The 10 Proven Ways to Losing Stubborn Bodyweight
If you’re constantly trying to lose weight over and over again, then this article is for you.
It’s time to learn what separates those who successfully lose weight (and keep it off) from those who don’t.
Getting into shape can be difficult. Like you, I was frustrated by my inability to lose weight and keep it off for years. However, over the last decade of undergoing my own transformation and helping hundreds of clients, I've found these 10 tips to be critical for success.
But, after ten years of coaching, I do know that if YOU are direct in your willingness and ability to learn, put in work, then you have an excellent chance to become leaner and stronger without living in the gym and becoming our next Mack Performance Coaching Success Story.
At Mack Performance, I help busy professionals simply their fitness so they can achieve extraordinary results with my 1-1 online coaching program, and today, I’m going to share with you the keys to their success.
I’ll tell you EVERYTHING you’ll need to know to finally lose that weight.
Here are the 10 Major Keys between Weight loss Success and Failure
Setting Optimistic, Realistic Expectations
The Power of Why
Don’t go on a “Diet”
Know what’s in the food you’re eating
Creating Realistic, behavioral goals
Switch “have” with “get” to exercise
Invest in your health like your 401K
Cultivating and Project your Momentum
Protect yourself from your Kryptonite
Surround yourself with Positive Support
1) Setting Optimistic, Realistic Expectations
Without question, losing weight is tough and a difficult process. It’s not going to happen overnight and you know what? That’s okay because it takes time to become the best version of yourself.
That’s because growing and changing takes time!
Those who successfully lose weight know this to be true and prepare their mind for the road ahead. They know it took them years to gain their current weight and they are not going to lose that same weight within a matter of days.
Therefore, they adopt a “growth mindset” and understand that if they’re patient and do the work, results will follow. You need to prepare yourself for the road ahead. While I want you to be optimistic and give you provide you the optimal path to achieving your results, I want you to be realistic in your pursuit of changing your behavior.
When it comes to losing body fat, everyone wants the immediate gratification of Instagram-worthy photos. Unfortunately, our bodies didn’t read the memo and like to go at their own pace. This is why it’s important to know what realistic rates of progress looks like, especially with all the conflicting misinformation out there.
I want to clearly articulate what is considered good results as you progress along your fitness journey. Just remember, the more consistent (and patient) you are with your training and nutrition, the better your results will be.
When it comes to becoming more consistent, one of the biggest adjustments must occur within our mindset for losing weight.
Speaking of which…..
2) The Power of Why
The road to perpetual weight loss and healthiness is littered with peril and ups and downs. Even the best laid plans and New Year Resolutions will end up in a ditch on the side of the road unless you have a damn good reason.
After all, life gets busy and there’s never going to be a perfect moment when things magically get easier. You cannot escape work, personal life, career responsibilities, and family demands. Nor can you escape your need for health and fitness within your life.
If we are completely honest with ourselves, within this game of life we know we’re not always going to be on our A-game. Sometimes we have that roaring fire burning within us. Other times we are crippled with self-doubt and just doing our best to get through the day.
To persevere through these hard and difficult times, we need to form a damn good reason and answer the question “Why does this matter to me?”
Working out because “you kinda know you should” isn’t enough to stay or even get motivated. However, working out as an expression of your commitment to your family or self may do the trick.
So, you’ll need to take it 3 steps deeper:
Ask yourself:
Why do you want to lose weight?
What will lose weight means for your life and/or happiness?
What will you be able to do because you lost that weight?
You see, that’s the motivation and answer you’ll need to remind yourself to persevere over the next few months.
If you answer, “ my doctor told me I should lose weight and my wife keeps bugging me about it.” then you are doomed to failure. You will give up at the first sign of adversity
Compare that answer to these raw, deep, honest answers we get from Mack Performance Clients when we ask about their “Why”
I want to lose weight because I don’t feel comfortable with how I look and my husband doesn’t look at me the way he used to and I want us to grow old together.
I’m here because my father has had numerous major heart conditions and I don’t want to become like my dad.
I want to lose weight because I want to look in the mirror and feel proud of what I see. I want to stop hiding behind others in photographs.
I’m here because my girlfriend dumped me and I want to get healthy so I can start dating again. I don’t want people swiping left on my photos anymore.
I want to build muscle because I’ve been struggling with my mental health. By lifting weights and getting stronger, this will help me build my self-confidence.
You need to know why are you here. Why do you want to build healthy habits?
