1. Accept that it’s hard…
Ironically, my first tip is to accept that fat loss is hard because if it wasn’t, we’d all be millionaires with 6-pack abs!
If you need it to be easy, unfortunately getting your dream body isn’t for you and that’s totally cool. In fact, it’s quite freeing to accept because it eliminates all of the guilt that you may feel when you think that you ‘should’ lose weight or you ‘should’ get healthier…it’s your body and you get to do whatever ya want with it.
On the other hand if this is a shift that you’re committed to make, it’s going to take consistency, time and effort.
Having said that, it does get easier the more experience, knowledge and healthy habits that you build, for example…
I’ve been at this healthy lifestyle stuff for well over a decade and it’s much less effortful now vs. when I started because I know my body really well, I know what works, I know what doesn’t work and I make solid choices the vast majority of the time in regards to my nutrition, movement, sleep and stress management simply out of habit.
It’s not hard to brush your teeth or take a shower every day because it’s just what you do, the same concept applies to a healthful lifestyle.
2. Make a plan
If you’re going on a road trip to a place that you’ve never been before, you don’t just hop in your car and hope for the best (at least I hope you don’t) you map out your route ahead of time based on where you want to go, what you want to see along the way and when you want to arrive.
So let’s say that you have 20 lbs that you’d like to lose over the course of the next 12 weeks, that’s an average of 1.66 lbs per week. If you’re 2 weeks in and you haven’t lost a pound yet, I’d recommend reassessing and adjusting your plan.
Your plan isn’t set in stone, but it does provide you with direction and feel free to change things around along the way because life happens, social events pop up, slip ups take place and so it’s important to make a plan, but it’s also important not to be too rigid with it.
3. Accountability
Are you internally or externally accountable?
Internally accountable folks get their daily steps in, go to the gym on their own without fail and they stick to their nutrition plan when nobody’s watching.
Externally accountable people do much better with someone or something outside of themselves to be accountable to. These folks have personal trainers, they have nutrition coaches, they do fitness classes and they thrive with an external mode of accountability.
Be honest with yourself on this one because the most common pitfall I see around accountability is people believing and telling themselves that they ‘should’ be able to do it on their own…but why?
Who says that you should be able to do it on your own?
Did you build your own home or apartment? Do you do your own plumbing and electrical? Do you fix your own car and file your own taxes?
Needing support doesn’t make you undisciplined, weak or lacking in the will power department. If you do better with external accountability, embrace it and work with your tendency vs. against it.
Another way to distinguish which category you fall into is via your word.
For example, if you say to yourself, ‘I’m going to do a workout at 10am tomorrow and then I’m going to prep some healthful lunches for the week’ and tomorrow rolls around and you’re like, ‘Nahhh fuck it’…
vs.
If you tell a friend that you’re going to meet them for a workout at 10am tomorrow and then you’re going to go grocery shopping together afterwards for your healthful lunches and even if you don’t want to go all that much, you still do because you don’t want to bail on your friend…you’re externally accountable!
Know thyself and put systems in place that have you follow through, so that could involve getting a coach, joining group workout classes or it could be scheduling hikes or workouts with friends…you need something outside of yourself to keep you on track and there’s no shame in that.
Funny enough I actually have YOU and my business to keep me accountable because I don’t want to be an overweight fat loss coach…that’s not a good look…so you actually hold me accountable whether you’re aware of it or not so, thank you!
4. Control Your Food Environment
If you have funky foods easily accessible in your fridge, pantry or garage, it’s not a matter of if you’ll eat them it’s when. So the absolute easiest way to either stay on point or mess your nutrition strategy up is via how you structure your food environment.
Just like if you didn’t want to drink alcohol you wouldn’t keep booze around, the same deal applies to food, so make it easy on yourself by keeping your home stocked with healthful whole foods that line up with your goals vs. keeping high calorie, hyper palatable foods at arm’s reach that aren’t in line with what you want.
If you’re watching Netflix at 8pm and you’re thinking man, some ice cream would be really tasty right now, but you’d need to go to the store to get it…9/10 times you’re not going to be having ice cream…but, if you had it 5 steps away in your freezer, it’s going down the hatch. We are opportunistic eaters, so take the opportunity out of the equation and set yourself up for success vs. sabotaging yourself.
Now if you’re thinking that you just need to be more disciplined and that you should be able to say no to ice cream in the fridge, cookies on the counter and chips in the pantry…again why?
No one’s willpower can combat millions of years of evolution, so humble yourself and don’t make healthful eating harder than it needs to be.
5. Work with your preferences
You should be eating adequate protein especially when your goal is fat loss, so prioritize protein and then tailor your carb and fat intake according to your preferences.
So, if you prefer more carbs, eat more carbs and less fat.
If you prefer more fat, eat more fat and less carbs.
If you like the middle of the road approach, eat moderate amounts of both.
When you equate for protein and calories, all of these approaches will yield the same fat loss results, so put something in place that you can follow and stick with long term and you’re golden!
6. Prepare
If your goal is fat loss and you’re going meal by meal just ‘figuring it out,’ that’s a great way to fail.
You can prep your food daily if you’ve got more time on your hands or if you really want to maximize efficiency you can do a food prep session once or twice per week.
Setting aside the time to prep ahead will not only yield better results from a fat loss standpoint, but it’ll also save you time and money.
Think about it like doing laundry, you don’t do your laundry one outfit at a time, you wait until you have a full load and then you do it all at once…the same concept can be applied to your meals.
