Oh hai, you sexy beast, you. I hope you’re having a fabulous day.
How would you like to talk for a bit about helping each other achieve righteous health and build bodacious bods?
“That sounds great, Ian!”
Awesome! I think so, too!
Heads up: this is gonna be a hell of a post. But if you hang in there with me (especially for the last point), I’m confident you will learn something that will benefit your health – now and potentially for the rest of your life.
So. Deep breath. Let’s begin together.
———-
Over the last several months, I have successfully managed to lose 25lbs. More importantly, though, is that I’ve managed to KEEP OFF those 25lbs. after I STOPPED dieting. My body image and overall mental health have significantly improved as well.
This is where so many of today’s approaches to losing weight today fail. They focus on how to achieve results NOW, without thinking about the implications those results will have on your health and wellness LATER. It’s not hard to see headlines like this plastered on covers of magazines and all over social media:
“Lose Your Gut in 21 Days – Guaranteed!”
“30 Day Detox Challenge Begins Next Week!”
“Get Single-Digit Bodyfat in Weeks!”
These make for eye-catching headlines and attractive Instagram bios, but they most certainly aren’t a smart approach to building a healthy, strong body – one that you have a good relationship with and can be proud of.
So with that, let’s talk about a smarter approach. Here is what I’ve learned and borrowed over the last several months building a better, healthier body. I hope you find some (or all!) of these tips and strategies useful.
1. You Need to Know WHY You Want to Change
Is it for your overall health? Do you want to look a certain way? Maybe it’s to help you reclaim peace of mind for the first time in years?
Whatever it is, knowing your “why” is crucial, because it will keep you anchored as you embark on your journey. It’s important to understand that this is about YOU – not what society thinks is acceptable, not what your social circle thinks you should do. Make this decision for you.
It’s helpful to write out your “why” and keep it somewhere accessible: a notes app on your phone, a sticky note in your apartment, a page in your moleskin – wherever. Make it easy to revisit and a powerful enough statement that it keeps you grounded when things get tough. Here was my “why:”
“I want to lose weight because being healthy and lean makes me feel like my best self. When I feel like my best self, I’m a better man for my loved ones and those around me.”
That’s powerful. Yours should be, too.
2. Principles > Tactics, aka Cutting Through the Noise
The fitness industry is saturated with strategies that claim they’ll help you to be healthier. Log on to Instagram and click on a “fitness” hashtag and you’ll find hundreds of thousands of posts espousing methods that promise to help you lose fat, build muscle, and supercharge your health.
Most of these are tactics. But we don’t want to focus on tactics – we want to focus on principles. This is something I learned from Nate Green, of NateGreen.org, and it’s made a huge difference in my approach to health and fitness.
“What’s the difference between a principle and a tactic?”
Principles are timeless. They’re the foundations. The elements that have stood the test of time. The “basics.”
Tactics are specific strategies that are planned to achieve a desired end. They’re the “parts” of the whole. The smaller, nitty gritty things.
Let’s look at some examples of principles vs. tactics as it relates to our health and fitness:
Principles
– Maintaining a calorie deficit
– Getting enough sleep
– Being consistent with eating mostly healthy foods and working out
– Minimizing stress
Tactics
– Keto
– Juicing
– Intermittent fasting
– Diet supplements like fat burners
– Any diet with a “name” (Atkins, Whole 30, Carnivore, etc.)
Now, tactics CAN be useful, but they will not be the key drivers of success. An over-reliance on tactics can end up leaving you stressed and confused. It can cause you to hop from one fad to another, and – very likely – leave you worse off than when you started. Principles, however, will keep you focused on the “big rocks” – the things that matter in the long run. This will help ensure you’re making progress day after day, week after week, month after month.
3. You Must Maintain a Calorie Deficit
The foundation of fat loss – the thing that makes everything else possible – is a calorie deficit.
Despite what some guru may tell you, fat loss occurs when you are consuming less calories than you are expending. If you are able to maintain a calorie deficit over time, you will lose fat. However you do that is personal preference.
There are a lot of calculators out there to figure out your calories. I recommend Precision Nutrition’s here: https://www.precisionnutrition.com/weight-loss-calculator
Now, this progress will not always be linear. I had weeks where I lost 1lb., others where I only lost .5lbs., and still others where I lost 2lbs. or even more. The key is to stay on track, trust yourself and the process, and be consistent.
Speaking of consistency…
4. Consistency is King
Lack of consistency is arguably the biggest reason why people fail to lose weight and keep it off for good. Many people will start a diet or new lifestyle with the best of intentions, only to fall off the wagon a few weeks in because of the intensity of totally flip-flopping their lifestyles. This results in frustration, doubt, potentially self-medicating with food, and backsliding.
The cycle then repeats itself, this time with new tactics and a renewed sense of focus and intensity. I think by now we both know what happens next: you’re stuck in the dreaded “yo-yo dieting” trap.
Dr. John Berardi of Precision Nutrition has a great maxim to combat this:
“Focus on ALWAYS SOMETHING instead of ALL OR NOTHING.”
If you are consistently taking steps – no matter how small – towards building and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, you will be successful.
