Even though we spend billions on weight loss each year, the obesity numbers keep going up. Over time, this trend has only accelerated. When life gets disrupted, people's delicately balanced health plans fall apart, and they end up with significant weight changes.

Many popular beliefs around weight management are unfortunately wrong or misguided, and this kind of misinformation can take decades to correct. After it was discovered that smoking was unhealthy, it took decades to prove it definitively, and millions of people still do it. Our current habits around sugar and processed foods likely fall into a similar category.

Unlearning

Changing global habits around food will probably take even longer. Maybe in 10 or 20 years there will be a stronger consensus on the points listed below, but you shouldn’t wait that long. We can start fixing this today — first with you, then your friends and family, and only then the rest of society.

For years, we’ve used tools like running experiments in Gyroscope, continuous glucose monitoring, one-on-one coaching, the Health Score algorithms, and many studies from scientists and doctors to validate what works and identify what doesn’t. Many of the myths here were things we once believed too. With better tools and testing, we can now see why they don’t work and put better solutions in place. In some cases the data makes the problem obvious; in others it’s a matter of being compatible with how normal people live their lives.

The Most Common Mistakes

Here are the top ways your current weight loss strategy may not be working — or may even be making the problem worse...

Calories & Eating

Trying to outrun a bad diet

Focusing on exercise and procrastinating on nutrition is one of the most common instincts. It’s an appealing fantasy — just work out more, build a little muscle, and burn away all the calories without ever addressing what you eat.

For great bodyfat results, changing your eating habits will be most of the work and the first thing to start on. Being more active, sleeping better, and managing stress matter a lot and can’t be ignored, but your daily food intake is the main lever you’ll use to control your weight.

When people put together a plan to lose fat on January 1, the picture in their head is usually running or hitting the gym every day to burn an extra few hundred calories, get into a deficit, and maybe build some muscle.

This is suboptimal because it’s rarely sustainable — by February the gyms are empty again. It doesn’t address the root cause of the bodyfat (usually an unhealthy diet), and it may not change your total calorie output much (which is relatively fixed per day even with an extra workout). Eating more food is much easier — you can eat in 1 minute what you’d burn in an hour — so if you drop the workout regime but keep the unhealthy diet, the fat comes right back.

You definitely can and should still enjoy food, but that doesn’t mean that you can ignore your body’s nutritional requirements or don’t need to focus on meal quality. In most cases, we recommend focusing on nutrition first and adding an exercise routine once that is dialed in.

The good news is that eating better isn’t very time consuming or expensive, while going to the gym daily can eat up many hours a week. Many people procrastinate on the whole process because they assume it requires hours a day. Done right, improving your meals could actually save you time and money, and even taste better. There’s no reason not to start today.

Misunderstanding your calorie numbers

Another common and dangerous misconception is that workouts exist to burn more calories. Exercise is very important — but its main purpose is not to cancel out excess food.

This can lead you to only do cardio and neglect resistance training, which would be a huge mistake. Resistance training and walking are essential during your weight loss journey, but not because they burn so many calories. Even if they burned only 1 calorie, you should be doing them.

Reasons to exercise (includes walking!) very frequently:

• Helping your brain function
• Reducing stress & cortisol
• Maintaining muscle function
• Stabilizing glucose levels
• Freeing up glycogen stores
• Because it is fun and interesting
• To lose weight from bodyfat not muscle
• To build new muscle mass

Note that nowhere in that list does it say: “Because you ate calories and now need to atone for your sins by that many calories burned.” Though that is a common perspective, it’s just not how things work! Both psychologically and physically, this is a backwards approach.

This strategy fails mainly because you can always eat far more than you can work out. The body is extremely efficient at using food for fuel, especially for things like running — a few small bites can fuel you for an hour. That was great for escaping predators a million years ago, but less useful now when you’re trying to burn off a big dinner with a marathon.

Your total energy usage for the day stays relatively constant. Over time, added muscle can raise your BMR, but people badly overestimate the impact of a single workout. A 200 calorie workout doesn’t mean you burn 200 calories more in total — it likely means you burn 200 less from fidgeting (NEAT) or produce less heat (BMR), for the same average. Fixing the problem at the source — not eating an excessive amount each day — is the only practical solution, and the main variable to focus on for a calorie deficit.

There’s some variation in your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) from exercise, but much less than you’d expect. To keep calories burned high, walking often is probably more effective than one workout. The body burns most of its calories on simple things like heat and survival, and a daily run makes up less than 5% of it. Micromanaging your calorie burn with workouts is either insignificant in that equation, or it means you need epic 500+ calorie workouts daily to move the needle on your energy balance.

