Fat loss and getting in shape just seems so darn difficult for almost everyone and the amount of advice overload can make your blood boil.

We don’t mean just aggravating and frustrating but plain old impossible. Even those who have made improvements with fitness tend to find that reaching their true goal just never seems to happen. Is there a missing piece to the puzzle and if so how does it fit? This is where we come in…we fit by showing you what many won’t, as well we work to fit it to you and your individuality.

We want you to sit back for a couple of seconds…no not metaphorically but actually give us 20 seconds and just sit back and exhale and be still for a brief moment. Drop everything spinning around your mind for a instant and drop your shoulders and breath out and slow down to a stop. Hear and look around you at this moment in time and be there, just anchor right there…chill.

Now slowly consider this – don’t agree or disagree just perceive it for a moment like something you just picked up off the beach to see what it was. Just let it be as is long enough to show you what it is rather than you making a bunch of judgments and assumptions pro or con. Just let what we say now stand on its own looking at you and allow it to introduce itself…

If 2.5 years ago you made just a couple of small changes and began losing 1-2 pounds of fat a month…if you started strengthening your body with exercise only 3-4 times a month – you would have made an incredible impact on your present day health and fitness. You would feel and look better in every way.

You would have worked out about 100 times, you would have shed 30 to 60 pounds of useless, life robbing fat! Not only that but because the immune system can easily take years to adjust to a new body composition you would have made such a significant physical change the new you would be easy to maintain. Furthermore, small but powerful habits would be fully established and working for you in the background practically effortlessly.

 

Times Impact

We said this to clients who have struggled and people who have looked to pick our brains and the pause, silence and stare is dramatic. They go from sharing their frustration and suffering and trying to figure it out like an advanced math equation to a momentary stun. The secret was TIME. We wrote our previous blog post ‘Time is Change’ for a reason, time is what everyone is taking for granted or completely overlooking. How much should I eat, what should I eat, when should I exercise, how should I exercise? Time is the most important principle to follow, ‘give it time’, ‘take time…make time’. All these folks with failure and doubt could already have their issues basically solved if it weren’t for poor timing.

We have all heard lose 1-2 pounds a week is best, well bulls**t. Best is what you can sustain/maintain over real time not short sub year bouts of nasty calorie restriction. One pound of your body fat will provide around 3500 calories. 99% of us cannot and will not eat 3500 to 7000 calories less than our maintenance amount every bloody week, month after month after month. And you know that huge fat loss many see in the first few weeks to a few months? Well remember you are 2/3 water and most of your weight loss, especially the rapid type, is water.

You literally suck the life out of your body when dieting fast (we have blogged here about this many times). Weight that took years to store is ripped away in months and it takes it’s toll. We see it all the time – Jane or Joe goes on a diet every other year and after aging from 35 to 45 they are in far worse shape than they started. Muscle is lost, metabolic/chemical equilibrium is bruised and battered and they end up a higher bodyfat % than they started now older and weaker. It’s horrible…plain horrible what we see in public health, the risk of disease and debilitating conditions skyrocket and aging/weakening accelerates. This all not just because of poor food choices and lack of exercise but equally because of dieting for rapid change.

The Impact of Time

We have all been thinking on the wrong scale, consider: Take a woman who is 165 and drops to 135 in 6 months, fantastic right? How about a man who is 230 and drops to 180 in 7 months? Ok now watch. In both cases it’s a lot of water and all your cells lose a lot of their internal substrates during a serious fat loss diet. This is what gives you that look in the face and certain body areas which makes people say “hey you are losing too much weight” even though naked there is still large amounts of unneeded fat to see. Cells go flat and so does your look. Muscle disappears with age and dieting accelerates this. Even with a solid exercise program muscular size and tone is lost.

Both the examples will, according to the stats gain it all back in 2-5 years. The bigger problem is, now they are older and less muscular so at the same weight they could easily be holding more fat than ever. Add to this that when we gain all this weight back it is so discouraging we tend to put on even more. Now she is 170 and he is 240 but the increase in fat percentage is even higher than it looks. Now she went from dropping what she thought was 30 lbs of fat but was more like 15 actual fat pounds and he thought he was down 50 pounds of fat but it was only around 30. Slowly each one gains back some 25 and 60 pounds of fat! Trust us we see it year after year – time waits for no one and you can give up or disregard but when the s** t hits the health fan you can’t turn back the clock.

We see same thing in exercise where people jump on some sort of hyped ‘bandwagon’ program looking to re-sculpt themselves with wild workouts. They submerge themselves in it completely and over do it. They burnout interest, maybe injure and don’t see the results they truly wanted…they quit and stop exercising or it peters down to a trickle of motivation.

Work in Time

So why not have time as your ally? Why not chill the heck out and start a steady, modest…sane plan? This is the ‘investment/money in the bank’ simple logic. A couple of years will fly by when your investment is moderate but constant and simple. We are NOT talking about patience and virtue, just plain old steady, repeatable choices and habit building.     Look at this basic plan as an overview:

> Start with a record. Strip down to your undies and take a couple of pictures head to toe. Do it, no one has to ever see it but you. Weigh yourself and write down the date, time and weight.
> Make a simple list of things to do for the next 30 days. Simple things like stop eating junk food every week. Stop eating huge meals completely. Drink more water. Get out for a walk. Eat veggies every day. Stop eating starch based carbs at almost every meal.
> Get back to or start a new hobby! Get living and goal setting but not about fat loss. Fill up the snacking and bloated digesting time with something else which is challenging but has nothing to do with dieting.
> Find a basic exercise scheme to do but don’t start filling your time with it. Don’t start turning to exercise as a replacement for food, rather learn what your body needs to build strength, new energy and endurance.
> Weigh yourself no more than once a week or just go by hip and waist size or even just take new pictures every month. Use this as a mild guide only, focus on the day you are in making mild but better food choices. Try to build the habit of moving around more but don’t get to concerned about it. Each day keep moving, mild improvements, small but sometimes tough choices.
> If you lose more than a couple of pounds in a month wonderful but don’t push it, you may want to but don’t. Save that zeal for the finish line because as you approach it you will need plenty of motivation. Save the extra pounds of loss in your records and use them when you hit…and you will hit, months where there is little or no loss.

