First off, I would consider myself a veteran of trying to lose weight and get fit. I have tried many different diets, workout plans, lifestyle hacks, psychological tricks, and everything in between to achieve the goal of weight loss and improved fitness/physique. I figured I'd finally make a post outlining some of the strategies and psychology behind my latest incursion back into caring for myself and changing my lifestyle for the better. So here is a list of the most important factors that have led to my most recent success, and why I feel that it is the most sustainable path I've found to date.
1: Be honest with yourself. This advice applies to many different aspects of lifestyle alteration and is, I think, the most important piece of advice.
-Be honest about what you like. You can't cut everything you like out of your life. It's entirely unsustainable to remove every source of joy from your life and adopt spartan discipline and habits because that fitness youtuber you watch only eats one slice of carrot cake per year and you want to look like him. Those changes will never stick, and they are too harsh a punishment for your body which has grown accustomed to a certain level of comfort and satisfaction from food.
-Be honest with yourself about your habits. This goes for diet, exercise, and cravings. Under-count your exercise and over-count your calories, if only by a little, to ensure you are not sneaking in that extra 100 calories of cooking oil that "don't count" or adding that 100 calories of expenditure by overestimating your pace or resistance level. That 200 calories per day will absolutely be the difference between slowly losing and slowly gaining weight, even if it's just a pound per month.
-Be honest about your cravings. Do not starve yourself because someone said intermittent fasting was the best way to lose weight. If you're hungry, eat a low-calorie, high-volume snack (like a big-ass salad or a bowl of fruit). If you don't feel like eating that apple but you are craving slice after slice of American cheese straight out of the bag (Land-o'-Lakes white, sliced off the block at the deli, not pre-sliced is a huge trigger food for me, for example) then you are not really hungry, your mouth is just lonely and you should find something else to fill your time.
-Be honest with yourself about what you are capable of. Saying that you're going to run/walk for an hour every single day to begin training for the marathon and you're going to eat perfectly clean and lift weights 6 days per week to achieve that 5% body fat pristine physique and you're going to start cooking healthy, gourmet meals 3 times per day for an hour is not going to be possible for the vast majority of people just beginning to make changes to their lifestyle.
-Be honest about your goals and the reasons you want to achieve them. People tend to shame some incentives and praise others, calling some shallow or trite and others more "noble" or more important. There is nothing wrong whatsoever with purely aesthetic goals. There's nothing wrong with just wanting to be more attractive to potential partners. It doesn't have to be that you want to feel healthier, you want to improve your health metrics, or live a longer, healthier life. Any reason you have is a great reason to start changing your life for the better.
2: Track. Everything. Yes, everything.
-Write everything you eat and do down. I use two Google sheets documents because they are online and can be accessed from anything that can haz interwebz. I use one to track each week's exercise, and one to track each week's daily body weight, calorie and macro-nutrient intake, TDEE based on that day's exercise, net calories (calorie intake - TDEE) as well as a master reference for my most commonly eaten foods so I don't spend all day googling "English muffin nutrition information" for the hundredth time. I even track whether or not I smoked marijuana each day, because this drastically affects my ability to make good nutrition decisions. I make a new sheet once I've finished logging the last week; this way, I can tab through all the previous weeks' data. I will probably graph my progress so I can correlate different factors once I have a few months' worth of logging behind me. I am currently at the beginning of month 3 for workout tracking, and the beginning of month two for in-depth diet information.
-Every tiny little thing counts. Track the little pad of butter you cooked the eggs in. Track the tomato and onion in the sandwich, even though it's only 20 calories. Track every beer or shot, every mile you walk, every rep, even things like hours of sleep and whether or not you needed a nap that day or whether you did recreational drugs. This is all useful information, because you might just find that on days where you didn't get enough sleep the night before, your impulse control is worse. Who knows? You do. That's who.
-You'll find that just the act of tracking the information increases your mindfulness about your diet. If you have to write down the 60 grams of carbs in that bagel with cream cheese every time you casually toast one up and slather that white gold on there, you might just choose something else next time. A whole bag of low fat popcorn is 100 fewer calories than a single bagel and cream cheese, and for me, I know I'll still want the popcorn whether or not I had the bagel first, but not as often the other way around.
3: Small, gradual changes are the only sustainable way to make lasting changes.
-You will not reach your goals in a day. Not in a week. Not in a month. Not even in a year. Your goal is reaching those perfect habits, the inevitable consequence of which is the body and mind you want. And even then, those habits cannot change all at once, overnight. In a year of implementing small changes, you will not even recognize your old lifestyle.
-Make one small change at a time. Instead of whole milk in your breakfast cereal, change it to 2% and pour a slightly smaller serving. That's 100 calories right there, and it won't feel different as far as your current habits go. Change the bagel in your breakfast sandwich to a wrap and throw in some veggies. That's 150 calories right there. Change the 85%/15% ground beef to 93%/7% in your burger or chili. That's 150 calories for each 8-ounce portion (2 servings) you have. Just add one such small daily change per week, and within a couple of months you will have a 1000-calorie swing from eating a 500-calorie surplus to a 500-calorie deficit, and you are now losing a pound per week instead of gaining a pound per week, and your habits do not feel different at all.
-You can eventually achieve a lifestyle completely unrecognizable to your old self. I eat salads now, apparently? Because a french bread tuna melt with bacon, lettuce, tomato, and onion became a tuna melt wrap became a tuna salad with feta cheese and crumbled bacon over lettuce and tons of veggies, a change of about 300 calories, and I feel even more full after eating the salad than I do the tuna melt because of the amount of fiber and no-calorie filler vegetables in those bad boys. (I put them in a huge mixing bowl because regular flatware is for quitters.)
-Completely new habits are very hard to implement. If you want to start walking or jogging or lifting, start very, very small. Just three dumbbell exercises for three sets each, two days per week is enough to get you started on muscle building. That can be done in 20 minutes per session. Just 1 mile walking, 2 days per week is enough to get you into the habit of moving your ass around a bit. That's 20 minutes of walking at a very slow pace per walk. Add a little bit every week and before long, 8 hours of lifting and 8 hours of walking/running per week feels completely normal. But those numbers sound pretty extreme to you right now, don't they? Get there slowly. Extreme doesn't work.
-Extreme changes will not stick. No way, no how. Crash diets and fad diets that completely change your daily routine, complete workout regimens, even ones like P90X that hold your hand all the way through, are very hard to maintain for long. They're even advertised as a 90-day solution for cryin' out loud. Nothing is "solved" in 90 days. Period.
So that's all I got. It's been working gangbusters for me thus far, with weight loss from 245 lbs to 235 lbs at 6'2" and significant body re-composition and strength gains in the last 2 months doing nothing but tracking calories and dumbbell exercises at home and running (let's be real, mostly walking) on some trails in the nearby state parks. Feel free to shoot me a message if you want an invite to look at the spreadsheets I made. I'm actually really proud of them, which is quite a departure from the usual self-loathing.
