, or be at a healthy weight and stay there!

Someone who has a lot of excess body fat will need to lose more than someone with less excess body fat. Where you store the extra fat can also play a significant role in how much you need to lose as well.

For example, carrying too much fat around your waist means you’re more likely to get conditions like heart disease, some cancers and type 2 diabetes. The NHS recommends that you should try to lose weight if your waist is 102cm (40in) or more for men, and 88cm (34.5in) or more for women.

You should also ask yourself why you want to lose weight?

It could be for one or more reasons, but some of the most common ones are to look and feel better about yourself, be more attractive, have better health or for a significant event like a wedding or holiday.

It’s natural for anyone trying to lose weight to want to lose it quickly, especially with claims made by some ‘diets’ that you can lose up to 5 – 7 lbs in a week. Yes, you could potentially lose this much weight, but most of it will come from water loss (not fat), which you’ll just put back on.

Evidence shows that losing weight gradually and steadily (around 1 to 2 pounds per week) will make you more successful at keeping the weight off, and that the majority of this will be fat loss. If you are overweight, a weight loss of 5 to 10 percent of your total body weight is also likely to produce health benefits.

The term “weight loss” can be misleading. If you’re thinking about losing weight, what you probably mean is that you want to lose unwanted excess body fat.

Most people tend to use scales to measure their weight, but the truth is that scales don’t tell you what you’re losing!

Your total body weight includes the weight of your muscles, fat, bone tissue, internal organs, and water. So, when you lose weight, what are you actually losing? Is it all fat, or are there other things being lost as well?

For example, many people on a 4 week calorie restricted diet, the ratio of fat, water and protein being lost can change on a weekly basis and may typically look something like this:

Week 1 Weeks 2 – 3 Week 4
Fat = 25% Fat = 70% Fat = 85%
Protein = 5% Protein = 10% Protein = 15%
Water = 70% Water = 20%

Whatever diet or weight (fat) loss programme you chose should, one of it’s main aims should be to change your body composition.

Body composition simply means how much fat you have compared to your lean body weight (like muscle, bone, internal organs etc). To get a better body composition, you should aim to lose excess fat while maintaining or increasing your lean body weight (e.g. muscle mass).

Good weight loss = Mostly fat loss + little or no muscle loss + little water loss

Bad weight loss = Water loss + some muscle loss + some fat loss

Losing muscle reduces your metabolic rate, meaning that any extra calories which are no longer needed (due to losing some muscle), will be stored as fat and could make you gain weight even faster.

Having more muscle mass increases your metabolism, meaning you burn off more calories while making it easier to lose fat and prevent fat gain.

Most people who lose weight regain it after a year or two, so clearly something isn’t working properly.

You wouldn’t buy a new car, fridge or television if you knew there was an 80% chance that it wasn’t going to work after a year or two.

However, many people still try to lose weight by following unrealistic diets or doing the same things over and over again to lose weight. While it may work short term (for example hitting a target weight), it’s rarely sustainable over the long term. Try looking at people who have been ‘slimmer of the year’ and see where they are on their weight journey a few years later!

Having a healthy diet and being in a negative energy balance (consuming less calories per day than you burn up) is probably the most important aspect of weight loss. For example, consuming 500 calories less per day than you burn up will make you lose about 1 lb of weight a week. The good news is that a lot of this will be fat loss.

But, also having an exercise plan with this can help you burn off even more calories, improve your health and fitness, and help to keep lean muscle mass, meaning you’ll look even better when you reach your weight loss goals.

Unfortunately, while many diets plans and weight management services may talk about physical activity, they don’t deliver exercise, or give you the knowledge about what exercise to do to maximise your weight loss.

Another reason why weight loss can’t be sustained is that most of us usually have to make long term lifestyle changes (which can be difficult to do).

Ultimately though, you’re the one who has the power to make the long term lifestyle changes and take control of the things you need to lose weight, maintain a healthy weight and be fitter and healthier.

The GutBusters weight management and exercise packages are designed to help you get the knowledge, tools, skills and support you need to achieve your goals.