Key Systems for Weight Loss
This isn’t your usual guide on how to lose weight. This is about systems. Your routines and plan that make weight loss goals successful…
In the long term.
Losing the weight you’ve tried to lose over and over, why it never stayed off and how to look at and build your systems that will guarantee lasting results. Those people that have successfully changed their lives and lost weight to keep it off never do so with any advanced strategies, diets or exercise plans. They don’t deprive themselves of foods or punish themselves in the gym because they had pizza the day before. Those results come from systems, mindset, habits and environment.
Some people inherently approach their goals this way, those are the successful ones, but for those that do not, the majority, this guide will help you “hack” these areas and build a plan that will yield success in the long term.
When it comes to losing weight, you’ll find millions of pieces online all with different methods, superfoods that burn fat, cardio workouts that promise to torch fat from certain areas, thousands upon thousands of diets or meal plans, detox or skinny teas that promise 20lbs gone in 30 days, the list of terrible and downright unenjoyable methods never ends.
I could go into why there’s all this terrible information, usually tied with something they want to sell you, but let’s just fall back on the saying, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
You see, the diet industry, the weight loss industry, doesn’t want you to lose weight or body fat the correct way. They don’t want you to lose it and be able to keep it off sustainably for the rest of your life. Why is this? Because then they will no longer have your attention and no longer be able to sell you any of these plans or products.
All of us, even those that can wade through the BS and have gone through the education, are still enticed by the quick answers. I’m still intrigued by clever marketing that claims to build muscle and burn fat faster than anything else out there. Inherently we all know that these claims aren’t plausible, but millions still fall prey to the tactics.
In this guide here, I will lay out the simple plan for you to lose weight, lose body fat and build muscle and strength. This plan won’t involve diets or workouts. Because those are secondary to what must be done first. And that’s counting, tracking, habit breaking and building, mindset and realizing that fitness doesn’t have an end date, it needs to be a lifelong endeavor.
Notice I called it simple. It’s simple because it’s built on the basics. Tried and true, these foundations can last you a lifetime and keep you looking and feeling your best year after year. While it may be simple, it will be difficult. It’s difficult to be consistent, difficult to harness the determination to keep pushing forward, and even more difficult to stay the course when results are not coming as fast as you’d like.
And believe me, your progress in building the better version of yourself that you’ve dreamt about will be much slower than you’d like. Sometimes painstakingly slow. It’s during these moments when difficulty in pushing forward and avoiding the hyped up methods thrown at us every day will be at its peak.
But as you push through you’ll develop a grit, a perseverance you hadn’t before imagined you had. You won’t only be building the body you want, you’ll be forming a new way you look at the world around you. Some of the greatest growth that comes with fitness is growth of the mind. Fitness isn’t only about the body but equally about the mindset it can help create.
So dive in with me and let’s create the plan and method for you to begin building the best body and mind you can achieve.
The path of least resistance is a terrible teacher.
-Ryan Holiday
What few people realize is that mindset is one of the most important aspects of changing your body and your life. Losing weight, losing fat and building muscle and crafting the best version of yourself is a game. It’s a game of two parts: inner and outer.
What most programs only focus on is the outer game. How to exercise, eat and supplement for the goal with little attention to the inner game, arguably the most important piece of the puzzle.
The outer game is simple, mastering what toggles to move to elicit the physiological changes you want for your goal, but the inner game makes implementing this outer game with consistency incredibly difficult.
That’s why the path to lasting success with your fitness needs to start with and always involve constant work on the inner game and mindset as you learn to master the foundations of the outer game. In other words, you don’t need any fancy diet or workout plan, but instead learn and practice the basics while elevating your inner game to become more and more consistent with the tried and true foundations of the outer.
This inner game is made up of self-doubt, lapses in concentration, self-condemnation, past habits that don’t align with the outer game, all or nothing mindsets, utilizing the scale as the be all end all metric of progress, heavily relying on motivation to get things done, you get the picture.
The hardest part of fitness isn’t the workouts or what to eat. It’s slaying the dragons in this inner battle. It’s important to realize that you never truly win the battle to take the castle but that there will always be more battles to fight. Over time your character gets stronger, the battles become easier, and from time to time you might come across a stronger dragon but you are more prepared and ready to fight.