Writing down your why and hanging it up somewhere you can see every day: the fridge, office, bathroom mirror, etc. Accept responsibility for your current situation, be compassionate towards yourself, and ALSO accept that you can change and your identity can change with small wins along the way.
The motto at Mack Performance is:
Respect yourself.
Respect your Efforts.
Always do the work.
3) Don’t go on a “diet” Instead, Discover your Ideal Diet
Without question, perpetually unhealthy people have a love/hate relationship with diets.
Instead of a little Column A, Column B situation, it’ primarily falls into the hate column.
You see, they go on diets all the time, especially in early January for a few weeks, then they go off diets. Then they go back onto another diet once they regain that weight. And then they find another diet that promises an even easier weight loss, so they switch to that one.
Unhealthy people get dieting the wrong front the starts, and this is what dooms them. Unhealthy people go on a diet for a month or two, eagerly waiting for the diet to end so they can go back to “eating normally”. The problem is that their “normal eating” is the reason why they’re overweight in the first place!
It’s no wonder that people abandon diets as soon as they start them; they are usually starving, depriving themselves of their favorite foods, and trying to use willpower to avoid candy and sweets. This is a terrible long term strategy.
Temporary changes to one’s eating habits result in
temporary results to one’s weight and physique.
This year, pledge to not go on a diet.
Instead, come to terms with this thought “my current concept of “normal eating” is broken, which means I need to recognize I need to permanently change my definition of “healthy eating”
Aim to make deliberate incremental permanent changes to your daily nutrition, slowly over many months. Know that it took years for you to get your current physique and it’s going to take months, if not years to correct it. This means you HAVE to enjoy the journey.
Once you accept that you’ll never get to be “done” you can start picking small adjustments or changes that won’t scare you away from adhering to your plan.
-----> Click here to learn more about discovering your perfect Diet
4) Know what’s in the food you eat.
Did you know that when it comes to weight loss, your nutritional choices will account for 90% of your success and failure?
The folks over at Nerd Fitness (you should check them out), refer to this as the “you cannot outrun your fork” rule.
Whatever it takes to get you to realize that changing your eating habits will be the fastest (and only) path to weight loss in 2021.
This is the foundation of your nutrition and it starts by educating yourself about your food. You need to make a habit of knowing what’s in the food you eat!
Whether it’s portion control, counting calories, or tracking macros or even keeping a food journal, it’s crucial to your long term weight loss success to have a rough idea of the total calories and nutritional breakdown of the food you’re consuming regularly.
Once you know how many calories you should be eating every day, you can start to make more informed decisions on foods that fill you up, yet are low in calories.
Learn about the food you’re eating. You’re fully capable to spend 3 minutes googling it or spending 5 minutes entering your food into MyFitnessPal.
Once you know the composition of your meals, you can start to make subtle adjustments or change qualities over time as you start to approach a healthier weight.
You don’t need to be perfect and you should learn to be “good enough” to start. As you do it more and more, you’ll get better and more accurate as time goes on.
Make small adjustments towards your goals over time and see how your body responds. Speaking of goals……
5) Create Realistic, Behavioral-Based Goals
Perpetually unhealthy people often say things like “ I’m going to exercise more this year!”
While their intentions are good, the truth is goals like these are cloudy with no real markers for success. The problem with the “I’ll work out more” statement is that there’s no metric to track, and there’s no accountability if they don’t succeed
Essentially, this is the same thing as telling your dentist that “you’ll floss more”. You and I (even your doctor) know you aren’t going to floss more.
When it comes to creating fitness goals, it is always better to frame your goals around your behavior rather than the outcome. However, what exactly does this mean?
Let’s clarify this:
Outcome-based goals focus on the result, like losing 20 pounds, but don’t account for what happens between now and then.
Behavior-based goals are centered on the actions you take, like eating three servings of vegetables per day.
Outcome-based goals are extremely difficult to control. Everyone’s bodies respond differently to a new way of eating, exercising, or how much daily stress we are under. By only focusing on the result (i.e the outcome), this can become very dissatisfied or even demoralizing after a few weeks.
When you only focus on the outcome, each day slowly becomes more and more difficult. When you end every day without significant progress on your big goal (i.e the outcome), you begin to lose momentum. Without momentum, you lack motivation. No motivation, no action. No action, no progress. And the vicious cycle goes on and on and on.
However, behavior-based goals require us to shift our focus to the things we can control at the moment so we can become 1 percent better. Remember, it’s our daily actions, behaviors, and habits that are the by-product of our success -not a spasmodic herculean effort to overhaul everything at once.