If you have tons of time to make your meals day by day and super fresh food is a huge priority to you then by all means go for it, but that’s not the case for the vast majority of folks, so be honest with yourself about the best way to approach meal prep for you given your time constraints.
Also it’s worth mentioning that if you’re expecting every meal that you eat to be a 10/10 sacred heavenly experience, cooking and finding new recipes is going to be a full-time job. On the other hand if you accept that not every single meal is going to be over-the-top delicious, it’ll make your life so much easier when it comes to food prep and choices.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the food that I eat and I wouldn’t ever eat something that I didn’t like the taste of, but it’s not all that realistic to expect every single meal that you eat to be absolutely incredible…some are better than others and when you’ve got some extra time on your hands or you’re cooking with your partner on the weekend, get as fancy as you’d like…but on a day to day basis you may have a few meals that don’t taste as good as pizza…and that’s ok.
7. Take the lifestyle approach
We’re all well aware that if we’re truly after sustainable and not just temporary fat loss, we’ve got to find a lifestyle approach that we can maintain long term, so constantly keep this in mind when you’re putting your plan in place.
Eating zero sugar, no meals out, no alcohol and working out 7 days a week is just not sustainable, it’s actually a great way to burn out and make the whole lifestyle aspect feel impossible, but fortunately you don’t have to be that strict to get great results.
I’d much prefer someone be 80% on point 100% of the time than be 100% on point 50% of the time. Duration is a lot more important than intensity.
How long can you sprint for? Not long, you get really tired super quick…but if you hit that groove and jog at a pace you can sustain for a lot longer, you can cover a lot more distance.
8. Assess and track along the way
The 4 most important assessment and tracking tools when it comes to getting fat loss results are the scale, your calorie intake, sleep and movement.
As far as the scale goes, it needs to be trending down simple as that and if it’s not, you’re not losing weight. You can track your weight daily or weekly, just be sure to weigh yourself under the same conditions and don’t put too much stalk in any one day or week, just watch the trend.
Nutrition is by far the most important input in regards to weight loss, so if you’re not tracking your intake in one way or another you’re putting the cart before the horse. You’ve likely heard that nutrition is responsible for 80% of fat loss results and workouts are 20%...honestly that’s probably conservative, it’s likely closer to 90/10.
Sleep 7-9 hours nightly and you’ll make life so much easier on yourself not only from a results standpoint, but from a quality of life standpoint too. Every aspect of life is better or worse depending on your sleep status.
Not getting enough sleep on a consistent basis is like going to the office and needing to catch up on 2 hours of work from the previous day, every day…you’re digging yourself out of a hole every morning, so start from level ground and get the sleep that you need.
On the movement front I’m FAR more interested in how many steps that you’re getting per week vs. how many workouts that you’re getting.
If you workout 5x per week moderately hard, but you’re sedentary the rest of the day, you’re leaving results on the table. If I had to choose between someone getting 5 workouts in per week and 3000 steps per day and someone getting 10,000 steps per day and 2 workouts per week, I’d take the 10k steps and 2 workouts every damn time.
Walking is underrated when it comes to fat loss and workouts are overrated…not that workouts aren’t beneficial, they’re just overrated.
9. Set goals and celebrate your wins
Having an ultimate goal is great and I recommended it in the planning section, but breaking down that big goal into mini goals is also an awesome strategy. When you reach those mini-goals, celebrate and then keep rolling, for example…
Let’s say that you want to lose 50 lbs…every time you lose 10 lbs you could go out for a really nice meal with your partner, celebrate your hard work and then wake up the following day and work towards the next 10 lbs.
Also, from a celebratory standpoint taking progress pictures isn’t a bad idea because you can see how far you’ve come. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had clients say, ‘I know that I’ve dropped 20 lbs on the scale, but I don’t think that I look all that different’ and then I attach comparison photos of where they started to where they currently are and they’re like, ‘Holy shit, I forgot I used to look like that!’
Progress pics can actually keep you on track and provide you with additional motivation because changes happen slowly day by day and it’s extremely difficult to be objective when it comes to your own body…having pictures to look at can provide that objectivity.
10. Be willing to address mental and emotional roadblocks
You may have noticed that when I said you might want to take progress pictures that your internal dialogue was like, ‘fuck that!’
If so, pics are a prime opportunity to address and confront some of the mental and emotional factors that are contributing to your current habits, health and body composition.
I think that there are a whole bunch of ways to address mental and emotional health and taking on a lifestyle change like this is one of them because it’s just a matter of time before those mental and emotional blocks pop up.
Fat loss and lifestyle change is not a purely physical process because you can’t separate the body from the mind and the emotions, they’re all inextricably linked, which is actually amazing news because when you improve one body (the physical, mental or emotional body) as a by-product you improve the others as well…it’s really cool!
It’s challenging sure, but it’s also incredibly rewarding and I promise you won’t regret it.
It’s amazing to watch because when I work with my clients, I see their mindset and emotional health increase while their weight decreases. They build great habits, they address mental and emotional roadblocks, they identify and shift behaviours that aren’t serving them and as a result, they become better versions of themselves across the board.
Essentially, that’s what life is all about because a better version of yourself equates to improved relationships, more diverse experiences and just an all-around better life.
I hope that you found these 10 practical take-home tips helpful and if you feel like doing all of them at once may be overwhelming, start with 1, get comfortable and add another when the first becomes second nature.
When the second one becomes mindless, add a third and so on…
Do you have any questions regarding this article or any others?
I’d love to hear from ya…post your question below and I’d be happy to answer it to the best of my ability!
