The Big Reason Personal Trainers Can't Help You Lose Weight

I remember when I got a personal trainer back in residency. I had just gotten married and had gained a bit of weight in the honeymoon phase of marriage and wanted to get back in shape.

So I did what many time strapped professionals do, I hired a personal trainer at the gym. 

It was helpful that he showed me which machines to use to build strength and also kept me accountable to showing up at the gym to pump some iron, but after a while it felt like he was simply babysitting me. 

When we discussed nutrition, he gave me a calorie range to stay in and printed out a very unpersonalized nutrition plan to follow. 

While I did make a few strength gains as a result of working with this personal trainer, I didn’t achieve my goal of losing weight. In fact I gained a pound or two and I’m not sure it was all muscle either. 

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Why didn’t personal training work for weight loss?

My trainer failed to truly educate me on the importance of nutrition for weight loss. You see, weight lifting and cardio are wonderful for my heart, lungs and brain and for many other reasons, but nothing trumps nutrition when it comes to weight loss. That’s because you simply can't out exercise a bad diet. Trust me, I spent MANY years trying. 

Lifting weights also increased my hunger but since I wasn’t paying that much attention to my nutrition, I made many poor food choices as a result and that’s probably why I gained some weight.

Personal trainers often reduce weight loss to a simple math problem of calories in vs calories out. And we all know that our bodies are way more complex than that. 

Giving someone even a highly customized nutrition plan with calories and macros calculated to perfection doesn’t do anything if the person doesn’t follow it. Sure it looks great on paper and in theory, but if it’s not being consistently implemented, what is the point?

The Key Question to Ask

The Million Dollar question however is this:  Why don’t we follow these nutrition plans created by personal trainers and nutritionists?

Because they only address WHAT to eat and not the WHY behind every time we eat.

Research shows that 75% of all eating is due to EMOTIONS and not physical hunger. 

And ONE CRUCIAL QUESTION my personal trainer never asked me about was my stress as a physician and what exactly I was doing with it. 

Because the truth was I was doing a LOT of stress eating both inside the ER (where I first picked up this habit) and also outside to decompress.

Sure, a nutrition plan written by a personal trainer is great, but I couldn’t even begin to follow it until I addressed all the stress eating I was doing.

That’s why when people ask me if they should hire a personal trainer or even a nutritionist for that matter to lose weight, I tell them No. 

Their time, money and energy is better spent on learning how to end stress eating or any other form of emotional eating like eating for comfort, eating out of boredom, eating because you’re not sure when your next meal will come, eating so you don’t have to say 'No' to your Auntie’s cooking or more.

Ready to stop wasting money on personal trainers and nutritionists who can’t help you lose weight because they themselves don’t know how to get to the bottom of stress and emotional eating?  

Apply here for a spot in my Mama Docs Weight Loss Accelerator and I’ll show you how you can achieve lasting weight loss.