The Highly Effective Habits to Transform Your Life
Do you know what’s the hardest part of the fat loss process?
It’s actually believing that this time things will be different.
I’ve struggled with this throughout my entire life.
Growing up, I always knew my weight was an issue as I was terrified of taking my shirt off in public, always afraid of what others would say. I’d used every possible opportunity to cover up my body so people wouldn’t notice. I spent years masking my insecurities out of fear of providing ammo for the other kid’s next teasing.
Truth is, it’s one of the reasons why I started my fitness journey and became a coach.
After achieving my own transformation, I’ve found my purpose in helping others achieve their own transformation.
That’s what happened to Ben, who was able to completely transform his life by losing 120+ pounds AND got promoted, reclaimed his social life, and even his mental outlook on life.
You can watch his story and transformation by clicking here.
After helping hundreds of clients both in-person and online, my clients achieve their results by following these highly effective habits. By following these habits, you’ll be able to transform yourself, like Ben, to become the leanest, strongest, and most confident version of yourself.
1) Follow the 6 Month Rule
Without a doubt, losing weight is tough and a difficult process. We know it’s not going to happen overnight.
Regardless of your starting point, if you have 5, 10, 20, or 50+ pounds to lose, I want you to mentally prepare for it to take 6 months to achieve your goal.
Now, will it take you a full 6 months to lose 5, 10, 20, or 50+ pounds to lose?
Maybe, maybe not, but it doesn’t really matter because losing weight isn’t the goal.
The real goal is to become the best version of yourself that weights 5, 10, 20, or 50+ pounds lighter and doesn’t struggle to maintain it.
Becoming that lighter, better version of yourself is the real goal, and that takes time.
It’s hard to say how long, but I can tell you with confidence that it will take at least 6 months to get there.
Do you think you’ll care if it initially took you 6 months, 1 year or 2 years to get there??
Hell No!
One of my mentor’s, Jordan Syatt, has a quote that I’ve repeated numerous times,
Ten years from now, you won’t give a shit what you weigh in 2021. You will care about your relationship with food. Focus on building healthy, sustainable habits long term and not trying to accelerate the process short term.
You’ll be glad you took your time early on and developed habits and strategies to becoming the leaner and stronger version of yourself.
You’ll be even more proud of yourself for learning how to maintain it, so why not start the process of learning how to do so from the start?
2) The Power of Why
Throughout your journey, your motivation will ebb and flow. Some days, you’ll wake up with a roaring fire burning within, pushing you forward with unparalleled confidence in your ability to succeed. Other days, you’ll feel crippled, and filled with self-doubt in the process.
To prepare yourself for the road ahead, you’ll need to be in the right headspace. Everyone gets into this for their own reasons, but the root cause of most people’s motivation to lose weight is different.
However, no one ever makes a crazy transformation without a powerful why.
Those who successfully lose weight know this to be true and prepare their mind for the road ahead. To help you really find your motivation to transform your body, I want you to use the “Five Why” Method.
First, ask yourself why you want to transform your body and write it down.
Next, ask yourself why you choose that answer.
Repeat until you find the root reasons (usually 5 times hence the name).
The more specific you can be, the better.
Once you identify your root reasons and “whys” for getting into fitness, staying consistent will be so much easier because you’ll be driven by YOUR choice and motivation.
3) Finding your Ideal Diet
When it comes to dieting, it can absolutely difficult, stressful, overwhelming, and a pain in the ass. it’s no wonder why dieting pushes people away from trying or causing them to quit prematurely.
As a coach, this frustrates me beyond belief. How can I get my clients to adhere to a long-term plan??
Did you notice how I said long-term?
Creating and maintaining sound nutritional habits is what separates those who keep the weight off and those who continue the vicious yo-yo dieting cycle. Without question, too many people spend their entire lives dieting and never reaching the point where they actually get to enjoy their life.
At Mack Performance, I firmly believe that your nutrition needs to fit your lifestyle, not the other way around.
The most powerful thing I can do as your nutritional coach and my top priority is to teach you how to make your diet work for you and your lifestyle, instead of fitting the rest of your life into your diet.
To achieve this, you’re nutritional strategy needs to be sustainable to achieve that lean and strong physique. Your nutritional strategy is the method you’ll use to measure and control your calorie intake and needs to adhere to the following parameters.
