Each time you step on the scales you are measuring your body fat, but also your bones, water, food and muscle. Your bones will likely stay the same weight, while muscle gain or loss won’t tend to show much difference from day to day. But when it comes to water this weight can fluctuate massively each day depending on what you’ve eaten. This is why when slimming clubs weigh their members weekly, they are administering success or failure based on someone’s entire mass, not just their body fat. Over a long period of time the number on the scales will indicate losses or gains in body fat as other weight variables level out. But in the short term it’s a poor barometer. Taking photos every couple of weeks is a more accurate way to measure short-term changes in body fat and removes you from the mental torture of basing your self-worth on a number that doesn’t even measure what you want it to.

Anyone who deems carbs to be inherently bad for weight loss or maintenance isn’t looking at the body of science. Sure, if you reduce carbs, you will likely create a calorie deficit, which is why you may lose weight. But why not just create a calorie deficit while including foods you enjoy? A few decades ago, there was an experiment where participants only ate a few hundred calories of rice, fruit and fruit juice (all carbs) for a long period. The result was that participants lost a combined total of 63.9kg. If carbs made us fat or stopped us from losing fat, how on earth did this happen? The answer is: carbs don’t make us fat and the participants lost weight because they created a calorie deficit.

If you want to lose a few pounds, it’s worth thinking about your calorie intake from a weekly not daily perspective. Let’s say your target is 2,000 calories per day for fat loss. Over seven days, that equals 14,000 calories. But instead of trying to achieve 2,000 calories every day, what about trying to achieve 14,000 calories across seven days? Spreading your calories in this way won’t change the numbers you have to aim for, but it gives you more flexibility. You can enjoy calorie-dense social occasions, knowing you can rein back calorie intake across other days to stay on track. Think about it like a sports team: you don’t win championships with one victory; you need many individual victories over a long period. You may also lose some matches, but that doesn’t mean you’ll lose the championship. There’s no pressure because there’s always another opportunity around the corner.

You’ve heard this one before, but moving more is the secret to being in better health. But it’s not all about the gym. The technical term for this is non exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) – this is the energy we burn without planned exercise, such as fidgeting, household chores, or just walking around. This unplanned and subconscious movement accounts for 15% of our total daily energy expenditure, which is actually pretty high. I’m a big fan of NEAT as it provides an easy way to chip away at your fat loss goal. Whether it’s increasing steps or moving in other ways, you’d be surprised at how much these simple increases add up over time to support your goal with minimal upheaval to your life. Instead of dreading a beastly PT session, how about aiming to achieve 10,000 steps per day, which equates to roughly 1.5-2 hours of walking. One study found that people with an active lifestyle could burn 2,000 more calories per day without planned exercise.

If you previously had a diet high in processed, low-quality food, then switching to a vegan diet will likely benefit your health. But if you already eat an abundance of plant-based foods like fruit and vegetables, along with nutritious sources of lean meat, fish, eggs and dairy, going vegan might worsen your health as you’re removing many vitamins and minerals from the animal-based foods. As a rule of thumb, we should all be striving to eat as many plants as we can, but animal products certainly support our health too.