The first step in creating your roadmap to win, lies in creating better systems for achieving your fitness goals. We can only rise to the level of our systems.
These systems include how you weigh, measure or track your food. How you track progress in the gym, are you collecting data (biofeedback) to assess how you feel as you implement your plan?
Chances are you’ve tried to lose weight before, and more likely than not you’ve gained it back and then some. All too often, most peoples’ first plan of attack includes eating cleaner, doing cardio to burn calories, trying to eat lots of salads, maybe some food tracking etc.
For starters they usually don’t enjoy what they are doing, they treat it as a temporary chore to slog through until they reach their goal. More often than not, this doesn’t get them to their goal and they end up quitting on the approach altogether. Who’s to blame them? They thought that cardio daily and eating bland foods will get them to the body they want, nevermind there is little in the way of tracking progress besides what the scale says. And this leads to disappointment when the scale doesn’t go down as much as they’d like or it’s too slow or they run into a week where they don’t lose weight or even see the scale go up.
They had little in the way of effective systems to produce achievements. They may have had food tracking and what the scale says each morning. But nothing that tracks performance and biofeedback. While goal setting is important, what is significantly more important is the system building that bridges that gap between the desired outcome and path to get there. Without the system we are winging it with our decisions and methods in hopes that we might reach our goal.
You will be infinitely more likely to meet your goal with a solid system to track and measure progress and provide the raw data to help you decide what to adjust. It not only makes achieving your goal more likely but also far easier because you now can see the elements of the approach that may or may not be working in your favor.
So how do you build your systems to produce the outcomes you are looking for? This will look a little different for everyone but there some essential components of fitness goals that everyone should track and gather data on. You can’t change what you don’t track. Without paying attention to these things you are approaching aspects of your journey to the goal blindly and thus not getting the most out of your work and efforts toward the desired outcome.
Now onto what these elements of a good system are. A good system will involve quantification and counting. You need to track what you are doing and how these things affect you to know if you are making meaningful progress toward your goal or if you are not progressing at all. There are ten things I like to pay particular attention to aside from your weight on the scale. Although, I still recommend tracking your weight at least a few times per week in order to gather that data and see what the trend is week to week and month to month.
I call these ten things PRE-CRASHES. Ten things that, if they start to decline, may indicate that what you are doing is not working for you as an individual. They can give you clues that your approach is about to hit a wall. Individuality in a diet is of utmost importance. It is key to recognize that what may work for someone else may not work for you. That’s why generic meal plans and workouts you might have gotten online are not the way to go if you want to change your body in the most efficient and effective way.
You need to build a plan that is specific to you and your problems as well as track & quantify how it affects you to give you insight into what may need to change within your approach.
Enter PRE-CRASHES:
P - Progress Pictures
R - Recovery
E - Energy
C - Confidence
R - Relationships with food & people
A - Assimilation of food
S - Sleep
H - Hunger
E - Emotions & Mood
S - Stress
Counting & Quantifying is crucial because it is a powerful way to measure whether or not an approach is fulfilling its purpose. If your goal is to burn fat and build muscle but you aren’t tracking your workouts, progressively lifting more weight over time, your body measurements or weight trends you won’t have the raw data to assess with certainty that your diet and exercise systems are working. At best you might have educated guesses that are faulty and uncertain which can drain motivation and desire to keep pushing forward in your diet and training.
When you add tracking these things you are installing feedback loops into your system. That is, when a change is made in your plan it affects the outcome, loops back and affects the thing that produced it. For example, if you are trying to build muscle, you should be aiming for small gains in body weight, which means you will need to be eating in a slight surplus of calories. Without tracking it is notoriously difficult to know if you are making progress.
So you implement tracking your food intake, progressive load on the bar in your lifts, and your bodyweight week to week to assess whether or not you have the variables in place to produce the outcome. Since you have the raw data after a few weeks, you now know you may need to add some calories if your weight is not trending upwards appropriately or inversely if you are gaining weight too fast you may need to pull back some calories. While the tracking of strength in your workouts is the key indicator of whether you are gaining muscle mass or not.
