How many times have you focused on your nutrition and fitness when you’ve tried to lose weight?
How long did you keep your results for?
If you’re like most people, you’ve probably tried everything from dieting, restricting food, eating clean, following meal plans, doing detoxes, or cutting out carbs.
Yet nothing seems to get you results that can keep.
If you’ve tried everything under the sun to lose weight, perhaps it’s time to try something else. Because the truth is that if you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’re always going to get the same kind of results. Nothing changes if nothing changes.
You see, weight loss is a bit like building a house. You need to start with a strong foundation, then you build the walls, put in the windows, add the roof, and then take care of the painting and decorating.
When it comes to losing weight, fitness and nutrition are the painting and decorating, yet many believe it to be the foundation and wonder why their results crumble and fall apart.
If you’ve been struggling to understand why focusing on diet and exercise has got you nowhere, then this blog will explain the steps that you’ve been missing.
Before you focus on fitness and nutrition, you need to…
Minimise metabolic blockers
The truth is that no matter how much attention you give to your nutrition and fitness, you’ll never be able to lose weight unless you minimise your metabolic blockers. Metabolic blockers are things that impact your metabolism and prevent you from losing weight no matter how good your diet and exercise program is. The most common are:
- Chronic stress
- Poor sleep
- Excessive alcohol consumption.
Chronic stress
Stress and weight gain are linked. Stress elicits responses in your body that make losing weight difficult. The first is the release of the hormone, cortisol. Cortisol increases your appetite, your cravings for junk food and makes it easier for your body to accumulate fat on your stomach. Stress also causes you to burn less calories, and contributes to poor sleep. You can read more about this in our blog How stress and weight gain are linked.
Poor sleep
Research has shown that poor sleep is associated with weight gain, increased appetite, a likelihood of giving into tempting foods, increased intake of foods high in calories, fats and carbs. Poor sleep also slows your metabolism, and increases your stress levels. To find out more, read our blogs Sleep and weight loss: the unexpected connection and Top tips to improve your sleep.
Excessive alcohol consumption
Drinking too much alcohol will severely restrict your ability to lose weight. Alcohol drastically increases your calorie intake and leads to poorer food choices, increased hunger, poor digestion, increased fat accumulation, and interferes with your sleep! We explain more about this in our blog Alcohol and weight gain: 9 ways drinking affects your body shape.
In order to lose weight, you’ll need to eliminate (or greatly reduce) the metabolic blockers in your life. But before you can do this, you need to focus on your habits, because the solution is found in why you do what you do.
Work on habits
One of the most common things people try to do when addressing their metabolic blockers is to focus on reducing their alcohol, or stress levels or improving their sleep. However, the answer isn’t found in changing these thing, but looking at why you’re stressed, sleeping poorly or drinking alcohol. This comes down to your habits.
Most people who struggle with their weight usually have a few of the following habits:
- Low self-esteem and low self-worth
- Lack of confidence
- Comparing themselves with others
- Trying to please everyone
- Putting their needs behind other people’s
- Perfectionism
- Worrying about what others think
- Letting fear run their life
- Having a diet mindset
- Believe they’re entitled and don’t have to work to lose weight
- Needing to control everything.
For example, someone may experience high stress levels because they have low self worth. This causes them to be people pleasers who put everyone else’s needs first which means they never have enough time to do what they need to do for themselves. This stress impedes their weight loss, and may cause them to turn to emotional eating or drinking alcohol. So the solution isn’t to reduce drinking or stop emotional eating; it’s to address the reason why they’re stressed.
The habits you have developed will depend upon a number of things including how long you’ve dieted for, the environment in which you grew up in, and even past trauma that you’ve experienced.
However, in order to work on your habits you need to be aware of them.
Become aware of your habits
Self-awareness is understanding and questioning how our choices, habits, mindsets and behaviours are responsible for our current situation and outcome. This can include our weight, health, and even the people in our life.
Without self-awareness, we’ll always continue to operate on auto-pilot, engaging in behaviours (habits) that slow our weight loss, or even contribute to weight gain. We explain the importance of being aware of your habits in our blog Why you’ll never lose weight without self-awareness.
But how do you become more aware?
You need to collect data.
Collect data
Lack of self-awareness is caused by making assumptions and decisions from our emotions instead of relying on facts. The only way we have the facts is if we record data over a period of time.
