It amazes me even as I type it, but this week marks Eric Helms’ debut on my show. I can promise it won’t be the last. Eric and his 3DMJ team have recently released a new program called “Transitioning Away From Tracking”. It is excellent. In this episode, we not only talk about that program but understanding the nuance of when it’s appropriate to track calories and when it’s better to shift away as well as the psychological effects of either strategy. Download, subscribe, share with your friends and please take a moment to leave us an iTunes review.
To learn more about Eric’s work and to purchase this program:
Like many of you, I’ve found the last several days to be confusing, shocking, and fascinating to watch.
As a small business owner, I’ve been watching to see how similar businesses are acting/reacting to the chaos around them. Being a part of several organizations who cater to gyms and gym owners like myself, protocols and methods for keeping business moving along have been all the buzz since the weekend began.
I’m watching the response to local businesses, domestic businesses and the way that other countries are treating this. I’m watching to check the pulse of my friends and clients to see what they feel, how they feel and to get a gauge on what the potential next steps are.
I’m fortunate that I know a lot of small business owners and I know that each industry is being affected in different ways. Some service providers may not feel as much of a pinch from this. I think of services offered by plumbers, handymen and electricians.
I also consider businesses which thrive on weekend/weeknight traffic when they generate the most revenue: bars, restaurants, music venues, etc.
There are also the businesses who thrive on seasonal events and parties like florists and event centers. Think of all the weddings which are either being postponed or cancelled right now due to fear of too many people in too small of a place.
For us, at RevFit, due to the government intervention, our semi-private training is temporarily on hold. As a result, we are transitioning many of our clients to online coaching to make sure we are still taking care of their needs.
There has also been a glimmer of hope in that we may still be able to coach 1-on-1 and 1-on-2 sessions for those who simply have no better option to train and don’t have the equipment to get the job done at home.
Should the weather warm up sooner as opposed to later here in Ohio, we may opt for outdoor workouts so there is more chance for clients to spread out and still get in some training so they don’t feel they’re missing out on a typical training session.
The good news, for us, is that there are many options for continuing a relatively seamless flow of business. We’ll modify and adapt to the best of our ability because we know how much of a stress relief (no matter what is happening in life) exercise can be. At times like these, we need things we can count on to not only make us feel better but boost our immune systems too.
However, as a consumer, and someone who knows the value of small business, I would ask you to consider how the current events might affect businesses which operate on smaller profit margins and may not be able to weather the storm of potentially weeks of decreased revenue.
My mother owns a flower shop and many of her events have been cancelled. I made a post on Facebook this week reminding people who just need a pick-me-up to order some flowers to be delivered. It may not make up all of the difference from the downturn of events but it may reduce the financial impact this loss of events (postponed or cancelled) may cause.
I also asked friends to consider the impact of restaurants which already operate on small profit margins. Consider ordering take-out so they can keep kitchen staff on hand and not have to reduce as much staff or payroll hours.
For those who are trying to buy the groceries they need, consider shopping at smaller Mom & Pop stores who don’t have the deep(er) pockets of chain grocery stores. This could be an excellent time to learn how to make simple recipes at home that take care of the family’s needs for a handful of days.
I know there are things I’m missing. I know there are people and businesses I haven’t yet considered. Every one matters. Reach out to friends and family who may need to know they have another line of support. That could be something as simple as a phone call.
No matter what you do, stay close (not too close), show unity and show support. Some people need it now more than ever.
We’re in it together.
Below is our Saturday crew keeping relatively safe distance from each other (left to right) Bill K., Kelvin V., Shon C., Jean V., Anthony S., and Charlie H.
Life coach David Wood joins me for this week’s bonus episode. David and I talk about the conversations we need to have, not only with ourselves, but with our friends and loved ones to help get unstuck when we can’t seem to make the progress we want in life. David presents tips from his 4-Step Blueprint to help increase self-awareness and to start the sometimes tough conversations we need to have to see change occur. Download, subscribe, share with your friends and please take a moment to leave us an iTunes review.
