With the large numbers of 6- and 12-week challenges being promoted you might wonder why we require our clients to work with us for a minimum of a year to achieve a body transformation.
Surely it doesn’t take that long to lose 10, 15, or 20kg, does it?
No…and yes!
You see, diets, quick-fixes and weight-loss challenges can certainly help you lose weight in the short-term. You know this. You’ve probably done it before, or at least seen all the ‘before and after’ shots of other people who have done it.
But how do you look 6 months, 12 months down the track? Are you looking better than you did when you finished your challenge? Or are you signing up to the next challenge? Maybe you’ve done several of these challenges since the first one.
Long-term weight loss VS short-term weight loss
You see, the main difference between all those quick-fixes and what we do at Imani Tribe is that we focus on long-term weight loss that is sustainable, that helps your body function better, feel better AND look better, while all those other programs simply focus on the quickest way to lose weight so you can look better for a short time.
If you like the continual cycle of going on and off diets, feeling tired and lethargic, battling your cravings for unhealthy food, bingeing and starving yourself, punishing yourself with exercise, and still not having the body you want, then a quick-fix is what you want.
But if you’d like to have a body transformation you can be proud of without the dieting, excessive exercise, and feeling guilty about food, then you need to commit to a 12-month body transformation journey. Because this is what will lead to long-term weight loss success.
The problem with diets and challenges
What happens when you undertake a 6- or 12-week challenge, or even embark on a diet is that you automatically go into ‘diet mode’. This means you cut back food groups, cut back on calories, and increase your levels of exercise.
At best, you may have a generic exercise plan to follow, which doesn’t take into consideration your goals, your mobility, your weight, your overall health and your ability to complete it. At worst, you guess and make it up as you go along, or copy what other people are doing.
You may also have a generic meal plan to follow, which doesn’t factor in your goals, your food preferences, your lifestyle, or your unique nutritional requirements. Or maybe you guess and make it up as you go along, or copy what other people are doing.
This approach will only take you so far. Before long, you’ll find it too hard, too overwhelming and the lack of results will see you give up. Because you’re thrashing yourself with exercise and not feeding your body properly, you’ll begin feeling tired, grumpy and may even sustain an injury.
Is it any wonder people fail to lose weight and keep it off with this approach.
An holistic approach
At Imani Tribe, we understand that it’s not what you’ve been eating or how you’ve been exercising (or not exercising) that’s the problem. It’s the reasons why you do it – your habits! Working on habits is one of the key foundations of our program, because unless you change your habits, you’ll always continue to do what you’ve done, and you’ll continue to get the results you’ve got.
Even if you get a great result on a diet or a challenge, you won’t keep it unless you change the habits that led you to be overweight in the first place.
Identify goals, problems and their WHY
When we begin working with clients the first thing we do is find out what their goals are, and identify what their biggest stumbling block has been that has prevented them from having the body they want.
We also help them develop their WHY — their deep-seated reason for wanting to change their life. Knowing WHY you want to lose weight and change your body shape will help you stay committed to the journey and hang in there when things get tough — because they will!
Develop a solution
We then develop a solution that will help our client begin to address their problem. Because we take an individualised approach, this is tailored to our clients. What works for one person won’t necessarily work for someone else. This action plan will include their tailored exercise program, advice on nutrition, and other lifestyle recommendations that will help them.
However, in order to prevent our clients from becoming overwhelmed, we start off small. There is no point trying to change 20 or 30 years’ worth of habits overnight. We start off with the one thing that will make the biggest difference to them.
Track data
Data is the secret code to weight loss. Recording information will reveal where you are, what you struggle with, why you struggle with it and will help us identify how we can best help you in order to achieve long-term weight loss. This may include data about food, exercise, sleep, mood, behaviours, and thoughts. Data shows us what works for you, and what doesn’t work for you, and will help us continue to tweak our action plan, so you can continue moving forward and achieve the best results.
Provide structure and accountability
We don’t just tell you what to do to lose weight. We provide you with the tools, skills and structure to help you do it. We also provide accountability to ensure that you do what you need to do. The beauty about this is that we go at your own pace without overloading or overwhelming you. The action steps we give you, are always based on where you’re currently at. As you progress, your action steps will continue to evolve.
While this process occurs, we still collect data — the magic substance that will help your transformation journey more than you know!
One-on-one consults
Our program includes 6-weekly one-on-one consults to track your progress. Using the data we’ve collected, we are able to identify various things to change, or to focus on. However, we will focus on changing the ONE thing that will give you the biggest return. Usually this is a keystone habit — a habit that causes you to engage in lots of other habits that sabotage your weight loss journey. The beauty about changing just ONE habit, is that you may inadvertently change dozens at the same time.
For example, you may think that one of your worst habits is that you have take-away several nights a week, and buy lunch most days because you’re short on time. But the reason you’re short on time is because you’re a people-pleaser, and never make yourself a priority. This means you spend your time doing things for other people (e.g. working late or volunteering), and end up getting to bed late every night, sleep through your alarm each day, and don’t have time to make a healthy lunch. Your lack of time and energy means you are very rarely bothered to prepare a healthy meal, so reach for take-away as an easy option, even though this consumes you with guilt.
By giving up your people-pleasing habit, and learning to prioritise yourself, you’ll find time to do the things to help you lose weight. You’ll start getting more sleep, find time to train before work, make time to meal prep healthy meals, will be eating better, will have more energy, and will feel proud instead of guilty.
This is how we help you change your life.
A continuing cycle
This cycle of collecting data, actioning your plan, one-on-one consults, tweaking your program according to what does and doesn’t work for you, and collecting data continues. And as long as we keep progressing through this cycle, we’ll keep progressing towards reaching your weight loss goals.
We also focusing on this process, instead of the end goal as this helps you get better results. When we focus on the journey, we learn more, we change our habits, we face our fears, we take action, we don’t get stuck, and we enjoy the process. And enjoying the process makes it easier to continue working towards your goal.
A minimum of 12 months
The reality is that the more data we have the easier it is for us to get you to your goal. An initial 12 months is a great baseline, but most people need more than 12 months to have a body transformation that will stick.
This may be for a number of reasons. For example, if you’ve been a chronic dieter for many years, you’ll need time to repair your metabolism, and to break out of the diet-mindset that you’ve been living with. If you have a lot of weight to lose, that will take time. But most importantly, it takes time to overcome habits that have been with us for a lifetime. And remember, it’s these habits that have led us to become overweight in the first place.
It may sound like it’s a long haul, but time passes by anyway, so you may as well work towards having the future you dream of, instead of staying on the same diet rollercoaster you’ve been living on and never getting anywhere.
We guarantee, that if you commit to this process, you’ll have the body you dream of, without the pain of dieting, without excessive, grueling workouts, and without the guilt around food that is always there when you diet.