Your nutrition needs to optimally fuel your muscles and daily life: This is a big aspect of nutrition that gets overlooked as you must fuel your body with all the nutrients it needs for health.
Your nutrition needs to allow some flexibility: You should be able to enjoy some drinks, eat some ice cream, burgers, or pizza occasionally without feeling guilty or losing your results.
Your nutrition needs to have a clear structure. Any time you don’t have a plan in place, the floor tends to fall out quickly. As a coach, I’ve found this to be especially true.
4) Following the 80/20 Rule
As I mentioned earlier, we want to make sure your nutrition both fuels your body, training performance, AND allows you to enjoy life.
The 80/20 rule has been absolutely crucial for my online clients to create sustainable success while living their life. Finding this balance is a big part of what most diets get wrong.
---> 80-90% Whole, Nutrient-dense foods
The honest truth and reality of the society we live in today, it’s way too easy to overeat. The overly processed foods (i.e. fast foods, snack foods) we eat are specially designed to be hyper-palatable as it’s literally engineered to make us eat more than we need.
This is why you need to prioritize whole, nutrient-dense foods. In the simplest terms, 80-90% of your foods should have at one point:
Swam in the ocean
Roamed the earth
Flew in the sky
Grew from the ground
All these foods are single-ingredient items that are packed with vitamins, minerals, and fiber to maximize your fullness, minimizing hunger/cravings WHILE providing your body with the necessary fuel and nutrients to maximize your progress.
---> 10-20% IIFYM
On the other end of the spectrum, we have the remaining 20% of the foods that you enjoy. These foods items include:
Pizza
Alcohol
Burgers
French Fries
Big Macs
Ice creams
Cookies
This means you can use these calories and macros to eat and drink whatever you want. Beer, ice cream, pizza….. Seriously, whatever. As long as you still make those foods work within your calories and macro goals, your results and health won’t be affected.
Remember, the goal of any sustainable dietary plan is to include foods you enjoy in moderation while still losing weight. We’ll be using an If It Fits Your Macros Approach (IIFYM) the other 10-20% of your diet so you can enjoy your life.
We do not want to completely restrict ourselves and cut them out altogether as this will backfire every single time. Together, we’ll be collaborating together to find your ideal diet.
As your coach, my top prioritize is to empower and educate you on how to make your diet work for your lifestyle. My coaching service is centered around teaching you how to achieve dietary freedom and confidence in your ability to succeed in transforming your body.
5) Protein with Each Meal
At Mack Performance, protein is the staple in our nutrition plan because it’s probably the most important macronutrient.
The reason is simple – it is an essential macronutrient, which means you literally cannot survive without consuming it. Protein is what helps us rebuild muscle tissue and keep our bodies running optimally.
Your body needs protein and when it comes to changing your body composition, your body needs protein for these critical reasons:
——-> Protein is the “raw material” your muscles are built from:
Without adequate protein, it doesn’t matter how hard you train….. you won’t build muscle. If the amount of protein is too small, your efforts within the gym won’t be reflected in the mirror.
——-> Protein is the most satiating and filling macronutrient:
One of the biggest reasons why people struggle on a diet is due to hunger levels being too high. Prioritizing protein helps you better manage hunger so you can stay the course.
——-> Protein burns a lot of calories during digestion:
20-35% of the calories you consume via protein are actually burned off during digestion. This is known as the “thermic effect of food.”
——-> Protein is extremely difficult to store as body fat:
This 2015 study took 48 randomized, resistance-trained men and women
Consume a minimum of 1.36g/lb of protein daily
Maintain current dietary habits for eight weeks while undergoing a standardized resistance training program designed to increase lean body mass.
Both groups did this for eight weeks while going through a standard resistance training program designed to build muscle.
The end result?
The high protein group ate ~490 calories more than the lower protein group and lost more fat!
Protein is extremely beneficial for both getting lean and building muscle so prioritizing it is absolutely crucial to your results.
6) Have Fun with your Training while Getting Stronger
Have you been following the same training program (or worse, no program) for months or even years?
While what you’re doing might not be “bad”, it’s probably not engaging, stimulating, and extremely boring.
As your coach, I want you to be looking forward to working out and having fun within the gym. When you’re having fun with your training, you’ll push and challenge yourself a lot harder.