To learn more about David’s work and to download his 4-Step Blueprint:
Precision Nutrition’s Krista Scott-Dixon returns for her fourth time on the show. You can check out her previous appearances with episodes 66, 92, and 141. In this episode we talk about why our boundaries matter when it comes to our goals, how to know when it’s time to shift your focus on those goals and learning how to prioritize our lives to make sure we accomplish what we want with our health. Krista always delivers “Can’t Miss” content and this episode is no exception. Download, subscribe, share with your friends and please take a moment to leave us an iTunes review.
When Amy first started training with me, weight loss was her primary goal. We talked about why it was important, we talked about how much she wanted to lose and we worked on a calorie plan to help her get there.
And since she’s been here, she’s lost twenty pounds to date.
I think the results are great because I know how much Amy has on her plate (pun intended).
Amy works part-time, she’s married and she has two young boys she’s raising. Like me, Amy is raising a child who is neuro-typical (Jack, pictured below) and Danny who is on the autism spectrum.
Since Danny was recently diagnosed with autism, Amy and her husband Don, have been navigating the world of additional therapies to help their son acclimate to the world the rest of us live in.
In addition, she’s also working through the health (and illness) of family members and the stress involved in being close by whenever something doesn’t go according to plan.
So, while Amy’s goal of weight loss is important for a host of reasons, the values she’s learning to get her to her goals is significantly more important.
For instance, wanting to lose 40 pounds is a goal. It has a finish line. And for certain people, they accomplish their goals so they can set others goals. It’s natural and we all do it to varying degrees.
In Amy’s case, little by little, she’s discovering how her values shape the way she trains, the way she sleeps, the way her mind is functioning and the way she eats.
We put a lot of emphasis on strength around here. Especially for our ladies and even more so for our Moms. We know what life is like because we train a lot of parents. They need their strength.
Amy is finding that when she puts an emphasis on showing up for her training sessions, even on less than optimal days, it’s her aligning with her values. She values being strong. As a result, we get her stronger. She can then use that strength to make better decisions on path to her goal (weight loss).
A few weeks ago, we were talking about her sleep habits. She and I discussed the important of turning off electronic devices 30-45 minutes before bed time so that the mind can start to calm down and not be stimulated before bed. Once she started to do that, she found that not only was she more rested but she had more control over her eating habits. Now, she values better, quality sleep.
As of last week, when I wrote this post, she circled back to me again and commented on how she needed a refresher on just how the brain and mindset can affect our progress. She told me some things she would be working on to make sure that mentally she was at her best. As a result, Amy is doing the due diligence to take care of that fascinating machinery between her ears. She values her thoughts and how they affect her actions.
Lastly, we continue to work on her food environment. When you have a goal of weight loss, the foods you have (and don’t have) access to can be the deciding factor in your success. Amy continues to navigate that world and she’s realized that when she’s been taking care of all the variables mentioned above, how she eats improves. She has found value in making healthier food choices.
It’s a long winded way of saying that goals are important. You have a target that you’re aiming for and you intend to hit it. Your values become the way you progress to that end goal. Values, by comparison, don’t end. You continue to refine and improve the way you implement them.
These were the things I thought about when Amy brought Jack in one day recently for her training session. Amy has had a lot of personal stress in her life and she makes every single attempt to be consistent with her training despite it.
She’s also been seeing some great momentum with her bench press lately, so on this particular day, she hit a new personal record of 115 pounds.
Jack was on hand to witness it.
Someday, when Jack is a little bit older and he has a better understanding and appreciation for what a strong body (forged by values) can do, maybe he’ll come across this picture and look at his mom and say “I’m so proud of you.”
As he should be, because we all know what it takes: to try and be a good parent and to model the values we have and achieve our goals because of them.
Dr. Lisa Lewis returns for her fourth time to the show (See episodes #157, #189, and #227). In this bonus episode, we talk about her newest program for fellow coaches called “Psych Skills For Fitness Pros”. Whether you are a coach who wants to learn more about the program before purchasing or a fitness enthusiast who wants to understand what the interplay is like between client and coach, you’ll want to hear this one. Dr. Lisa is also offering a launch discount that ends on March 16 so you’ll want to act soon if you want the best price. Download, subscribe, share with your friends and please take a moment to leave us an iTunes review.
