Transform For Life

Every New Year brings up new resolutions or old resolutions that didn’t come to fruition. Most of these resolutions revolve around personal growth, namely improving health and fitness. This is the time of the year that fitness studios and gyms see an influx of new members and trendy diets take the forefront.

This is great, but often the resolution gets dropped only a couple months into the year. Diets are hard to stick to and sometimes life is too busy to make it to the gym. There is nothing wrong with starting a restrictive diet to try and drop some weight, but often the rules to the plan are too strict and hard to maintain which results in going the opposite direction. The first few months of starting a fitness program are very motivating because strength builds very quickly, but soon the workouts get harder and the drive to continue disappears. Why does this happen?

The reason is because the human body wants to eat and rest more. Why, though? It’s because natural instincts for survival are still active and the body wants to preserve energy for any stressful situation or in case of drought or famine. The body has not yet evolved out of this preservation mode and realized that storing excessive bodyfat is the new danger. Humans have only had a surplus of food for 50 years or less, whereas, for millions of years humans had to hunt and preserve food and energy as much as possible.

Trying to be more active and lose body fat goes against the body’s instincts. Going too hard on calorie restriction and exercise causes the body to fight back by craving high calorie foods, dropping energy levels, affecting mood, and anything else to encourage more eating and less burning. Yes, it is swimming upstream to get into good physical shape, but resisting these urges and building mental fortitude is what separates humans from animals.

The only way to drop significant body fat and keep it off for life is by setting up habits that decrease calorie intake and increase activity over a long period of time. This will produce results without creating push back from the survival instincts. Here are 4 habits that are essential to creating sustainable health and fitness. (I thought about naming this article, “Observations of My Skinny Friends- Those Assholes”)

NEAT

This stands for Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis. Put simply, this is the calories burned from activities that doesn’t include sleeping, eating or sports-like exercise. NEAT doesn’t burn a tremendous amount of calories in an isolated moment, but over a lifetime the calories burned will add up. For example, my wife works in retail and is constantly running around the store like a mad woman. It is not unusual for her to come home from work having walked over 30k steps! This is the reason she can eat peanut butter all day, ice cream every night, and any other snacks she wants and remain a size 2 in pants (after having 2 babies, too!). The moral is consistent low intensity exercise burns low amounts of calories that won’t trigger the body to desire massive binges. Turn off the TV and take a walk, skip the elevator and take the steps, pass on valet and walk a few blocks, and steal every moment possible to move more to have lasting weight loss.

Eat Slower to Eat Less

I don’t condone many ‘diets’, but one of my favorites is the Chopstick Diet. The rule is to eat every meal with chopsticks. This diet works because it’s hard to take big bites of food which means the meal takes longer to finish. In eating competitions it is important to eat as much food in 15 min before satiety sets in. If eating less is the goal, then try to consume as minimal as possible in the first 15 min! This is hard for parents or people with demanding jobs, but learning to set the fork down and exercise patience with eating will reduce massive calories over a lifetime. I used to get so frustrated when my friend Josh would only be 2 bites into his meal when I was finished because I ate so fast was still hungry. Needless to say he still eats slowly and is still very lean despite his diet resembling that of an elementary school child.

More Water

This is not a revolutionary idea and has been stated by many people over and over, but it’s still extremely important. The human body is ~70% water, not soda or coffee. Sometimes the body is dehydrated and needs water, but that need appears as hunger to many people causing more over eating. Not only should humans be drinking a lot of water, but should also be consuming foods that are high in water. Foods like fruit, vegetables, meat, legumes, and some grains are majority water which makes them naturally low in calories. Foods like chips, crackers, bread, candy, cheese, and deserts are calorie dense because they contain little to no water. Drink plenty of water (100oz/day) and eat foods high in water to keep the average calories low and to stay full longer. I recently convinced one of my friends to drink more water to help alleviate muscle pains and poor athletic performance. The first thing he mentioned was that he wassn’t as hungry through the day. Drink a full glass of water and eat a salad before meal and there will be less desire to over eat when the food arrives.

End the Addictive Behavior

Much of the language around food is very similar to the language around drug addiction:

“I HAVE to have my ____”

“I could never stop eating _____”

“I love ______ too much to ever do that”

“I’m just a foodie”

This kind of talk is just accepted about food, but if any of this was replaced by heroin or alcohol then someone would step in and intervene. To recover from any drug addiction the first step is to remove the person from the environment and people that provide the drugs, but that can’t happen with food because it is required for survival. So, how does one go from being an addict to a responsible user? That’s the hard part. Many people that are overweight have a very poor relationship with food and there isn’t a diet or exercise plan that is going to fix that. In order to change for life, the thoughts around food have to change. This means finding new things to do socially that don’t revolve around eating and drinking, getting out of the kitchen when its not time to eat, and understanding that hunger is just a feeling- it is not starvation. There are religions that fast for whole months and don’t have members dropping dead or being admitted to the hospital. This doesn’t mean that fasting is essential to weight loss, but having control over hunger and not having hunger control you is. You don’t have to cut out your favorite foods, but you should have control over how much, how often, and how you feel about it.

I am not a nutritionist, and have no desire to be one, but I was able to make a dramatic body transformation and have been able to keep it for almost a year now. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be permanent, but these habits have allowed me to continue to make progress. I have struggled for many years with my relationship with food and I can finally say that I’m in the driver seat of this nutrition journey. Diets and training plans are great, but they can’t last forever. Build the habits as the foundation to your nutrition so that when the temporary diet is finished the results will remain for life.