Another danger is that exercising more without first fixing your nutrition can make you hungrier and cause you to eat even more. Combined with high stress, this can lead you to eat much more and start burning less — a recipe for gaining fat rather than losing it.

Once you look closely at how your body burns calories, it’s clear that controlling what you eat is the only practical way to reach a calorie deficit.

Constantly snacking & eating

A very common myth is that eating many times a day keeps your “metabolism going” and burns more calories. Some people incorrectly believe many small meals burn more calories or are healthier. Others feel they need to keep their brain constantly fueled while working.

The science here is now clear: for weight loss or general health, you don’t need to eat constantly. As you saw in part 1, between your liver, glycogen, and muscles, the body has more than enough stored energy to survive a few hours between meals. Unless you’re a professional athlete with extremely high energy needs, we don’t recommend it. If you spend most of your day sitting at a desk, constant eating will likely cause more problems than it fixes.

Food timing is a complex topic (covered in more detail in the Health Academy), but the main takeaway is that many small meals don’t provide those alleged benefits. They can actually cause serious problems like insulin resistance and diabetes if each mini-meal isn’t perfect. If each one creates a glucose spike (very likely with small snacks or processed foods), you’re constantly damaging your metabolic health rather than helping it. At the very least, constant eating makes it easy to gain weight, with many more chances for extra calories per day.

Some people go as far as only tracking fasting and not even tracking food. If your nutrition is already optimized, having one or two balanced meals a day can be a simple shortcut to manage your intake without tracking every variable.

However many meals you eat and whenever you have them, the one thing everyone agrees on is that your food must be well balanced, with a correct ratio of protein, fats, and carbs eaten together. Imbalanced snacks — like sugar without protein and fat — can cause problems even if they add up fine in a calorie tracker at the end of the day.

Mindset

Food, exercise, and physical habits get most of the attention. They’re necessary, but losing weight is equally a mental game. Everyone is capable of making these simple changes — your mindset is what determines whether you stick with it forever or give up after a few weeks.

An “All Or Nothing” Approach

An “All or Nothing” approach often prevents people from succeeding. It usually looks like being very motivated for a few weeks, chasing unsustainable habits, then giving up entirely. The best results come from simple (often boring) changes repeated daily for years.

For weight loss, straightforward, consistent habits matter much more than one intense gym session or a memorable meal. Tools like Gyroscope are designed to help you overcome these biases and see the big picture instead.

The human brain generally stores memories that were especially emotional or intense, or the most recent. This is known as “peak/end” in psychology. Day-to-day “boring” things like eating a salad or walking to work are less memorable, which could explain why more extreme approaches are so tempting.

A simple solution is to not overcommit. Only do things you could do every day for a year. It may not feel fast enough, but that’s ok — it’s required, since you won’t have superhuman workouts or hours to meal prep every single day. Don’t build a plan that needs that. Doing extra one day is fine; the important part is not giving up entirely when you can’t.

Walking instead of driving is a simple but sustainable habit. Something more intense, like waking up at 4am to go running, may seem more effective — but if you stop after a few days, it won’t help you at all.

People often blame work or family or other constraints for not having time for their health. None of those are surprises. Set yourself up for success with a plan that works alongside them, rather than an all-or-nothing approach.

Feeling guilty for eating food

It is a challenging balance to take care of your body and health by prioritizing good nutrition, while not being too hard on yourself or developing a negative relationship with food. Both extremes can be harmful.

One problem with the all-or-nothing mentality is the guilt it creates when lofty ambitions aren’t fully met. People set themselves up for failure by expecting to be 100% strict, then eventually slipping.

For example, if you love pizza and tell yourself “Ok, I’ll never eat pizza again because I have to lose weight,” that might last a few weeks, but you’ll slip up and the whole plan unravels. The common reaction is “well, I had pizza, my diet failed, I might as well keep eating junk for the rest of the month.” Easier and more pleasant alternatives: only eat pizza on weekends, have one slice after a salad instead of the whole box, or just go for a longer walk and practice moderation after a big meal.

Planning for an 80/20 distribution generally gets much better results, and you get to have more fun along the way. Good tools help you see things objectively and self-manage rather than feel guilty. A more productive view is to look at your average nutrient intake and judge yourself on whether you’re ending up with a good balance of protein, fats, and carbs.

One option is to delegate that decision to a coach, who has the experience to interpret the numbers and stays objective. Software can also provide that analysis.