Data is information that you record, which reveals where you are, what you struggle with, and why you struggle with it.
This includes:
- What you eat and drink?
- Details about your training and exercise
- How does your body feel
- Information about your sleep
- Data about your mood
- Details about your behaviours, thoughts and habits.
When you record data, you’re able to see what you’re doing. You gain an awareness of what you do and how it impacts your life. Data is the thin line between permanent weight loss and yo-yo dieting. You can read more about the importance of data in our blog The Secret Code to Weight Loss.
Be consistent
Recording data takes time. The longer you record data, the more accurate the picture you get, and the more accurate the picture, the better your coach is able to help you. Over time, you’ll get a clear idea on what works, what doesn’t, and what needs to be changed. However, you need to be consistent with your data — not just recording it when you remember, when you feel like it, or when the data ‘looks good’.
Consistently recording what you eat, how you exercise, what your mood is like, and how well you’re sleeping will give your coach valuable clues on what you need to work on to continue to get results. And the more accurate and consistent the data is, the more you’ll be aware of what you need to do. You can read more about the importance of consistency in our blog How to be consistent with your weight loss.
But in order to collect the right data, you need to be accountable.
Include accountability
It’s one thing to say you’re going to record data, but what happens when you can’t be bothered, or you find it too hard? You won’t do it, right? That’s why you need to add in an element of accountability into the mix.
Accountability has been defined as “the acknowledgement of responsibility for your actions with the obligation to report, explain, and be responsible for the resulting consequences.” Most people are afraid of accountability, but research shows when you make yourself accountable to someone for achieving your goals, you increase your chances of success to a massive 95%!
Accountability not only helps you stay on track with what you need to do to lose weight, it actually helps you to do it when motivation is low. That’s why accountability will help you collect your data! You can read more about accountability and why it’s important in our blog Two things your weight loss plan must include.
Commit to the process
However, in order to make yourself accountable you need to commit yourself to the process. Losing weight and keeping it off doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen without working at it. In fact, it’s a journey that has lots of ups and downs, which is why you need to make a commitment to doing what it takes. We explain this in more detail in our blogs The Seasons of Body Transformation and The Stages of Body Transformation.
Have a reason to commit
If long-term weight loss requires you to do all this work and make a commitment to stick at it for the long haul, how do you do that?
You need to have a WHY. Your WHY is a deep-seated reason for committing to the journey, and it’s often only found after having a snap point. A snap point is when you’ve had enough. It’s the point where you can’t take it anymore. It’s the place where your pain is too great, and you’ll do anything to get out of your current situation. And you’d rather die than go back to where you are, ever again.
Once you hit rock bottom, you’ll usually have a reason for committing, and this is what we refer to as your WHY. Your WHY is what will keep you going through tough times. It will help you:
- get out of bed and get to training, even on the days you don’t feel like it
- choose to go for a walk instead of lazing on the couch
- make time to do your food prep, even in the busy weeks
- keep working to create new and better habits, no matter how long it will take
- get out of your comfort zone and do things that scare you
- keep looking for ways to grow and develop
- put in the hard work, even when you don’t want to
- avoid getting complacent
- stop making excuses for why you can’t do things
- keep going, when all you want to do is give up.
Your WHY must be personal. It must be strong. And it must be bigger than you.
You can read more about how to find your WHY in our blog Find your WHY to lose weight. To find out more about why snap points are important, read our blog The power of hitting rock bottom.
Build your foundation first
As you can see, there are a lot of steps you need to take before you begin focusing on nutrition and fitness.
You need to have a compelling reason to commit to the process. Then you need to make yourself accountable, which will help you record the necessary data which will help you become aware of your habits. Next, you need to work on these habits, one at a time in order to reduce the metabolic blockers in your life. Then and only then will your efforts with your food and exercise make a difference.
We understand that this goes against everything that you’ve ever been taught by the diet industry and that this may be hard to get your head around. After all, we’ve been taught that fad diets and quick fixes are the answer to our weight loss woes. But none of these work.
That’s why we developed The Diet Antidote Transformation System (DATS™️ Program), the Not-diet Diet for people who are sick of diets and want more than a good body.
DATSTM will help you build the right foundations so you can lose weight, keep it off and regain your confidence.
Are you ready to try something new instead of going around in circles forever?
