Tag: lasting weight loss

How to Shake Off The Diet Mentality

Jun 17, 2019

Has this ever happened to you? 

You know, that moment when you realize it’s time to do something about your fitness.

Frustrated with your current fitness level?

It may happen when you’re looking in the mirror or standing on the scale.

Your first thought is to go on a ‘diet’ but as quickly as that enters your mind, the ghosts of a hundred diets past return…along with all the frustration.

Then you wonder, why bother?

The weight will come back, as it always has. Then you’ll be back in front of the mirror as discouraged as ever.

The answer is not to go on another diet.

The answer is to change your lifestyle.

Adopt a fitness lifestyle


How Do We Change Our Lifestyle?

We have to lose the ‘all or nothing’ mentality. We need to embrace simple, small changes that will add up to big improvements in  our health fitness over time.

These are your main avenues for change:

What You Eat

Let’s face it, some of the foods we eat aren’t the healthiest. Some are downright terrible (sugar-laden soda, for example). While others become bad for us due to the volume in which we consume them (the snacks you eat while watching TV, for example).

The solution to cleaning up your daily diet is NOT to go back on a ‘diet’. In fact, I never want you to go on a ‘diet’ again (Yes! you heard me right!). Instead I want you to make permanent healthy changes to your eating habits and stick with them 80% of the time.  You might not be able to sustain an 80% “clean eating” track record today, but you can work towards it with baby steps and get a little bit better every day.

Here are some practical examples:

Choose more veggies

✓  Choose salad over chips or fries
✓  Eat fresh produce with every meal (Yep.  Even breakfast)
✓  Limit desserts to one per week
✓  Cut out mindless snacking (get snack foods out of the house)
✓  Drink water, not soda (use sparkling water if plain water bores you)

At lifeSport Fitness, we don’t expect perfection from those we coach.  We all have slip ups, BUT — there’s no “diet” to go back on.  We just get back up on the “clean eating” wagon and move forward. We think the 80/20 lifestyle approach allows you to have some planned indulgences but still eat healthfully most of the time.

How You Move

Exercise is a huge component to a healthy lifestyle, and quite frankly many Silicon Valley residents are not getting enough of it. How often does an entire week go by without you ever lacing up your tennis shoes? Don’t disregard the importance and power of a good workout.

Your new healthy lifestyle means moving more or exercising on most days of the week. This may seem tough, but there are ways to sneak in extra movement in your day.

Here are simple ways to move more:

✓  Walk to talk with a friend at work instead of texting or emailing

✓  Do some squats or push ups on the kitchen counter while you have something in the microwave

✓  Play at the park with the kids

✓  Walk in the neighborhood after dinner

✓  Do some stretches every morning

While none of the above are meant as substitutes for a solid exercise routine, they are great ways to become more active and to improve your lifestyle.

Your lifestyle is the balance of all the choices that you make regarding your body. Swing the balance in your favor—make a majority of your choices health conscious.

Feeling stuck or overwhelmed? Need a little help figuring out how to implement the first few steps in changing your lifestyle?  Hit us up for a FREE 15 minute phone consultation.  We’d be happy to help get you pointed in the right direction with some lifestyle hacks you can try at home!

Fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch to get you scheduled for a 15-minute phone consultation.

 

 

Habits, Not Diets, for Lasting Weight Loss – Part 1 of 4

Feb 21, 2019


I’ve seen it time and again where a new client gets really excited about working on improving their nutrition, but they fall off the wagon after a few weeks (or days!). Intuitively, they understand what to do, but they have a hard time executing consistently.

I’ve been a personal trainer in San Jose for over 25 years. During that time, I’ve helped hundreds of people improve their nutrition for lasting weight loss. I’ve also seen some people really struggle to maintain or persevere with their weight loss plans.

Failure to execute consistently usually happens due to a few common themes:

1)    Changing too much too rapidly

2)   Failing to plan or think ahead

3)   Maintaining a non-supportive environment

4)   Being unaware of food triggers

If you’ve tried and failed at incorporating healthier eating into your life, I’m guessing you may have gotten hung up with one or more of these situations as well.

Walk with me here over the next few days while I offer you some solutions to each of these 4 habit change hold ups.

Let’s start with Habit Change Hang Up #1 — Changing too much too rapidly.

SOLUTION: Work on ONE change at a time

What I’ve seen from coaching hundreds of people over the years is that too much change all at once is just too stressful for most people. It’s that “diet mentality” where you decide that come next Monday, everything is going to change.  For most of us, all that change is unsustainable. Having to think about and focus on all those different things you need to change is downright stressful and fatiguing. 

Rather than change everything all at once, I coach my clients to work on one change at a time.  It’s not nearly as fatiguing.  Now, you’re not going to lose 20 pounds in two weeks doing it this way.  However, focusing on one change at a time, you’re likely to end up with a sustainable new lifestyle habit down the road instead of one more failed diet.

I work with my clients to choose one habit change that will likely net the best outcome for the client as well as choose the habit that the client is most likely to stick with.  Once we’ve made significant progress on making that habit part of their lifestyle, we move on to another habit to improve.

Here’s what I suggest you to do so that you don’t fall into the “too much too soon” trap: Choose one thing you can do to improve your overall nutrition starting tomorrow. Work on that and only that for the next month.  That one thing will be your only focus.  You don’t have to be perfect at it in order to be successful, but I want you to be mindful of it every day.  Focus on implementing that one habit daily. Be really, really consistent at that one thing.

This one habit change may be subtracting something from your lifestyle or adding something to your lifestyle.  An example of subtraction would be taking out your daily soda or decreasing the amount of fast food you eat.  An example of addition would be adding in additional water every day, or perhaps making sure to eat 3 more servings of vegetables every day.

Once it’s become easier to maintain that habit and you’re confident you can, challenge yourself to work on implementing another new habit.

Like I said earlier, this won’t net you massive weight loss in a week, but it might just net you permanent weight loss down the road because you will have changed the choices that you make on a daily basis.

If you’re struggling to change your nutrition, try my “one habit at a time” suggestion and let me know how it goes!

Stay tuned for Part 2 next week where I’ll go over the solution to Habit Change Hang Up #2 – Failing to plan or think ahead. I’ve got some ideas I think you’ll like!