Some people have no trouble with discipline and just need to be told what to do, while for many others this is a complex topic with hundreds of emotions and memories tangled together. A therapist can be a very useful tool for these challenges. Just as you’d take a high-performance car to a mechanic, your brain can almost always benefit from maintenance by an expert.

Feeling guilt on the scale

Stepping on the scale is another emotional minefield, which leads many people to avoid it. A big part of the problem is inadequate tools and bad information. The numbers can provide essential data, but are often misunderstood — a single high reading can cause needless anxiety or even make people give up. Never tracking your metrics is risky too.

With this guide you should be in much more control over the scale. The worst and most common feeling is being stuck or going the wrong direction despite trying hard. Following this guide, within a few weeks (often sooner) you should start to see changes that match your expected calculations — which is very rewarding and motivating.

It is essential to tell short-term fluctuations apart from actual changes. The best way is to weigh yourself often and watch the difference in the trend. Your weight will swing 4 or 5 pounds every few days — does that mean you gained or lost that much bodyfat? No! That number isn’t related to what you did today or even this week. Your hard work today may show up in your bodyfat number in a month.

If you have a wifi scale, just stand on it without looking at the reading — you could even tape over the screen so you don’t see incomplete data. We suggest mostly looking at the 1-3 month graph in Gyroscope, or even a whole year at a time, rather than the latest number. Seeing the direction, and how spiky the raw data behind the smooth line really is, helps you read it more accurately.

Remember that one pound of bodyfat is 3,500 calories. Being in a 500 calorie deficit (as a daily average) would equal losing about 1 pound a week. That is probably the fastest pace you should expect to lose weight. For most people, 200 or 300 is probably optimal. Any more would be unsustainable and unhealthy.

If the scale went up a few pounds but you didn’t eat thousands of calories in the meantime, don’t think about it. It’s most likely food you’re still digesting, water you drank recently, or any number of other variables.

Checking too infrequently — once a week or a few times a month — makes this worse, since it’s a weaker signal and more prone to random fluctuations. Checking once a day is more likely to reveal the true signal. A scale that estimates bodyfat is slightly more useful, but the same variation applies there too.

If you start a diet and then expect to be down 10 pounds the next week, you will be disappointed. What you should be expecting is to be down 4 or 5 pounds within the next few months, with a steady and consistently trending graph. Some days after eating you may end up being 2 or 3 pounds more than you started! That should not cause you to feel guilty or give up, it is basically meaningless. By checking your weight frequently and graphing it, you can much more accurately see whether you are on track or not.

If checking weight often is hard for you, just use other metrics instead. If you’re tracking food accurately and the meals are great quality, weight may not need to be checked as frequently. How you look in the mirror, how your clothes fit, your resting heart rate and HRV are all good leading indicators, but less triggering for some people.

Only relying on one technique

People often get excited about one strategy — keto, vegan, crossfit, anything — and think nothing else is needed. Each has its own tribe and culture, and joining those communities can be motivating. The common mistake is treating it as a magical shortcut and neglecting the other equally important parts of your health. Balance is the only real way to manage your health.

It’s like being excited about your new shoes and then not wearing any other clothes. The whole outfit needs completing, even if there’s one part you particularly like.

Leaning too hard on one strategy and pretending nothing else matters may work briefly, but won’t be sustainable. Even if you lose weight, other health drawbacks can creep in and you gain it all back — which then gets wrongly blamed on not being strict enough.

For this reason, we built the Health Score. It shows your grades across every category, so you don’t get an F somewhere while worrying about turning a B+ into an A.

A common example is following a strict vegetarian diet but eating a lot of pasta, cookies, or processed foods. Being vegetarian doesn’t mean the other variables stop mattering — in fact it makes them even more necessary.

Similarly, a ketogenic diet that ignores micronutrient density or fiber will backfire eventually. Exercising frequently with no focus on food quality is another example. Spending too much energy on one thing leaves little to balance everything else.

In reality, you should be lazy with everything and put in just 80% effort everywhere. That’s enough to get fantastic results! If you’re putting in real effort and not getting results, it’s probably because you’re allocating it wrong, not because you aren’t trying hard enough.

Dietary Choices

Avoiding foods that are healthy

People accidentally avoid many great foods, just because someone somewhere once called them unhealthy. Even if that was disproven decades ago, these misconceptions get stuck in popular culture and are hard to undo. Here are some foods you may be avoiding for no good reason...

