Are you tired of trying restrictive crash diets that prioritize weight loss over wellness? We all know the ones. The aggressive calorie restrictions, eliminate food groups and intense exercise routines.
Sure, these are effective, but even from that first week, you knew it wouldn’t be sustainable. However, when we don’t stick to the strict method we still feel guilt and shame over yet another failed weight loss campaign.
Then maybe it’s time to try the BAG Method/Standing for balance, accountability, and grace, it prioritizes wellness alongside weight loss, with a goal for long-term sustainability.
In this article, we discuss everything you need to know about the BAG Method. We cover the core principles, the benefits, and why this can be your best shot at weight loss and wellness success.
What Is the BAG Method for Weight Loss?
The BAG method stands for balance, accountability, and grace, a weight loss method focusing on well-being over weight loss. This is achieved through intuitive eating, fasting intervals, the Mediterranean diet, and a calorie deficit.
Created by lifestyle transformation coach Hillary Goodman (balancebyhillary), her TikTok videos went viral for displaying her ability to lose 130 lbs using the BAG Method. Utilizing evidence-based weight loss practices including a calorie deficit and macronutrient tracking, the BAG Method aims to teach users how to listen and understand their body during weight loss, fostering a healthy relationship for long-term success.
Breaking Down the BAG Method
The BAG Method is developed around prioritizing yourself over your scale weight. Most weight loss methods and programs focus solely on the result. They prescribe calorie control and exercise, however, their approach feels clinical rarely accounting for factors such as our mental health, energy levels, and overall well-being.
The BAG Method plays its hand in reverse, placing your well-being and mental health first. It encourages a healthy relationship with food and the body to give yourself grace through the weight loss process which can be challenging physically and emotionally.
Why Balance, Accountability, and Grace Work Together
Balance, accountability, and grace are overarching principles that provide a safe and encouraging space for developing your health and fitness.
Balance promotes realistic nutrition plans and exercise routines that suit your schedule. While many plans force you into strict routine and weight loss frameworks, the BAG Method aims to balance weight loss with life, offering a realistic exercise and nutrition framework, which equals greater stability.
Accountability ensures you keep promises to yourself, remain focused, and on track toward your goals.
Grace allows you the space and freedom to process the highs and lows of weight loss, allowing you to make mistakes and feel your way through the process without feeling shame and guilt. Combined they promote well-being, leading to a long-term healthy lifestyle change.
Balance: The Foundation of the BAG Method
The reason why the BAG Method works is because it promotes balance in all areas of your life. Strict weight loss programs and fad diets focused on shedding weight present often provide routines that can get the job done, but demand so much time and focus they are not only difficult to maintain, but are not enjoyable.
Meanwhile, the BAG Method encourages balance across all aspects. It promotes balanced nutrition with a calorie deficit and macronutrient tracking. This allows you to manipulate your food intake, while still enabling you to splurge calories on special meals.
It encourages balance with work, exercise, and recreational activities, to ensure you are not only getting your body moving but maintaining your mental health through social connections, even when they challenge your daily calorie limits.
Below, share how to create a balanced diet and maintain a healthy lifestyle to show that losing weight and enjoying all aspects of life is possible.
Creating a Balanced Diet
The foundation of a balanced diet is to establish your calories and macronutrients. Understanding these components will allow you to manipulate your food intake to fix your lifestyle.
Calorie Deficit
The BAG Method requires you to be in a calorie deficit, which means consuming fewer calories than your body is burning at rest. Your body then burns fat to make up the deficit, leading to fat loss.
For example, women’s recommended daily calorie intake is approximately 2,000 per day. If you lower your daily intake to 1,700 calories, you will be in a deficit of 300 calories. We recommend starting with a smaller deficit. This will decrease feelings of hunger and allow you to reduce calories further if weight loss plateaus.
Once you have identified your daily calorie intake, you can manipulate it to eat the foods you want while still losing weight. For example, say you have dinner planned at your favorite restaurant on Thursday night. Instead of restricting yourself and forgoing your favorite dish, you can modify your calorie intake to allow you to eat that meal while still staying in a calorie deficit.
This can be done in one of two ways:
The first option is to eat fewer calories that day. You can reduce your breakfast and lunch portions by 200 calories each (400 calories total), allowing you an additional 400 calories at dinner.
The second option is to calculate your weekly calories (in this case it's 11,900) and reduce your daily calorie intake. Instead of consuming 1,700 calories daily, reduce it by 100 calories to 1,600 per day. Over the seven days leading up to the meal, it will amount to 700 additional calories on top of your existing daily calorie allowance.
Macronutrients
Macronutrient intake is the second piece of the puzzle which is equally important. Balancing our macronutrients ensures we provide our body with vital nutrients to support our energy levels, the body systems, and vital organs.