To learn more about Dr. Lisa’s work and to purchase “Psych Skills For Fitness Pros”, visit:
This week, I’m honored to welcome fellow coach and author, Kevin Mullins, to the show. In this episode, we talk about the steps we need to take to find more wins in our health journey. There’s a lot here about the way we view our health habits and how to see perceived failures as success along the way. Download, subscribe, share with your friends and please take a moment to leave us an iTunes review.
Calories in, calories out. That’s all that matters for weight loss right?
Sure.
Assuming we can remove things like stress, emotions, hormones, environmental factors, social events, and this funny thing that’s somehow intertwined with them like…our brains.
As of this writing, I have 97 clients. 25% of those clients are currently on medication for depression, anxiety or both. Another 5% are currently seeking the help of a therapist but are not on medications. Another 15% are currently working through major traumatic events such as: divorce, loss of a loved one, loss of a job and/or transition in the workplace.
When you take these variables, any of which can be affecting you in a variety of combinations it makes actually hitting those caloric goals that much harder.
It’s why you’re beginning to hear more trainers and coaches talk about the importance of mindset, the importance of healthy habits, the importance of having more than just one coping mechanism when your go-to is food.
It’s also why JUST exercising doesn’t solve the problem and neither does JUST dieting.
Everything you do for your health starts from the foundation of how your mind perceives it.
Your mind determines whether you will or won’t eat something.
Your mind determines whether you will or won’t hit the snooze button before getting up to train in the morning before work.
Your mind is the one precious commodity that so many people feel they can forget about and then they wonder why they can’t see better results on the scale.
Here are 10 tips for getting your mind back in the best place for weight loss success:
Talk To Your Doctor
If you’re anything like the 25% of my clients who are currently on medication for depression/anxiety, you may want to start by determining if those medications are known for contributing to weight gain. If so, talk to your doctor to see if a change in medication or dosage is a possibility.
If you happen to see more than one medical professional, such as a general practitioner and a psychiatrist, make sure that each is aware of all medications you’re currently taking as particular combinations of pharmaceutical drugs can not only affect you mentally but can have different effects on your hunger signals.
2. Curate Your Social Media Feed
We are in the age of photoshopped bodies, filters, and highlight reels. It can be difficult to comprehend what’s truth from fiction. Block, remove and unfollow any person, business, or newsfeed that doesn’t make you feel better about yourself.
If you find yourself powerless around delicious foods, you may need to permanently or temporarily unfollow food websites and unsubscribe from recipe mailers if they only serve to make it harder for you to stay on your plan. This may include asking your friends and family to not share recipes with you that can trigger negative responses.
3. Talk To A Therapist
I’d love to say that enlisting the help of friends and family would be enough support for you to overcome a counterproductive relationship with food. You may need to spend some time talking with a licensed therapist so you can develop new coping mechanisms that don’t have calories attached to them. In some cases, it may be beneficial for you to see a specialist qualified in working with individuals who suffer with eating disorders.
4. Focus on Quality Sleep
When you’re tired, you don’t have full use of your cognitive abilities. A tired body is also a hungry body and what do we want to eat when we’re tired and hungry? Highly processed foods.
Utilize better sleep habits by limiting your access to electronic devices at least 30 minutes before bedtime. This includes phone, tablet, laptop and even television.
Make your bedroom as dark and quiet as possible (and slightly cool) to give yourself the best opportunity for a good night’s sleep. In addition, try to keep yourself on a similar sleep schedule throughout the week, going to bed and waking up at roughly the same times each day.
5. Tame Your Racing Mind
If you’re anything like me, your mind races constantly. You’re thinking about the next task you have to execute on, the next conversation you need to have, the next bill you have to pay, etc. Since different tips work for different people, put your focus on short, prioritized task lists (3-5 items might be the maximum per day). You may also need to consider a “brain dump” journal. This is a place where you can write out all of those racing thoughts and give them space to breathe. Doing this at night before you go to bed can also give you the ability to let your mind slow down before drifting off to sleep.
6. Just Move
While your diet is the most efficient way to control your weight loss, getting yourself moving may be the most effective stress reliever so you can focus on your diet. Depending on the person, this could be a power-walk, lifting weights, increasing your total steps per day, or yoga. It may take consistent movement and a steady schedule you can count on to know that you have an outlet not only for your body but for your mind.
