The Power of Patience: Achieving Your Fitness and Diet Goals

Setting Realistic Timelines for Sustainable Weight Loss and Muscle Gain

Photo by Iva Rajović on Unsplash

Achieving your fitness and dietary goals requires more than just effort, it demands patience and a balanced pace. Rapid weight loss might seem appealing, but it can be counterproductive, while a pace that's too slow can dampen motivation. Similarly, building muscle and strength is a gradual process, and expecting rapid transformations can lead to disappointment. Comparing your early progress to someone else when they have years more training experience, is a common pitfall that can derail your motivation. Our goals demand realistic timelines, and I want to help lay out how long those goals can take, and help establish a realistic timeframe for you to get where you want to be. All helping to understand the realistic timeframes that getting to certain areas can take. 

The Importance of Patience in Dieting

First, I want to dive into the understanding of how long dieting will take and draw a deeper understanding to all of the phases that we typically go through so we can understand realistic expectations for the amount of weight loss that is incurred. The larger the amount of weight to lose, the longer the process will take, understanding that it is a marathon not a sprint will help in making this all happen. All too often, we see lofty goals set, which is a good thing, I think we should dream big and take steps to make those goals a reality. The problem lies when we set unrealistic standards and set ourselves up for disappointment. If we get off to the races with 100 pounds to lose and drop 5-10 in a week, the expectation is set that you will maintain that rate. However, understanding that a large majority of that loss is coming from water weight will set an unrealistic and unsustainable goal for the future weeks. Causing either disappointment or decreasing the amount of calories further in order to get to the goal as fast as possible. Both of these are absolutely counterproductive to the end goal that we want to be achieving. 

Accepting that it had taken time to get to the place that you are now, and it is likely going to take just as long to get to the place that you want to be helps temper those expectations. When we experience that rapid weight loss, often times our body is in such a large deficit that we are not only dropping a large amount of water, but we are dropping a good bit of muscle too. Losing this muscle drops our metabolism causing our caloric needs to plummet even further. This puts us at a large risk for rebound weight gain, plus when you do lose the weight you may not get the appearance that you want since all that losing weight does is just reveal the muscle underneath. If there is no muscle underneath then you’re just going to have a smaller frame with not much to reveal. This then often leads to further frustration and falling back into old habits.

Now with a lot of doom and gloom on the nutrition time frame end of it, how can we ensure that we don’t get ourselves wrapped up in disappointment and understand how to do this process effectively. This is where we understand personalizing your approach and making sure that you have effective timetables for getting to where you want to be. When we break our dieting into phases, we want to lose around 0.5-1% of your body weight per week. It will likely be a bit higher the first week as you shed a lot of water but it should average out to around that range per week. This should then not exceed 5-10% of your total body weight in any given dieting period. As you can expect, no one dieting phase should last longer than 6-12 weeks. This means if you are a 200-pound person, our rate of loss should be around 1-2 pounds per week, and ending the 6-12 week dieting phase we should ideally be around 190-180 pounds. This rate will make sure that we are not plunging our body into starvation mode, sparing most all of our muscle, and getting a large majority of that weight loss directly from fat. Now you might ask, what comes next after this dieting phase?

Once we are done with one dieting phase, there must be a break from the dieting to let your body recover. Recovering from dieting is usually recommended to take half the time to the full amount of time that you spent dieting. This is often where we can get ourselves into trouble, if you rush this phase then you can find yourself not bringing your caloric expenditure up as high as it should be, thus slowing your next dieting phase down. If you diet down 500 calories below where your expenditure is then we will be on pace to lose that pound a week, but once you’re nearing the end of your dieting phase, your body will be adapting and bringing your expenditure down to meet the lower intake. This is why we must bring the intake back up over that extended period of time, as we raise the intake slowly, your body will raise the expenditure accordingly keeping your weight stable. You will know when you are done with this phase once your weight has stopped rapidly fluctuating. Do not rush it!

The Importance of Patience in Training

Now that we have touched on how important it is to have patience with your dieting phase and how that looks. Let’s talk about the training side of things as this is another place where it is all too common to rush things on the expectations while less on the training. Both of those outcomes make it incredibly difficult to actually get to where you want to be. Training needs to be effective and sustained for you to be seeing the gains that you want to be seeing. Just like with dieting, the initial progression is very fast, but then it slows to a crawl quickly. This initial gain is typically not from muscle gain but from neuromuscular adaptations and a higher level of synchronicity within the muscle fibers. This just means that your muscles fire together creating a stronger initial force giving the appearance of building more muscle quicker. This can then lead to frustration of adding weight and adding weight then lead into a cycle of ego lifting which then exposes the risk of injury. 