Other aspects are more difficult to track & measure. Take confidence & relationships for example. While they are difficult to measure it doesn’t mean they aren’t important. In efforts to improve your health or your body you should also aim to improve these areas. After all, a fitness journey isn’t only about the physical.
As I mentioned earlier, fitness will change the way you look at the world and at yourself. What use is improving your physical fitness, strength or body composition if it isn’t also adding to your enjoyment of life, fulfillment and pride in what your body can do for you?
Don’t fall into the trap of only setting goals around things that are easy to measure rather than important. Sometimes quality should be the primary focus rather than quantity. If, over time, you are rating your emotions, mood and energy each day lower and lower on a scale of 1-5, you could be dieting too hard, working out too much, it’s likely your recovery is also declining as well as your sleep or feeling of restfulness after you wake up. These are indicators that you may need to adjust your plan, pull back on intensity of the diet and/or workouts and possibly take a break, increase calories slightly and focus on restorative activities and sleep.
These ten things to track often play off of one another.
This brings us to forming new habits and approaches. How many times have you set a New Year’s Resolution to get in shape? Eat better? Work out more?
I’d wager you’ve set these intentions for several years, just like I used to. But here is the missing element. You can’t set these intentions and work hard at them for a few months to get into shape finally and expect that to last if after those few months you revert back to how you did things before.
You won’t change if you don’t change.
I know that sounds obvious. But it’s deeper than you might think. Fitness and building the body you want for yourself is not an endeavor that lasts for a few months and then once you achieve it you don’t need to worry about it anymore. In order to change your body for life, you will need to accept that fitness and health is a lifelong pursuit. Lasting success with changing your body and your mind will come not from a few months of hard work at a New Year’s Resolution but it will come from work year after year, month after month of building the lifestyle and the habits that support that goal. It doesn’t mean that you can no longer enjoy the foods and drinks you have always liked but rather learning how to fit those into your new lifestyle.
The primary reason that these resolutions don’t last is that they remove these things from your life for a set period of time and you never develop the tools and knowledge to incorporate them within the journey. These resolutions to change don’t incorporate rituals and habit building. These resolutions usually involve new routines (or systems) that require massive deviations from your normal routines so that they also lack resilience. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline to escape what’s familiar and it’s all too easy to fall back into our old ways because of temptation, stress and discomfort. So, the better we can work to ingrain the right habits vs the wrong ones, the better our routines (systems) will operate for us.
In essence, in order to guarantee success with a fitness goal, you need to build these systems with an initial focus on habits and ritualization. As much as 40% of our daily actions are dictated by subconscious habits.
What brought you to your current state, won’t help you get to your future state.
Letting go of the methods you think you need to get to your goal as well as letting go of the thoughts that you fight in the inner battler I mentioned earlier are a key element in this initial habit building process of your system or routines. When you approach fitness with an initial habit focus, that stays with you for years to come, you may need to revisit them from time to time but they translate well into new goals and new systems for those future goals. Building this habitualization of actions will allow your brain to conserve energy and perform these common tasks more efficiently as well as limit decision fatigue and decrease the instances of let’s say grabbing fast food that might not serve your goal when you don’t have any meals prepped for example.
So, how do you approach this to guarantee your weight loss success?
You do it in the exact opposite manner with which you approach New Year’s resolutions and fitness challenges. Where these usually require you to make massive changes to your routine from the start, guaranteeing long term failure, real habit building is done best by:
Starting small and easy
Expecting failure
Gradually improving
Use these three things to start building and breaking habits. Consistency is the name of the game here. Start with things that are small and easy enough for you to add to your routine, allowing you to achieve those wins to help you keep going. It’s far easier to set targets in the beginning that are so easy and small that you can’t say no to them. In the beginning the goal is to get things moving not huge transformations which come later through consistency and long term effort.
Expect failure at times. You are working on new routines and new ways of doing things. No one ever made huge breakthroughs from the start. Why beat yourself up with the inner game, demand perfection immediately and scold yourself for not being perfect. You need to cut yourself some slack and only focus on getting back on target again. Failure is actually an important part of growth. Take those times when you don’t meet your targets as teaching moments to help you hit the mark later on rather than as a catalyst for buckling down and punishing yourself into hitting your marks. Use failure as a tool to help you make adjustments.
