After spending a year following nutrition advice from fitness influencers on social media, Hailey Groski realized she had unintentionally gained 20 pounds.
As a sophomore studying nutrition in 2016, she followed the trends of the time and would eat a big bowl of oatmeal with a big dollop of peanut butter in her dorm room for breakfast, a salad with half a cup of hummus for lunch, and snack on an acai bowl topped with honey and granola.
Following the influencers’ advice blindly meant she was unknowingly eating hundreds more calories than she needed each day.
“I was shook because I was doing everything that we were told was right to do for weight loss, and I was exercising a lot too,” Groski, 28, who is a dietitian based in LA, told Business Insider. Her diet was “healthy, but it was very calorie-dense,” she said.
Groski exercised more in the hope of returning to her previous weight. She trained for and ran two half marathons, but it still didn’t shift.
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“I was training every single day, and I still couldn’t lose the weight,” she said. (Exercise has many benefits, but isn’t the shortcut to fat loss that many believe it to be).
When Groski followed influencers’ advice to lose the weight, she was left feeling hungry and unsatisfied.
It was only when she “dialled into her nutrition” that she started to see results and was able to shed the 20 pounds. “The big unlock for me was not just eating healthy foods but eating healthy foods for weight loss, and that supported my goals,” she said.
“The big shift for me there was really learning not to outsource what my food and nutrition choices were to social media,” she said.
Nine years later, Groski is able to maintain her weight without overdoing it in the gym or following a restrictive diet. She shared the three biggest lessons she learned about sustainable weight loss.
1) Don’t outsource your nutrition choices
To lose weight, you need to be in a calorie deficit, where the body uses more calories than it consumes. But the number of calories a person needs depends on several factors, including their height, weight, and lifestyle.
At first, Groski ate very small portions, which felt overly restrictive. “I wasn’t doing it based on my own calorie needs, I was doing it based on a generic recommendation from someone on social media,” she said. Likewise, she ate the amount of protein as an influencer said she should, without knowing her specific needs, and still felt hungry.
Groski lost weight, but the process was unpleasant and her habits didn’t feel sustainable.
That’s when she started listening to her hunger cues and learning about calories.
2) Tracking calories short-term can help with portion-sizing
Health experts recommend those who have struggled with disordered eating to be mindful of tracking calories becoming an obsession. But tracking her calories in an app for a short period of time taught Groski which foods were higher in calories than she realized, such as peanut butter, and helped her stay within a calorie deficit.
After a few weeks, she had learned what, say, 300 calories of chicken looked like, and she no longer needed to keep tabs on her calorie intake.
“It’s a great tool to educate yourself on calories, protein, fiber, different things like that,” she said. “It’s a vehicle for education, awareness, and accountability. But you want to have those habits ingrained in you, that education ingrained in you, and then you can eyeball portions.”
Groski calculated how many calories her body needed to be in a gentle deficit. Once she lost the weight, she calculated how many calories she would need to maintain it and adjusted her diet accordingly.
3) Create sustainable habits and be kind to yourself
After trying and failing to maintain a rigid workout schedule and a restrictive diet for weight loss, Groski learned that the key to maintaining her weight was creating sustainable habits that she would stick to long-term.
This looked like a gentle calorie deficit when needed, exercising to feel good rather than look a certain way, and refusing to cut out any foods.
Progress was inevitably slower than when she was going to extremes, but it meant she was enjoying life rather than white-knuckling her way through her weight loss journey.
“I think it’s really important to bring that self-love throughout the entire process rather than being harsh on ourselves,” she said, “love yourself in motion, whether you have achieved your goal weight or not.”