When we assess ways to approach this that gives you consistent progression we can take it just like we do with the diet when we are looking to take our time. Set a consistent goal each week, say adding 5-10 pounds each week dependent on the lift, then keep doing that until you reach that point of where you’re unable to continue adding. This is how we know we are reaching the end of the initial beginner progression. When we hit this point, it can often get frustrating and this is where people tend to spend a lot of time spinning their wheels. The weights feel heavy but they are never truly pushing themselves to progress at this point. To draw a parallel between the diet ideas, once we hit this place, this is the end of a training block, just like the end of the diet block, we are going to want to take a break to give our body a chance to recover. The thing with training is that it will be a significantly shorter break and doesn’t need to be completely off. It is typically recommended to scale back training for a week to about half the volume that you were doing prior. 

Prolonging your training with deload breaks in between will ensure that you’re progressing consistently over the long term, not hitting weights that you get comfortable with, and make sure that you are truly gaining strength. This also fights against overtraining and overuse injuries which stack up if you don’t take these breaks in your training. Then at the end of the day, this consistent progression over the long term, making it as sustainable as we can, will ensure that for a long time you can be getting progressively stronger and stronger. 

Personalizing Realistic Goals for Long-Term Success

When we are looking at the importance of putting these together and being truly patient with how long this can take. It is going to be important to set these expectations in your head to not get discouraged. Make sure that you know it is only 5-10% of your body weight over the course of 6-12 weeks, then know that you want to make your training sustainable with breaks and overreaching periods to make sure you’re not getting comfortable. This understanding will set you so much farther ahead than you think. It will help make sure that you’re in it for the long haul as there is truly no other way to do it other than being committed. Knowing that your goals are going to take you time and coming up with a realistic time frame for how long it is going to take. This will help put everything in perspective to make your week-to-week expectations a lot easier. 

When you are setting up your goals, take that 5-10% of your total body weight and set your dieting period, this is going to be the number that you aim for for the timeframe that you set. Let’s say that you are 200 pounds, and you want to be 160, this is going to be 40-pound swing but more importantly a 20% difference in your total body weight. If we go by the recommendations then this 20% difference will be 2 dieting phases of 6-12 weeks with a period of maintenance in between for another 6-12 weeks. So this whole process of going from 200-160 with minimal chances of rebounding and doing minimal damage to your metabolism could take anywhere from 12 weeks to 36 weeks on the longer end. Anywhere in there will be the ideal ways to set your time frames. The same end goes for growing muscle, if you are more experienced, it can take about a year to gain 5-10 pounds of true muscle, with a minor surplus with your training on point and consistently pushing yourself. These things take a long amount of time, making sure that you set realistic expectations for yourself, as that is going to be optimal with good nutrition and training on both ends. If you factor in life getting in the way, days where you struggle to find the motivation, days where you aren’t able to mentally push yourself in the gym. It can all lead to inoptimizations causing these things to be drawn out a bit more. If you’re aiming for an 8% loss in 10 weeks, but you have 5 events pop up in those 10 weeks, that may delay you and push you back to only getting a 6-7% loss. This isn’t a failure, it is being realistic with your situation and level of commitment and the speed that is optimal for us to be losing or gaining at.

In summary, achieving your fitness and dietary goals requires a realistic and patient approach. For nutrition, it's essential to understand that losing weight is a marathon, not a sprint. Setting realistic expectations and breaking your diet into phases, aiming to lose 0.5-1% of your body weight per week, helps prevent disappointment and ensures sustainable progress. After each dieting phase, taking a break to let your body recover is crucial to maintaining long-term success. Similarly, patience is key in training. Initial rapid gains are often due to neuromuscular adaptations, not muscle growth. Setting consistent, achievable goals, such as adding 5-10 pounds to your lifts each week, helps maintain steady progress. Taking deload breaks ensures your body recovers, preventing overtraining and injuries, and allows for continuous strength gains over time.

Putting it all together, setting realistic timelines for your goals is essential. Life's interruptions are normal, and adjusting your expectations to accommodate these challenges helps maintain motivation and prevents setbacks. By committing to a patient and balanced approach, you'll be well-equipped to achieve your long-term fitness and dietary goals.

I am excited to begin building a community to connect people with similar interests, making the fitness journey easier and more enjoyable for everyone. If you're interested, have any questions, or need personalized guidance, don't hesitate to reach out to me at sidneyabartlett@gmail.com.

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Until next time, let's keep pushing toward our goals together!

Sidney Bartlett, CSCS