Also, by focusing on the process and your journey, you’ll find it to be more empowering and develop those long last habits to keep the weight off. You’ll find a greater sense of satisfaction, lasting motivation, and long term progress
Speaking of wanting to exercise more…….
6) Switch "Have" with "Get" to exercise
Unhealthy people treat exercise as a miserable means to an end.
“I’ll exercise until I reach my goal weight then I can FINALLY stop exercising and go back to what I was doing previously!”
Temporary changes mixed with a miserable strategy
will always lead to temporary results.
These individuals will run on a treadmill for hours because they think they should, even though they hate it. Or they will go into a virtual training session with their camera off so the instructor can not see them “working out”.
While they are doing their best to build the exercise habit, they’re so unhappy, unexcited, and unmotivated to exercise that the habit will never stick. They only exercise until they reach their goal.
YOU DON’T HAVE TO EXERCISE IN A WAY THAT YOU HATE!
Remember nutrition is 90% responsible for the weight loss battle, so you’re far better off doing exercises that you enjoy doing!
7) Invest in your health like your 401K
When it comes to your health, you can invest in three ways
Time
Effort
Money
Healthy habit-building knows this and prioritizes accordingly. They know investing in their health is the best decision they can make for the long term. So they decide what’s the correct balance of time, effort, and money to use for that investment.
Just like your net worth, your health is an investment:
If you want to devote your effort and time to build your workouts, meal prepping, and keeping yourself accountable, that fucken awesome!!! Seriously! I did this myself for years.
If you are struggling to put together workouts, you might decide to outsource your programming to a coach.
If you are struggling with accountability, then you might want a coach to help you do the things you say you’ll do.
If you are struggling with all the above, then you’ll want to invest in a coach to create your program and nutrition while providing that accountability.
Either way, this is a process that requires discipline! Every day you get one percent better than the day before. Just like compounding interest with money, your small, daily healthy habits will build up over time and result in big results that we may not see during the process.
I’m willing to bet good money that you have read a TON of free content via blogs, videos, IG, etc with no results because they never invested in themselves. I’ve had numerous online clients do the same thing. However, once they decided to invest in themselves by hiring a coach, they took action and lose weight within months.
Why?
Because we VALUE what we pay for and invest in. This makes us more likely to do the damn thing we said we’re going to do. When it’s free, we take it for granted. This is called having skin in the game.
Many people (myself included) will gladly pay for someone to cut through all the bullshit noise and bad information to deliver ONLY the right information that they need to read or hear.
Your money, your time, and your effort are all limited resources: how you choose to spend each of them tells me a lot of your priorities.
Personally, I’ve spent hundreds and even thousands of dollars per month for my own online fitness and business coaching. You may think this is crazy, yet I feel like it’s the best money I’ve spent because it forces me into acting towards my goal. By committing to another human being, provides the necessary accountability and useful tension to my personal integrity to do the things I said I was going to do when I said I was going to do it.
You’re investing in your future and purchasing accountability, expertise, and momentum.
It’s not what you say is a priority, it’s what you spend your time, money, and effort towards that’s a priority. You’ll more likely to get into shape because you’ll care about it.
8) Cultivating and Protecting your Momentum
Change is hard, especially when you are first starting out. You’re probably used to spending your time sitting on the couch and eating junk food, which means the habit of exercising is agonizing. It will take extra effort to convince themselves to get off the couch to go to the gym and the thought of eating vegetables and healthy foods.
Sure, they can go beast mode and do these things a few times before their momentum shifts from unhealthy to healthy. However, that’s when things fall apart and life starts throwing curveballs.
Their kids get sick. They are late for work. They forget their headphones at home after all no one wants to workout without headphones. All of a sudden, they are back at square one.
Instead of purely focusing on motivation and white-knuckling yourself to workout and eating healthy foods, we’ll focus on cultivating and protecting momentum.
Perpetual health doesn’t happen in days or with a few decisions. It takes months of consistent effort and that’s before shit hits the fan.
You know… work. Kids, Pandemics, Life.
It’s far more than “missing a workout”. It’s killing your momentum and momentum is absolutely essential to long-term health. Momentum is crucial to perpetually be healthy. Therefore, you need to protect it with your life.
This means you’ll be following my favorite rule: Don’t hit the Pause Button on your Life.
Two missed workouts become 15 before you know it. Two bad meals become a week of fast food and pizza.
So how do you continue to maintain your fitness progress during those imperfect, difficult periods? You need to turn your intensity dial down.
Think of your fitness and nutrition efforts as a dial. There are times when you want to dial your efforts up (i.e. those previously mentioned 30 days this or 90 days that programs) and times when you want to dial them down (i.e. settling into a new home, taking care of a newborn).
