- Have you ever been in a situation where
you fully committed to eating better,
you cleaned up your diet, you started getting leaner,
everything was going well,
but then you have a major life event happened.
Might've moved to a new city, got the new job,
moved in with a loved one, became a parent.
And then things suddenly got a lot more difficult.
It's as if you were playing the game on easy mode,
and then suddenly someone went behind your back
and set it to the hardest possible difficulty.
You kept failing time, after time,
one bad day turned into a week, the week turned into a month
and you kept saying that you're going to get back into it,
remotivate yourself, recommit to the process,
but you never regained that momentum.
And before you know it,
you regain all the body fat you've lost
and now you started gaining new body fat.
And you kept trying to go back
to the old plan that it worked before, but it wasn't enough.
You just kept digging yourself
into a deeper and deeper hole.
And if this is something that already happened to you,
or if you're someone that's looking to get lean
and you want to prevent this from happening,
that's exactly what I'm going to
talk to you about in this video.
I'm going to share with you what you need to know
to prevent this and to make sure
you can finally reach your fitness goals.
And we are not talking about any kind of quick fix here
because building habits takes hard work and discipline,
but I can promise you that it will be well worth it.
So let's dive right into it.
First, we need to talk about your plan.
Do you have a plan that you can follow
for the rest of your life?
In other words, is your plan future-proof
or is your plan a temporary plan?
Because if your goal is to just lose some body fat
in the next three months
and then you're okay with regaining it,
well, you don't need any of this stuff.
You can just go do whatever diet you want to do.
But if you want permanent results,
well, then it's not even about losing body fat,
it's actually about losing the old lifestyle
that got you that excess body fat to begin with
and replacing that with a new lifestyle
that will help you get lean and then stay lean.
And why do people fail at changing their lifestyle?
Well, they keep falling off track
because they rely on willpower alone
as a way to stay consistent.
And the problem with that is that willpower
is the first thing that goes out the window
when life gets stressful.
And to make a truly lasting change,
we need consistency and routine and repetition
over a longer period of time to form habits.
And one of the best ways to do that actually
is to engineer your environment
to make good habits easier to do
and make bad habits harder to do.
An example of this would be to have
a refillable bottle of water right next to your computer
so you can stay on top of your water intake a lot easier.
That means the environment is working for you.
A great resource on building an environment
in general habits is Atomic Habits by James Clear.
It's a book that if you've haven't read already
I highly highly recommended.
And one of the other things that you can do
to really help you create this lifestyle change
is to become a master at preparation,
especially if you're someone
who's never been very, very lean.
If you end up in a restaurant
and you only have 150 calories left for that day,
well you are now in a lose lose situation.
You didn't fail in that moment,
you've actually failed earlier in that day
and earlier in that week,
because you didn't prepare properly.
If you invest five, 10 minutes to organize your diet,
to plan out your calories, your macros,
you automate grocery delivery,
you have ready to go easy templates
and plans and contingencies.
Well, now you have a system
and a system is going to deliver consistent results
while you making decisions on the go,
which depends on your emotional state,
depends on external factors,
depends a lot of different things.
Guess which one is going to work longterm?
The system is always going to beat out
that person that just randomly making decisions.
So if you become a master of preparation,
if you organize your environment,
I'm very confident that with those two ingredients in place,
you will now be able to create that plan
that's going to work a long-term
that you can actually follow for the rest of your life.
Now, aside from those two things,
what you need to do to actually create a lasting change
and to prevent weight regain is you need to
stop beating yourself up over
every little slip up that you make.
And I'm serious about this,
you need to stop doing that right now.
A common scenario is that someone starts the journey,
they put so much pressure on themselves to be perfect,
that everything goes the way they plan.
And then the first slip up comes up
and they go black and white, all or nothing.
Oh my God, I eat that extra cookie,
it's extra 30 calories, extra hundred calories,
extra 300 calories, that means the whole day's over.
Now, the day turns it into a whole weekend is over,
let's start fresh on Monday,
then Monday turns to the next one,
a month later they just lost a lot of progress.
And they're wondering what happened
because they were never really in that
rational state of mind where they're able
to properly reflect back, analyze the situation,
learn from it, and then move on fast.
That's what a rational person would do,
but not if you have that negative self-talk
if you're beating yourself up.
And we are really harsh on ourselves,
much harsher than we would ever be with a friend
or someone we know we're trying to get lean.
And success is not all or nothing.
Being a perfectionist, thinking black and white
will keep you stuck for a very, very long time,
losing the same body fat over and over and over again.
And every single time you're going to regain it
and you don't have to be perfect to get amazing results.
It's not about what you do once in a while
that makes you who you are,
it's about what you do consistently.
So eating one pizza is not going to make your overweight,
same as eating one salad is not going to make you shredded.
If you want to be shredded, you need to hit the like button,
everybody knows that.
So you need to keep things in the right perspective
and you want to use lessons that you learned
from your mistakes to help you form those habits,
and then allow those habits to get stronger over time.
Now, speaking of time, this brings me to my third point.
We live in a culture that really values intensity.
That means training every single day,
taking every step to failure.
That means losing 20 pounds in a month.
That means doing all of that
while sleeping only five hours a night
and don't get me wrong, work ethic is essential
and if you want to get exceptional results,
you will have to work really, really hard.
And I don't see anything wrong with that,
but 50 years from now when you look back
at you getting to 12% body fat, will you care
that it happened in six months or eight months?
Will you even remember how long it actually took you?
If you want to do this the right way,
my philosophy is to commit to consistency first
and intensity later.
The way I see it, consistency enables you to build habits
which makes the process easier over time.
Whereas intensity, if you focus on that first,
you have a higher risk of burnout,
you're going more aggressive so there's more hunger,
more cravings, more stress overall.
So you're really stacking the odds against you.
And the way I also see it is that consistency
is your baseline where you just keep
moving forward no matter what.
Whereas intensity can come and go.
Some periods of time you can commit and go a bit harder,
other periods of time you go a bit slower,
but at least you're moving forward.
I run into so many people that are stuck
with a very low calorie intake,
and they're not making progress
because they can't stick with it.
And when I asked them, why don't you increase calories
by 5% and try that, or 10%,
maybe you can be more consistent with that.
Yeah, you're not going to get there as fast as you'd like,
but at least you're going to get there eventually.
And a lot of people get uncomfortable because of that,
'cause they feel like they're failing
if they increase their calorie intake.
Because it's almost like
they would rather not get there at all
if they can't get there in that hardcore way
that they initially planned out,
which is a really crazy idea.
So if you have someone who has, let's say 30 pounds to lose,
I really suggest taking that 26 weeks, 30 weeks,
really planning it out properly,
be more rational and more patient with it.
And you're going to be really happy
that you made that decision because the process
is going to be much more enjoyable,
you'll be able to sleep better,
you're going to have more muscle at the end of that,
less hunger overall and it's going to really be
more sustainable because at the end the day
it is about sustainability, it's about balance
because life there's a lot of things happening at once
and we want to make sure that we can balance things out
and really do this the right way.
What's going to help you do that is making sure you
hit that subscribe button below and to get notification
is by hitting the bell icon.
Details for coaching if you want to work with me
on description below.
And I'm going to see you in my next video.