Protein! Especially from meat. There’s a lot of nuance here, but don’t write off the whole category. Grass-fed and ethically sourced meat can be an effective way to hit your protein goals. Getting enough protein in every meal is probably the single most important thing for a healthy diet and losing bodyfat. It’s doable without meat, just harder — what often happens is people replace the missing protein with sugar and fat.

Eggs! Yes, yolk included — eggs are a great food. They’re a convenient, affordable source of protein and micronutrients. Many people wrongly assume they must be bad for some reason like cholesterol or fat content.

Dairy! Unless you’re lactose intolerant, whole fat milk and yogurt are good options and much more balanced, with protein and fat to offset the sugar. Removing that fat is itself a form of processing and rarely makes it a better choice. Stripping out the fats removes some calories, but low-fat or artificial milks often end up higher in sugar or more processed. The ”low fat” options are usually ”high sugar,” which biologically reads as “not satisfying” — your body uses those fats as a signal for fullness.

Fat! The whole category is often avoided. Since fat sounds like bodyfat, it’s logical but wrong to assume it leads directly to getting fat. Others have heard incomplete claims about cholesterol or fat clogging arteries. In reality, fats are an important part of the human diet, especially for brain function — if you want to feel good and think clearly, the right amount of fat is essential. There’s nuance here, with a dozen variants of fat and complex reactions when they’re heated. Fats from fresh olive oil, dairy, eggs, or fish are especially great, while food fried in vegetable oils or saturated fat from processed foods should still be avoided.

Foods marketed as healthy, but are not

On the flipside, a lot of what’s sold is marketed as "healthy" but isn’t great to eat constantly.

The biggest culprit is processed foods. Since a company manufactures them, they need to be sold — which is where the marketing comes in. Whole foods, like the produce section, have minimal advertising or packaging.

Generally, the more processed something is, the worse it is for you — for general health and longevity, but also for sustained weight loss. Dozens of ingredients you can’t pronounce is not a good sign. If it has minimal protein (under 10g) and is mostly carbs or sugar, it should probably be avoided.

As a rule of thumb, if a food hasn’t been eaten by someone who successfully lived to 100+, don’t eat it every day! Processed vegetarian or vegan products are especially at risk here — brand new inventions like oat milk or artificial meats are highly processed and full of chemicals still largely untested in humans. These can be an occasional treat but shouldn’t be the foundation of your diet.

In general, processed foods shouldn’t be part of your daily habits. Unfortunately, these are usually the things with the biggest marketing budgets and the most ads making them seem healthy, or at least appealing...

• Orange juice
• Sodas with sugar
• Processed cereals
• Sweet breakfasts
• Pastas & breads
• Fake meats

Processing is a spectrum, so finding a good balance matters. Even cooking counts as processing, and that’s generally fine. To gauge how processed a food is, look at how much fiber and protein are left (often taken out), how many vitamins and minerals remain (often removed too), and how many ingredients you still recognize.

The problem with processed foods

Why are we focusing on these foods? Don’t they have vitamins and things? Haven’t we seen the advertising explaining how good they are?

Highly processed foods are mostly devoid of protein, have minimal fiber, or pack in excessive added sugar to taste good. That’s the crucial difference between eating a real orange and drinking orange juice. On a calorie level, they’re easy to overeat — you can accidentally rack up 1,000 extra calories a day. On a hormonal level, they spike your glucose, and done habitually that leads to insulin resistance and diabetes, hurting your metabolic health and making you more likely to put on bodyfat.

Processed foods are often devoid of nutrients too, consisting primarily of sugar and fat. They’re convenient to stock up on, so you buy 100 and eat them daily. The lack of effort — just opening a bag of chips or pint of ice cream — makes them extremely tempting when stressed.

Someone may avoid a sugary dessert but eat a whole pizza, bag of chips, or bowl of cereal without thinking twice. Being salty or marketed as healthy doesn’t mean a food can’t hurt your health or pile up an excessive number of calories.

A better approach is to prioritize unprocessed meals and only eat ones with enough protein. A practical tip: don’t buy those items or keep them in the house — and throw away what you have left rather than forcing yourself to finish it.

Gyroscope’s Food XRAY helps overcome many of these myths by giving an accurate grade for each meal and revealing whether it’s likely to cause a glucose spike.

Now that we’ve covered what not to do, let’s explore a better alternative.

You may be pleasantly surprised that the right way isn’t actually much harder. You might even feel guilty at how simple and “easy” it is, having expected to suffer more.

Remember, the challenge isn’t doing it once but finding a simple way to make these a consistent part of your life, most days of the year, for the rest of your life. So every strategy you pick should be one you could do even on your most stressful, busy day of the year.