It’s on the more hectic days, you may turn your dial to a 3 or 2. There’s no reason to feel guilty about setting your dial a little lower. What is most important is that your dial is still on and you're consciously making the effort.
It’s in these moments you have to realize that something was going to be better than nothing. We still consciously take action towards prioritizing our health, and fitness.
———-> Click here to Learn More
9) Protecting yourself from your Kryptonite
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself;
you are the easiest person to fool.”
Richard Feynman, Physicist
Unhealthy people may be aware of your kryptonite, but they just hope and pray they have enough willpower to overcome it every day. It usually starts with a single cookie, and then spend the next hour thinking about cookies, until they have another one. Then another one. Another. Until they berate themselves for not having more willpower to avoid the temptation.
Here’s the honest truth- we are all flawed
However, here is the difference. Perpetually unhealthy people always try to fix their flaws through sheer willpower and then feel deep shame about their behaviors. Perpetually healthy people recognize their kryptonite and have a plan to avoid or protect against it.
This is why is so important to know yourself and know what your triggers are. We are all flawed creatures. Instead of replying with motivation and willpower to tackle your kryptonite, plan for your flaws instead of fighting them. Having a Kyronite proof plan so you don’t have to worry about avoiding it.
Here are a few tips on how to build your kryptonite-proof plan:
Don’t order out from unhealthy restaurants and schedule early workouts on Saturdays so you don’t drink too much.
Reward yourself when you meet a goal. For example, new running shoes if you complete 25 runs in a month.
Redesign your kitchen/environment so it’s tougher to make unhealthy decisions and easier to make healthy ones.
Again, you don’t need to be perfected, yet what you need is to have an honest conversation with yourself about what you need to avoid while making healthier decisions.
10) Surround yourself with Positive Support
You need to surround yourself with people who pick you up not slow you down.
Perpetually healthy people know this and they make the hard decision about who is worthy of their time and attention.
They’ll often fire their unhealthy friends and family - even if only temporary - because they cannot be around their negative influence as they build motivation. This is because we are highly influenced by the people surrounding us whether you realize this or not.
Here’s an example:
You want to workout out:
Unhealthy people: You want to exercise, yet your friends are mad at you for skipping happy hour… so you skip your workout.
Healthy people: you want to exercise and your friends are currently playing in the park…. You are going to join them!
You want to eat healthier:
Unhealthy People: Your family orders take out and everyone wants pizza. Instead of ordering a salad or poke, you’ll order junk food to fit in rather than endure the scorn.
Healthy People: Your decision on delivery and everyone wants salads. Since everyone else is ordering healthy food, you want to join in.
You want to improve your mental health:
Unhealthy people: Your friends are always drunk and never talk about anything serious; how are you supposed to tell them about your depression or that you’re thinking about seeing a therapist?
Healthy people: Your friends are not only supportive of your flaws but share theirs too and have helpful advice to help.
The honest truth is you need to decide who is worthy of your attention and work on putting yourself into situations where people want to make you better.
If they are worth your time, they will change their tune to being more supportive and less of an anchor. This will be your first step towards spending time around people who are stronger, healthier, happy, and more successful than you. By extension, you’ll start doing those supportive things they do.
How is 2021 going to be different?
Holy crap! That was a lot of info!
Okay, let’s do a quick review and see how many of these you can check off.
Setting Optimistic, Realistic Expectations
The Power of Why
Don’t go on a “Diet”
Know what’s in the food you’re eating
Creating Realistic, behavioral goals
Switch “have” with “get” to exercise
Invest in your health like your 401K
Cultivating and Protecting your Momentum
Protect yourself from your Kryptonite
Surround yourself with Positive Support
Give yourself a score and let me know which ones are your toughest for you to follow through on.
If you score 6 or fewer, then pick one of the habits to focus on for the next month. Make it part of your new identity. Once you’re consistent with that new habit, move onto the next one.
This is how you build momentum! Never underestimate momentum. Once you start building it, it can be very difficult to stop.
As for your next step, you should know….
All the knowledge you absorbed within this article doesn’t equal change.
If you’re fed up with how COVID fucked up your year, invest in a coach.
If you’ve read LITERALLY DOZENS of guides like this in the past and still haven’t made the change nor the confidence you want, invert in a coach.
If you’re overwhelmed by the content in this article, invest in a coach.
If you cannot be consistent with the strategies within this article, invest in a coach.
If you are ready for a change, I’m here to coach you.