Lastly, gradually improve. Take those small and easy tasks and the inevitable moments of missing the mark and the adjustments you make to bring more consistency into the system and build upon them once you meet that consistency mark. Small, incremental improvements over time might seem trivial in the now, but they can amount to massive changes over the long haul.
The last piece of the puzzle to look at before you get to specific dieting and training strategies to set yourself up for weight loss & fat loss or muscle building success is your environment. With New Year's resolutions, Fitness challenges and the like too many people rely on willpower & motivation to get things going.
The problem here is that both of those things will wax and wane. We’ve all been in scenarios where we have high motivation and willpower to keep going. At these times it’s easy to make progress and stick to our plans. Real progress, especially with fitness and weight loss, will come during those times you can get the work done when you are not motivated. Those are the times where you don’t feel like working out but do it anyway, the times when you don’t want to prepare dinner that serves you and aligns with your goal but you do it anyway rather than getting fast food.
So how do you set up your environment to best support your efforts toward your goals and eliminate as many roadblocks as you can?
Most people know what they should be doing to move closer to their goals. We know we should probably eat a bit better and move a bit more. And most of us have at one point or another tried to apply this knowledge and failed, falling back into old patterns, blaming it on lack of willpower or self-control. Little do we realize that it is our environment that pushes and pulls our feelings and actions every single day.
Our environment molds our decisions, habits, thoughts and in turn our life. Organizing your environment to support your goals is one of the most powerful ways to increase your chances of realizing your goals.
How to set up your environment isn’t something I can tell you how to do specifically. You will have to audit your environment now and find ways to transform it to support your goal.
If you tend to snack on things that don’t serve you, a simple fix could be removing those snack items from your house and instead having fruit in a bowl on the kitchen table. Modifying your environment doesn’t have to be crazy, difficult things to do. It can be very small, simple changes to support you. For example, if your sleep isn’t optimal, moving the phone charger from your night stand to across the room or in another room could be another way to change your environment to eliminate mindless scrolling before bed so you can fall asleep earlier and faster.
Most of us go along with the flow on autopilot of things around us, so why not design your own environment so that it nudges you toward the outcomes that you want? We can prearrange better autopilot choices to our default so we can better stay on course without needing to constantly think about making those choices each day.
The options here are endless. Think about the habits and choices you would like to make your default and then brainstorm ways to help turn those choices into default actions. Start by naming three things you want to start doing or stop doing. Then write three ways you can adjust your surroundings to make those choices simple and easy. Track your consistency and how that progresses to find out if you need to make any other adjustments. Some of these environment changes might seem small and trivial but don’t underestimate their effectiveness. Removing small excuses that might derail the choice you want to make a default choice can help you multiply your effectiveness in following through.
We don’t need to make out health and fitness overly complex and more difficult than it already is. By making mall, seemingly meaningless changes to our environment, we can greatly improve our chances at success. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Our life is like a sculpture, it’s taking a chisel and slowly chipping away at the marble to craft what we desire, one step at a time. That’s why where you are now is far less important than where you are going.
Before you worry about the intricacies of your diet and training methods, take the blueprint in this guide to help you create an environment that will support your goals. That environment starts with counting and tracking the PRE-CRASHES, breaking habits that don’t serve you, those that brought you to where you are today, building new habits and hitting them consistently and always aiming to improve. 1% better each day than the last adds up to huge amounts of progress in a year's time. Use this tracking to create awareness with what you do and how it affects you and help you cultivate the mindset that will take you to your goals.
Attaining fitness goals isn’t about intensity or killing yourself with dieting or in the gym. It comes down to consistency day to day with the basics, crafting that into your lifestyle so it becomes simple to maintain and when you have a loftier goal to get as shredded as possible for example, it’s that much easier to double down on the basics because those are what will really get you there.
Thank you for reading! I hope you found this guide helpful. No matter your goals, fat loss or lean gains, systems and tracking are keys to success.
For more help determining how to implement this blueprint to help you get leaner and stronger without making the rest of your life suck CLICK THIS LINK for a free strategy call. If you have any questions about this guide or anything else email me with the link below.