Start Small

You’re starting the New Year motivated as ever, ready to take on the challenge of getting your nutrition in check and hitting the gym consistently. 

You got a plan too – you’re going to start going to the gym 5 days a week, you have the time, there’s no reason not to go that often. 

Your motivation might power you through that plan for the first couple of weeks, but what happens when life starts getting in the way like it inevitably will? 

What happens when you aren’t as motivated to go to the gym anymore? 

Instead of having a plan that requires a lot of willpower, scale it back to something you can do even on the days you aren’t motivated! If you can’t see yourself staying consistent with your plan at all times when you’re probably biting more than you can chew.

Start small and build consistency first – then you can start doing more!

Reverse Engineer Your Goals

You have the massive goal of losing 20,30, or 50+ pounds!

That’s a huge number and definitely not something that you’re going to accomplish in a short amount of time. It can even be intimidating to look at times and can discourage you from moving forward once you realize the pace you’ll need to take.

Instead of focusing on only the big goal, focus on the benchmarks it’ll take you to get there. 

There are 52 weeks in a year. If you lose 1 pound per week, you can lose 52 pounds in the year. 

That’s 4-5 pounds per month. Much easier to look at and work toward than the daunting 50-pound mark. You have to lose 5 pounds before you lose 50 pounds anyway, so why not shift focus on the smaller benchmarks and put your mind at ease!

Consistency Over Perfection

I can hand you the best training and nutrition program that I could draw based on all of the relevant research over the last 20 years, but it still won’t help you reach your goals.

It’s not because the program is bad (my programs are actually amazing) but because the program is probably completely different than how you live your current life. When that happens, it makes it almost impossible to be consistent to the program!

Even the best program is useless if you can’t be consistent enough to execute it, and if you’re not executing you won’t see results. The most important part of literally any program is your adherence to the program. The best program is actually the program that you can adhere to long term and remain consistent with.

Don’t chase perfection, chase consistency. 

Don’t Ignore Your Health

Between societal standards, media campaigns, 30-day challenges, and crash diets. Everyone is looking to lose weight as fast as possible.

This leads to a number of dangerous health practices to actually accomplish the task, including but not limited to:

• Twice as many workouts on half as many calories
• Overtraining and under recovering your body
• Over restricting your calories (sub-1200)
• Avoiding social events
• Cutting out foods you love entirely.

These practices don’t just impact your physical health but your mental and emotional health as well. Don’t let the desire to lose weight create a mind and body that you wouldn’t want to live in.

Hidden Calories Count 

There are a lot of hidden calories that are easy to forget to count:

• Sweeteners you add to your drinks
• Sauces you add or dip on your food
• The oils you cook your food in
• The little bites of food you eat off of your kid’s plate throughout the day

All of these can add up to a lot of calories over a week-long span! Don’t lose sight of these little things that you might be overlooking!

Manage Your Stress

When your body is under stress, it’s a lot more resistive to change or release stored energy (aka body fat).

Stress comes in all kinds of forms as well!

There’s the physical stress of training, the physical stress of dieting (being in a calorie deficit is a form of stress), the financial stress of bills, the mental stress of everything you need to accomplish, and the emotional stress of relationships.

All of that really adds up over time and can stop you from losing weight if it’s not managed properly!

Make it a priority to destress weekly if not every day! Not only will you finally be relaxed but it’ll help your body carry on metabolic processes that it put on pause before!

Get Educated

If you’ve ever tried learning an instrument, you know that it’s a skill that takes A LOT of time to learn the basics of let alone perform at a high level!

Your fitness journey should be viewed in the same light. This is a skill that takes time to master. If you want to be effective at getting the body of your dreams then you need some basic understanding of how your body works, how to train effectively, and what different foods do for your body.

Not only will this help you lose weight in the short term but keep the weight off long term! I give all my clients the gift of education so that they can become their own coaches and understand how to keep their weight off long term!

Put the work on the front end so that you can reap the long term benefits!

Periodize Your Nutrition

Periodizing your nutrition is just a fancy way of saying you should plan your nutrition in advance. You should not be in a diet your whole life. You need to have a plan of when to implement diet breaks, when to have maintenance phases, and what your diet after the diet is going to look like.

The goal with periodizing your nutrition is to help you get to your goal weight while eating as many calories as possible and then maintaining that calorie mark so that you can still have a high-calorie intake after dieting so that it’s easier to maintain your new weight!

Journal

This handy little skill has single-handedly changed my life. Journaling has all kinds of health benefits including reducing stress, improving immune function, keeping your memory sharp, boosting your mood, and strengthening your emotional function!

Getting your thoughts out of your head and onto paper is an amazing way to create perspective in your current actions and how you can better improve!

Not sure what to journal? Here’s a basic prompt to get you started:

• Gratitude- write 3 things you’re grateful for
• “Today would be great if…” – What would you want to happen today? Write it down!
• I AM ___! – Positive affirmation about yourself in ALL CAPS

Morning Routine

How you start your mornings set the tone for the rest of your day.

Do you rush to make it out of the house on time? Well, you’ll probably spend the day in a rush (I’m sure you’ve experienced this before). 

Do you drag yourself out of bed? Well, you might be dragging your feet all day.

Instead of letting the morning go by, take advantage of it and let the rest of your day fall in alignment with the tone you set! 

• Start your day with a greens drink to get a boost of nutrients and start the day with a health-focused mindset.
• Journal your thoughts to set a positive mindset for your day.
• Express gratitude to someone in your life!
• Move! You don’t have to do a whole workout, but go on a walk, do some mobility work, or even a few pushups! Something to get the blood flowing and your body moving!