7. Forget About The Joneses
Did you happen to see this year’s Super Bowl halftime show? Chances are, even if you’re not a football fan, you either saw the performance put on by Shakira and Jennifer Lopez or you saw pictures. It was arguably the biggest conversation piece throughout the following week. And while both women put on great performances, you invariably got the unfair comparisons. “Why can’t I look like that at 50 years of age?” We tend to forget about the genetics, the lifestyle, the commitment level and, in some cases, the cosmetic surgeries that celebrities get to look amazing 365 days out of a given year.
For the rest of us mere mortals who don’t dance for a living or have to be camera/stage ready every day of our lives, we have to remember that our life is just that. Our life. Not only is the comparison unfair, it’s unrealistic unless you’re willing to forego the life you have for someone else’s. Unfortunately, we spend too much time worrying over how to look like other people even if it’s not a celebrity but our neighbor, Susan.
Time spent agonizing over someone else’s body is time not spent focusing on the one you’ve got and all of the amazing things it’s capable of (despite your thoughts to the contrary). When you take the time to learn what your body can do and be versus what it isn’t, you can stop spending the mental energy wondering why you don’t measure up to others.
8. Choose Your Circle Wisely
When you hear the belief, “you are the sum total of the five people you spend the most time with”, listen carefully. It holds a lot of weight. Consider the people you spend the most time, do they lift you up or pull you down? Do they help make you a better person or keep you second guessing yourself and what your potential is? You can’t pick your parents or your siblings but you can decide how much time you spend with them and the influence you’ll allow them to have on your health. Surround yourself with people who give you the room and the feedback to be the best version of yourself.
9. Have Outlets For Frustration
I spoke previously about using movement to help your mind. That does work for a lot of people but, like many things, it can be taken to extremes. In my case, I’m fortunate to have playing guitar, reading, singing, writing and playing with my boys as ways to help me forget about my stresses. If weight loss is your goal, have things in your life that you can fall back on that don’t require food to give you pleasure or relief.
10. Forgive The Imperfections
I talk about this a lot with my clients and I won’t stop talking about it. No matter how you’re trying to improve your health, no endeavor will be perfect and no time will be the perfect time to begin. The progress you want is not linear and you will have moments where things don’t go as planned. Anticipate this with the plan of action being that it is normal and not a sign of weakness. Some days are great days to focus on self-improvement and some days there just isn’t enough left in the tank. This makes you human. We all, coaches and clients alike, go through this. The sooner you can forgive the missteps, the easier you can get back to strategies that work more often than not.
As you work your way through this list on the areas that make the most sense to you, ask yourself which of them are getting you closer to (or taking you further from) your goals. Not every tip will make sense right now in your life. However, you may find some obstacles creep in that were not problems before.
There is no fool-proof road map to success. We all are working through different challenges and different perspectives that inform how we react to those challenges. There are a host of reasons why you can’t stay focused on eating in a deficit or you haven’t found a better way to incorporate whole foods into your diet instead of dashing through the drive-thru. Revisit this list of tips to refresh yourself on what might be distracting you from greater weight loss progress.
Dr. Gillian McKnight-Tutein has been both a face-to-face and online client of mine over nearly a decade of work together. In this client spotlight, we talk about what that history has been like together, her motivations for change, how she has used pain to help steer her back to better health and what her support system is like. If you’re currently on a weight loss journey, this episode is highly recommended listening. Download, subscribe, share with your friends and please take a moment to leave us an iTunes review.
Many years ago, I attended a nutrition seminar hosted by a professor who had been running some weight loss trials on clients in efforts to reduce risk of Type II diabetes, heart disease and strokes.
He had seen significant success with a diet comprised of approximately 40% protein, 40% fat, and 20% carbohydrate.
I was so impressed with his results and his confident delivery that I asked several of my weight loss clients if they would be interested in experimenting with something similar to see how well it worked.
At the time, I had a fraction of the clients I do now but I did have some willing participants.
Since I don’t have a degree in dietetics, I can’t “prescribe” a plan to clients. I can offer suggestions, I help design meal templates but I can’t make any promises of what a diet can or cannot do for a client beyond weight loss and general performance.
However, at that time, I was seeing really great results with this breakdown of macronutrients.
There was just one problem.