Below is the recommended macronutrient ratio for the Mediterranean diet:
- Carbohydrates: 40–65% of total calorie intake
- Protein: 10–35%
- Fat: 28–40%
A balanced diet requires we consume complex carbohydrates, protein, and healthy fats. Complex carbohydrate foods such as quinoa, edamame, brown rice, broccoli, beans, and oats provide our bodies with sustainable energy. They are a great source of fiber, a non-digestible carbohydrate that can improve fullness and gut health.
Protein foods such as meat, poultry, fish, nuts, and seeds help preserve muscle mass and improve satiety. Furthermore, it can increase thermogenesis, where the body burns energy to produce heat further increasing energy expenditure.
Meanwhile, healthy fats such as omega-3 foods such salmon, tuna, mackerel, sardines, flaxseeds, chia seeds, and soybeans help prevent heart disease, and stroke while supporting the heart, eye, and brain.
Balanced macronutrients will help you stick to your calorie deficit, enhancing long-term health and well-being.
Maintaining Lifestyle Balance
Balance not only means balancing your diet but also your lifestyle. When undertaking a weight loss program we can get stuck into the all-of-nothing mindset. This is understandable as a large part of each week is focused on sticking to your exercise and nutrition plan. However, this is also why we must balance recreational exercise and nice meals to help keep things interesting.
The BAG Method does this through nutrition and exercise. While tracking our nutrition can seem like overdoing it, providing the freedom to splurge on our favorite foods without exceeding our calorie limit. This removes restrictions and allows you to enjoy different experiences without feeling guilty.
Furthermore, the focus on balance encourages you in all aspects of life. While traditional weight loss programs tend to be fixated on the task at hand, the BAG Method helps us understand that weight loss isn’t a phase, but a long-term change for wellness. This removes the expectation of getting results here, right now, and allows you to gradually progress toward better health.
Accountability: Staying on Track
One of the most difficult things to do during the weight loss process is keeping ourselves accountable. In the initial weeks, it can be easier, however, just one misstep with our nutrition can break our streak, hampering our all-or-nothing mindset.
Fortunately, with the BAG Method’s focus on balance and making accountability easier. Accountability with the BAG Method goes both ways. It means taking responsibility for a calorie deficit including sticking to your daily limit, and not letting bad decisions spiral into a bad day. Furthermore, it makes you responsible for stepping outside your normal eating routine to enjoy those meals out, which can help form a healthy balance.
Moving and manipulating nutrition boundaries challenges our accountability, and teaches us how to be adaptable to different situations. This form of accountability shows us that we are always in control, which is vital for long-term well-being.
The Importance of Tracking Progress
Tracking progress is an actionable form of accountability. Food journals, fitness apps, weight loss, and workout tracking are all powerful methods for recording your progress. Tracking your calorie and macronutrient intake ensures we are hitting our daily targets. Meanwhile, recording scale weight, measurements, clothing sizes, energy levels, and training progress provides real data of how far we have come which can be invaluable when weight loss slows or motivation is waning.
Building a Support System
Losing weight can be a lonely endeavor. While many go through it, finding supportive and encouraging people who understand the process can be challenging. This is why we need to build our support system.
Support systems such as online resources, training partners, support groups, trainers, and healthcare professionals can keep you focused.
Training partners and support groups can be great places to learn from others and share experiences. Hearing about other people's failures and successes can help you put things into perspective, showing you that you are not alone. Meanwhile, health professionals and trainers can provide you with guidance toward goals. These elements can add an extra layer of accountability, helping you stay on track.
Grace: The Key to Long-Term Success
The final component of the BAG Method is grace. Dieting and weight loss can be an emotional journey. For many, food is a source of comfort. Sadly, this means that many rely on it after failed diets, which can lead to feelings of shame and guilt.
The BAG Method encourages us to extend grace to ourselves in these times. To find balance in the emotional chaos, while being accountable to continue pursuing wellness in the face of negative emotions. Below, we discuss how giving yourself grace can be the key to long-term success.
Practicing Self-Compassion
Diets and weight loss always contain setbacks. Whether stagnant weight, binge eating, injury, or missed training sessions, many factors can disrupt your routine and lead to your weight loss endeavors spiral out of control.
During these moments, we mustn’t let these setbacks gain control of our emotions. This can be done by practicing self-compassion which consists of three elements including:
- Kindness and understanding — Be kind and understanding toward ourselves.
- Sense of common humanity — Acceptance and recognition of flaws and defects.
- Mindfulness — Ability to keep the mind focused on the present.
During setbacks when we are feeling overwhelmed, practice self-compassion techniques including:
- Journals about your feeling
- Surround yourself with friends who exhibit self-compassion
- Seek counselling
- Talk to yourself in the third person about your failure and rejection
Regular practice can help reduce catastrophizing, improve emotional regulation, and decrease negative states.