Sleep More

Things that happen when you get less than 7 hours of sleep:

• Measurable physical and mental impairment
• You reach training fatigue 30% faster
• Lactic builds up quicker in your muscles
• 60% Increase in injury probability
• Lower peak strength
• Ghrelin (appetite hormone) increases
• Produce less testosterone
• Produce less insulin

You will get better results, faster, just by making sure that you sleep at least 7 hours every night!

7 hours of sleep means 8+ hours in bed because we both know you won’t sleep right away!

Hydrate

Here are just a few reasons you need more water: 

• • Drinking-Water Helps Maintain the Balance of Body Fluids
  • Water Helps Energize Muscles
  • Water Helps Keep Skin Looking Good
  • Water Helps Your Kidneys
  • Water Helps Maintain Normal Bowel Function
  • Relieves Headaches
  • Regulates Calorie Intake

Drink water with every meal and to start the day!

Plan

This one tip will guarantee your success.

Benjamin Franklin famously said, “If you’re not making a plan, you’re planning to fail.” 

Think about it, if you don’t have a plan of attack for your nutrition or your training, how are you really going to know if you’ll get results?

I doubt you’d trust living in a building that was put together until it was house-shaped, you’d be crazy to live in something like that.

There’s always a plan on every detail of building a house before the final product is revealed.

Every successful process has a plan. Why wouldn’t you do the same for your body?

Weighing Yourself

If you’re reading this you probably have a weight-related goal whether it’s gaining or losing weight. 

If you choose to weigh yourself every day, be prepared to know that the scale WILL fluctuate on a daily basis. Weight loss is not a linear process, it’s going to go up and down. You shouldn’t get caught up on daily weight fluctuations because so many things will influence your weight!

Drinking extra water, having a full bowel, being sore, eating extra carbs, drinking alcohol, getting your cycle, excess sodium, are all things that could cause the scale to spike up!

Instead of focusing on the day to day fluctuations, it’s best to look at the week to week trends of your weight! Take your scale weight on a daily basis and average it out from Sun-Sat, then compare your average weight for this week with the average weight for next week.

This will not only save you stress but give you a more accurate idea of how your weight is trending

Track Your Food

You never know how much you actually eat until you track it. Not tracking your food means you’re just hoping that what you’re eating will lead to the results you’re looking for.

Don’t hope for results, start making them happen! Track your food and start understanding what you’re eating so that you know what to adjust!

Want to learn how to track and set nutrition goals? Get my free ebook “The Nutrition Manual” here! You’ll learn everything you need including your ideal calorie intake, macros, micros, and more!

Follow A Program

Following a program makes going to the gym so much easier. 

Instead of sitting on your couch wondering about what you’ll do when you go to the gym just to decide you’d rather stay home you’ll know exactly what to do when you get there and all you’ll have to do is show up!

Not to mention following a well-designed training program will help you shape your body the way you’d like it to be shaped while helping maintain strong joints and healthy movement patterns

Be Process Focused Not Outcome Focused

I see this a lot with onboarding clients. You want to reach that weight goal. It’s all you think about. You want it so bad that if the scale doesn’t show that weight you actually get frustrated and get demotivated.

It’s important to recognize that you can’t control the scale – it’s out of your hands. What you can control, though, are the daily practices that will lead to your goal. Getting your steps in, hitting your protein, working out, hydrating, getting your sleep – these are the daily things that you can measure and control that will lead you to your weight goal!

Only by focusing on what you need to do today do you actually get the goal you’re looking for.

Be Patient

You didn’t gain the weight overnight, don’t expect it to be lost after one day. You need to accept that you’ll be playing the long game here.

Not to mention that training and nutrition are actual skills that you learn to master. You wouldn’t expect to know how to play the guitar after just one day of lessons, you’d be taken in for tests if that were the case. Give yourself time to learn how to train, give yourself time to understand your nutrition, and give yourself time to enjoy life along the way! 

Stay consistent and playing the long game will lead you to your results.

Find Accountability

As humans, we’re always fine with letting ourselves down. How many times have you told yourself that you’d do something but didn’t follow through with whatever reason? It happens to all of us, I know I’m guilty of that. 

Conversely, how many times have you done something you really didn’t want to because you told somebody else that you would? Probably a lot more often than the other case. 

It’s really simple, find somebody who’s opinion you deeply care about – your spouse, a family member, your best friend, or a coach and let them know about what you’re trying to accomplish. You’ll be more likely to succeed when you have someone in your corner to pick you up.

Invest In Yourself

Most of us aren’t car people. If something goes wrong with our cars we are quick to hand it off to somebody else to fix for us. Oil change, tire rotations, check engine light on, tune-ups, and everything else are left to a mechanic because they’re the professional.

You could always ignore these problems but after some time you’re just going to have bigger problems to deal with. You might even need to replace the car entirely if you don’t invest in the regular maintenance you should’ve been in the first place.

Your body is an even more complicated machine. It has systems and processes that most people don’t understand. You have weight you’ve been stuck with, you have joint pain that you think you have to live with, you aren’t sure how to cook or what different foods do for your body, or don’t know how to lift safely and effectively.

It’s not a bad thing, you just haven’t been given the opportunity to learn. You have 1 body, you can’t get a new one if you don’t keep up with regular maintenance like you would your car.

Invest in yourself so that you can learn how to eat (not diet), invest in yourself so that you know how to move pain-free, and invest in yourself to save the time of trying to figure it all out on your own. Set yourself up for success this 2020 and do what’s best for you!

If you’re ready to invest in yourself click here.