None of my clients could sustain this diet.
All of the clients who succeeded at losing weight with this plan, regained most (if not all) of the weight back.
I put a lot of the blame on my shoulders for that. I never “taught” them how to keep the weight off. I only taught them how to lose it.
To this day, I still have some of those clients and they still talk to me about going back to it so they can succeed (or fail, depending on your viewpoint) on it again.
It would have been easy to stick to my guns with this diet. My clients saw great results, I just needed to be more proactive with the long-term view of it.
What I haven’t told you about is all the clients who didn’t succeed on the diet. That would have been over 50%. When I say, didn’t succeed, I mean they didn’t lose any significant amount of weight.
Why? Sustainability.
As the years continue to roll by and I continue to work with more and more people, I find myself inching further and further away from most diets.
You see, for as alluring as it might be to make a new weight loss client “go Keto”, I just can’t do it.
Nor can I encourage them to do intermittent fasting, or pull a dietary 180 and go vegan.
It isn’t because those diets don’t work, every diet works when you follow it.
It’s because I cannot replicate the success rate of any one diet for all of my clients and the long-term view is (almost) always suspect.
Most troubling to me, is the clients who dig their heels firmly into the dogma of whatever diet they’re seduced by despite the fact that they haven’t seen noticeable AND sustainable success on them either.
Let me clarify: I do have clients who have seen tremendous success going vegan. I have others who have seen great success on Whole30. This is truly great news. Until you fast forward 6 months down the road and many of these same people are right back where they started, just like the clients of mine who tried that diet I learned about all those years ago.
This isn’t a knock on any one diet.
Because for each diet, there is a select group who do magnificently on it. They are not the norm. They are the exceptions.
But you wouldn’t know that if you get your dietary advice from social media. It’s an echo chamber and if you need to find people who salute the Keto flag, by God, you’ll find them. They’ll be so proud that you’ll wonder how Keto could ever fail you.
Until it does fail you.
Then you’ll wonder what’s wrong with you that in trying to keep up with the KetoJoneses that you couldn’t succeed too.
For the record, there’s nothing wrong with you. You may have picked the wrong tool, used it at the wrong time, or just didn’t follow it to the letter.
There is another point worth mentioning.
If you started your weight loss journey today and you decided that Whole30 was the diet you would embark on, you would likely lose an admirable amount of weight.
Maybe you’d double the time on it and stick with it for a full 60 days.
Then, the wheels start to come off, as they invariably do and you flounder for a bit. You try to go back to Whole30 but it just doesn’t do what it did before. It loses its novelty. It loses its power.
You have to make a choice. Do you cling tighter to the diet that served you so well initially or do you change course and try the next diet?
Sometimes, the tool you pick initially does not serve for the entire course of your weight loss journey and you have to realize that you need something different now.
This is okay.
Just because intermittent fasting helped you lose your first twenty pounds, doesn’t mean it will help you with the next twenty or the thirty after that.
And as you’re experimenting with the nuances of each diet, ask yourself:
What am I learning about myself?
Learn the factors that make a diet succeed for you:
-Are you eating the right amount of calories for your goal?
-Are you recovering well from your workouts, sleeping restfully and not too irritable?
-Do you feel bloated often? What foods OR combinations of foods make you feel that way?
-Are you consistently sticking to the plan you picked for yourself or are you constantly taking dietary detours?
-Does this diet plan fit within your lifestyle including work, home and social life?
-Do you feel in control of your food decisions or is your home/work environment plagued by foods that make you feel powerless?
I can tell you this, no diet can teach you how to feel when you eat. Because no diet understands feelings and many of us eat based on emotions.
No diet truly understands your life and course-corrects in real time to modify itself for your needs.
These constants remain:
To lose weight, you must be in an energy deficit.
To maintain weight, you must be eating equivalent to what you burn on a daily basis.
To gain (true) weight, you must be in an energy surplus.
The diet that you can sustain is the one you have spent the time understanding how to make it mold to your goals, your life and your particular set of challenges (we all have those).
So, if you’re frustrated when a diet that once worked (or in theory SHOULD work) but is no longer having that magical effect, it may be time to divorce yourself from it and the dogmatic beliefs that come with it.
Jason Leenaarts 