As a result of this and your nutrition on point, you’ll be able to build a lot of muscle and lose body fat simultaneously.
You don’t need to follow a crazy plan nor live in the gym, but you should enjoy working out and being consistent.
By having more fun, paired with the confidence of what you’re doing in the gym will give you the exact results you want to completely transform your body.
7) Redesign your Environment and Getting Organized
At the start of any transformation, you always want to redesign your environment. Familiar environments trigger similar habits.
You can briefly use willpower to “do better” but you’ll eventually fall back to your old habits. So the first step to building good habits is to start breaking bad habits.
The more fiction you can place between your bad habits the less likely you are to perform it.
Your environment controls your habits and your habits control your life.
Your environment needs to be conducive to building the body and life you want, which usually means getting organized.
If you are like me or most of the awesome people I coach, you probably keep “running out of time to eat healthily,” or “running out of time to go to the gym.”
The solution is to get more organized as this saves you a TON of time and gets you better results.
Follow these two simple steps to save you time while making an insane difference in your results and productivity.
Start by planning out exactly when you would work out each day, during a time when I knew I wouldn’t be distracted by work
I planned time to meal prep weekly, identified my ideal food choices to better support my nutritional goals so cooking wouldn’t be an issue anymore.
A HUGE aspect of my coaching service is to hold you accountable for getting more organized so you quit “running out of time.”
8) Get Plenty of Sleep
Sleep is often the forgotten component of fitness. There is soo much focus on what is the best diet, what training program should I follow that sleep is constantly neglected.
The truth is we get our muscular gains while sleeping. So by not getting enough restful sleep, you’re actually inhibiting the body’s ability to rebuild and restore your muscles.
But don’t just take my word for it. This is backed by science.
There was a recent 8-week study done that focused on the effects of sleep restriction on weight loss when in a calorie deficit. There were 36 people in the study and got their baseline body compositions (muscle and fat mass) tested in week 1. 15 of the people (Group A) simply used a calorie deficit for the 8 weeks.
The remaining 21 individuals (Group B) used a calorie deficit combined with sleep restriction for 8 weeks. They were instructed to reduce their time in bed Monday-Friday and cold sleep as much as they wanted on the weekends (to “catch up” on their sleep). This was an average of 169 minutes less sleep for the entire week.
The results: Group 2 loses an average of 39% of their total weight loss as muscle mass and 58% as fat mass. When sleep was not restricted, Group A only lost 17% of their weight as muscle mass, but 87% as fat mass. That means both groups lost the same amount of total weight, but the group with more sleep lost more fat and less muscle!
This is exactly why I have my online clients track their sleep every night and hold them accountable to improving it. I made getting 7+ hours of sleep per night a non-negotiable in my life and it made an insane difference for my results.
9) Measure and Assess
Throughout your journey, we need to know how your body is changing with your current nutrition and training, so we can make intelligent adjustments to get the results you want.
This is why I and my online clients started
Tracking body measurements
Tracking Bodyweight 3x/week or more
Tracking biofeedback
tracking weights lifted
Taking progress photos
My online clients weren’t hoping to make progress; we knew where we started, exactly how much progress we were making, and when we needed to adjust nutrition or training.
This is why my online clients track the above metrics Knowing where you started, and how your body is responding tells us exactly when and where we need to adjust your nutrition and training.
Bonus Tip: Accountability
Many individuals can achieve their health and body composition goals simply by actively practicing these essential habits. I know because Ben was able to achieve his results by following these guidelines.
Wouldn’t it be better to have an expert:
Correct and modify your workouts to reduce the risk of pain or injury?
Plan your workouts and nutrition to eliminate guesswork
Ensure you make progress in a sensible way that’s right for you
Listen to your feedback and modify things accordingly
It begins with realistic goals and ends with transforming your body and your life, so you’ll have the confidence to tackle anything, inside or outside the gym.
Isn’t about time you took control and improved your life once and for all?
Here’s your decision: Do you either continue down the road of random workouts and eating decisions? How well has that been working for you?
Or do you want to transform your life?
If you are ready to stop collecting information and start transforming your body, click here now to apply for online coaching.
I’ll apply proven, science-backed nutrition ad training methods through individualized coaching to help you get the body you want while teaching you how to keep it for a lifetime.