When you are stressed and backslide in behaviour put away the drama queen dress. Put the negative nasty talk on a shelf and save it for a real cause. Stop before you start making excuses to cover for feeling bad. You don’t need excuses and you don’t need to feel bad. This is your bloody body and your bloody life, you do your best and keep going. Push too hard too long and you fail not to achieve goals but you fail to take care of yourself properly.

In the realist of sense this is NOT about weight loss and fitness this is about taking care of yourself like anyone you care about. *Remember even if in time you only lose half of the weight you feel you need to, if you only exercised a third as much as you want to…if you sustain it you are way more successful than almost everyone out there! 

This IS doable. This is real. We have no reason to lie to you and this is free info.

We charge big bucks to work one on one with people and have seen all sorts of people through many years of issues. This is the truth and is often a bitter pill for a past client of ours. If they come to us with frustration, confusion and doubt in our expertise we simply make it clear. Had they followed basic mild suggestions since day one and let time do the math, they would have already achieved as much if not more than they ever hoped for.

Time to Decide

Doubt us and question us all you want but this is how it actually works for certain. Time and constancy, self awareness and self care. We’re giving you the straight goods. Human physiology is complex so just listen and stop boggling your own mind. Whether you are dangerously out of shape or just want to take things up to a new level it is about letting time work for you instead of against. We’re not just talking statistics, this is ‘as seen’ in the trenches by a couple of dedicated fitness geeks surrounded by dumbed down quick fix scams.

Still skeptical? How about considering it from this angle…if you sat down and read just 10 pages on a subject each day, spending just 15 minutes to absorb that small bit…in a couple of years you would practically be an expert on the subject. You would have read over 7000 pages and in small chunks that you could properly, pardon the fitness pun, digest. Everyone of us easily wastes a 15 minute slice each and everyday of life, imagine what we could have learned!

If you make only 5 smart choices and make 5 smart moves this month it is always better when multiplied by say 30 months (2.5 years ;n). We see people make amazingly smart choices and changes sometimes 5 a day but in time the math doesn’t add up as they give up and backslide. The sum total is always greater than the parts. The key is balance and sensible self estimation. Over and underestimating what you can handle today is where it all goes wrong. Challenge yourself often but not too often. Curb yourself regularly but not all the time. Similar to how this is not really about patience this isn’t actually about moderation. You need to cut back on crap and drive yourself to get strong but at a pace which you actually keep without running out of steam. You need to make real changes but not lose yourself in the process.

Help? – Keep it Simple

Here is a sustainable self awareness, self study technique: Put up a calendar where you see it everyday in the evening. Put a red marker and a blue marker near it…simple. Now each day decide if you made better than 50% decent fat loss/fitness choices or less than. Put a red check mark through the box for yes and a blue x for no. Your habit is to be honest but realistic about your day but not over think it. It will get easier with time. Your goal is to have a few more checkmarks in your month than x’s, it’s that basic and it will add up to feeling and looking healthier. This moment of visual impact of the colours and the past days, works well and eventually reaches right through all the mishmash to your core. Remember it’s just half your choices and doings that you judge. Be honest but don’t be overly dramatic. A better than 50% checkmark can just mean you skipped any junk food that day or let yourself be a little bit hungry all day but then did not bulk eat in the evening. Better than 50% can stand for a day where you got to vigorous exercising or ate sort of maintenance but went for a nice walk. A checkmark can even mean you got some decent food ideas and made a plan for tomorrow instead of just winging it. An x really just means you ignored yourself and your fitness and did negative things to your health. An x isn’t about what you didn’t do right for yourself (that’s what checkmarks are for) the x is for doing things you know we’re unreasonable if you want to be in healthy shape.

This helps you get to know yourself and become at ease with yourself around fitness stuff. The simple habit will help you separate the useful stuff from the self hurt crap, things which after a while get tangled into each other because of uncomfortable feelings and plain old confusion. Trying to analyze a week is way too tough even with lots of records, we know that’s our job.

A day…a day is just a day and you can relate to it reasonably, when you awoke what you did how you felt that morning, how it played out that afternoon and where it has let you this evening. The simplicity is for lack of a better word, elegant and unlocks a lot of trapped problems you may have had trouble solving.

Yes we think this IS the greatest advice.

 The approach doesn’t look like an earth shattering discovery but the result will be like rare find. We have seen so much positivity in our chosen field of fitness but far too much of it fleeting. As the saying goes “a year from now you will wish you started today” and a couple of years from now, if you do start  you will be shocked you didn’t begin this process much earlier in life.

If looking at yourself and life over the past decade (where health and fitness really has serious impact) you see failure, then no matter how much you dislike this solution remember it will work, it will change everything for you.

One foot in front of the other, one morning to evening, doing what you can with what you have where you are. You stumble, you fall, you get lost….one foot in front of the other, one day at a time you make small corrections and carry on to achievement. Time can pull you apart or put you together, the choice is yours.

-WeFit (if you know anyone who is suffering, has suffered or may be in need…please share this with them, it’s free)

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