Progress isn’t linear and overnight success is often a sign that someone has been striving behind closed doors. Practicing self-compassion can help you beat feelings of shame and guilt, and focus on progress and not perfection.
Flexibility in Your Approach
Giving yourself grace requires a flexible approach to your diet and nutrition. This is where the elements of balance, accountability, and grace intersect, allowing you to modify your diet, make missteps, and get back on track, without giving into those negative emotions that have derailed your progress in the past.
If you have dieted you would have been there before. You are weeks into your weight loss program and get caught out with kids, work, or social commitments without a planned, healthy option in sight.
Your hunger takes over and you give into the calorie-dense finger food, or sugary treat and it tastes amazing. The guilt soon takes over, which leaves you feeling defeated. These situations require grace and an understanding that you need to eat and that it is okay.
Here, you must now be flexible. Modifying your calorie intake for the next 24 hours to account for intake. This can be challenging, but with enough practice, you will take these missteps in your stride, which can help you maintain your nutrition plan long-term.
Benefits of the BAG Method for Weight Loss
The BAG Methods focus on balance, accountability, and grace, promoting a positive mindset and sustainable weight loss. Below, we highlight the benefits and reasons you should try this weight loss method.
Promotes a Sustainable and Positive Mindset
The BAG Method’s focus on well-being alongside weight loss makes it great for developing a positive mindset and sustainability. As mentioned, many programs promote long-term health, but place eight-, ten-, or twelve-week time frames on their goals, this can place stress on the participants to perform with little room for error, fostering the all-or-nothing attitude.
Where the BAG Method differs is that there is no true timeframe. Sure, its purpose is weight loss, however, its promotion of balance, and grace encourages flexibility. This not only makes it more sustainable, but it reduces stress, guilt, and shame which commonly accompany strict diets.
Builds Healthy, Consistent Habits
The BAG Method’s focus on balance, accountability, and grace are powerful pillars for building healthy habits. Balance helps us understand that while weight loss is the priority, life can get in the way. Instead of feeling guilting and frustrated about going off the diet, it encourages us to take it in our stride, refocus, and get back to it.
Over time, balance, accountability, and grace become second nature. Bad days stop turning into bad weeks and become just another day in your balanced, healthy lifestyle.
Reduces Stress and Increases Motivation
Balance, accountability, and grace are incredible for reducing stress and increasing motivation. While many weight loss programs pile on strict training plans, meal plans, and time-centric weight loss goals, the BAG Methods use of balance and grace nurtures a relaxed approach focusing on sustainable weight loss. This reduces the stress surrounding rapid weight loss and tight weight loss deadlines.
Furthermore, after weeks and months, this balanced lifestyle will feel second nature. The results will come, giving you that dopamine hit, and providing a sense of reward and motivation. Best of all, you will have taken it all in your stride, with a realistic positive mindset.
Recap: BAG Method for Weight Loss
The BAG Method is a powerful framework for weight loss. Forming its foundation on balance, accountability, and grace makes it more than just a tool to lose weight, it teaches us how to prioritize our health around all aspects of life.
Weight loss programs are famously known for trying to fit their participant into their framework. Meanwhile, the BAG Method encourages the use of evidence-based nutrition practices alongside your lifestyle, promoting sustainability for long-term weight loss
Being balance-focused means eating a nutrient-dense Mediterranean diet and accounting for a couple of glasses of wine at a fancy dinner. This goes hand-in-hand with accountability, to not only get back on track after missteps but to perform calculated steps away from your nutrition plan for some sanity. Finally, grace provides self-compassion, allowing you to make mistakes without spiraling out of control.
These elements create a holistic weight approach that promotes wellness alongside weight loss.
FAQs
What is the BAG Weight Loss Method?
The BAG Weight Loss Method stands for Balance, Accountability, and Grace. It’s a holistic approach that emphasizes maintaining a balanced diet, staying accountable through tracking or support systems, and being kind to yourself during the weight loss journey.
How does the BAG method promote sustainable weight loss?
By focusing on balance in nutrition, accountability through consistent habits, and grace to handle setbacks, the BAG method helps create sustainable lifestyle changes rather than quick fixes or restrictive dieting.
What role does accountability play in the BAG Weight Loss Method?
Accountability helps keep you on track by encouraging consistent habits. This can be achieved through journaling, tracking meals, joining a community, or having a supportive partner in your weight loss journey.
Why is grace important in the BAG method?
Grace allows you to forgive yourself for setbacks and focus on progress rather than perfection. It helps reduce guilt and stress, which can otherwise derail your weight loss efforts.
Can the BAG Weight Loss Method work for busy individuals?
Yes, the BAG method is adaptable to any lifestyle. Its emphasis on balance makes it easy to incorporate into daily routines, while accountability and grace provide flexibility to adjust when life gets hectic.