In my case, I dieted for 12 weeks with the goal of losing fat. I am now finishing my 8th week of maintaining my new bodyweight post-diet. That’s 20 weeks – or five months – of mindful effort towards improving my health.
Hardly a sexy 30 day fitness challenge.
I was able to do this because I focused on sustainable, healthy habits that I repeated every day. I didn’t radically alter my life or push the pedal to the metal. I simply did less, but better, every day. You can, too – and that starts by…
5. Making Things Fit Your Lifestyle
A healthy diet should fit the unique needs of your life.
“Duh! Of course it should, Ian!”
Well, if we all know that, then why do so many people continue to gain weight every year, despite trying the latest fitness trends?
“…”
Right. Sometimes common sense isn’t so common.
Friction caused by trying to fit a “square peg in a round hole” – i.e., a diet that disrupts your day-to-day life – have a MUCH higher risk of failing.
One way to help avoid this is to move from expansive thinking to reductive thinking. Instead of saying, “What COULD I do to stick to a healthy diet,” ask yourself, “What SHOULD I do to stick to a healthy diet?”
Let’s look at this in practice.
Let’s say a diet tells you to cut out carbs, but you and your partner are foodies and like to go out to eat. It’s going to be VERY hard to make that fit within the context of your life. You will constantly be tempted to eat foods that contain carbs, which will make going out stressful, reduce your enjoyment of eating, and possibly negatively affect time spent with your partner.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the dinner roll over 2 hours of stressing about food and not enjoying my evening and my partner’s company.
Another example: if a diet tells you that you NEED to eat 6x per day, but you’re much more comfortable with eating 3-4x per day, then you should eat 3-4x per day, because you’re more likely to be consistent with it.
The biggest thing to remember here is this:
Diets are static – lifestyles are fluid.
You need to accept this and be okay with imperfections, because you are almost certainly going to mess up a few times.
To help make this principle fit your lifestyle, I’d recommend following an “80/20” approach to food.
80% of the time, eat whole, nutritious foods. Stuff our grandparents would recognize as “real food.” But 20% of the time, you can include some “treat” foods like desserts, pastries, a couple of glasses of wine, etc. Just don’t make it an everyday thing and ensure you’re maintaining your calorie deficit.
Through making eating fit our lifestyles, we are seeking to create balance. This should be something we can do for the rest of our lives. We’re working to build healthy habits – not just complete a diet or challenge.
6. Pick Foods You Enjoy and Eat Them!
Lots of diets these days need to have a unique selling point in order to differentiate them from other diets. Extreme, flashy approaches to solving a very personal problem like weight loss sell, and they sell well.
For example, Whole 30 is a paleo-style diet. It tells you what to eat and what NOT to eat, such as dairy, alcohol, or grains such as bread.
While this is great for marketing, it might not necessarily the best choice for building healthy, sustainable lifestyle. This method is akin to an “all or nothing” approach that we discussed above. Diets like these will often deliver fast results in a short time, but often leave people asking, “Now what?” at the end. They don’t set you up for longterm success. We want principles that will work for life, not quick fixes.
Do you love carbs like rice and bread? Great! Eat them.
Maybe you really can’t stand spinach. That’s okay – you don’t have to eat spinach. But Popeye will be sad.
Design the majority of your diet around healthy, nutritious foods that you like eating. Doing so will help you actually ENJOY the process of losing weight and getting healthier, as opposed to feeling restricted, stressed, and tempted to overindulge in comfort foods.
7. What Does a “Healthy” Meal Look Like?
This is a great question and will depend on who you ask and what dietary ideology they subscribe to.
Low carb eaters might say steak and eggs. Vegetarians might say a chickpea chopped salad. Intermittent fasters might say, “Ask me later – I don’t start eating until 2 p.m.”
In my experience, it’s best to keep things simple. For our purposes, let’s agree that a healthy meal is composed of…
– A protein
– A carb
– A fat
– A vegetable
The idea of building meals in this “templated” style was inspired by my use of Renaissance Periodization‘s Simplified Diet Templates, which were absolutely crucial in my successful weight loss. Knowing the “building blocks” of a healthy meal can help empower you to make smart choices and focus on foods you like in those categories.
For example, a meal I ate countless times at lunch (consistency!) was 6oz. of grilled chicken, 1 cup of wild rice, 2 cups of broccoli, and 1 avocado, seasoned with sea salt and pepper. This covered all of my bases and provided me with a satiating, healthy meal that I looked forward to eating each day.
8. Supplement Your Eating with Strength Training
A healthy relationship with food and a structured approach to weight loss will be the most important parts of your journey. However, in my experience, the next biggest factors are strength training and building lean muscle.
So, why should you strength train? Well, strength training…
– Helps you burn more calories at rest, boosting your metabolic rate
– Increases bone density
– Decreases likelihood of diseases such as diabetes
– Decreases blood pressure
– Improves and preserves cognitive abilities
Pretty damn good reasons if you ask me.
Like designing a healthy meal, we can also take a “plug and play” approach to designing an effective strength training regimen. How you structure your training will be dependent on your lifestyle, schedule, and personal dispositions (see point 5, “Making Thing Fit Your Lifestyle”).
Maybe you love being in the gym and consider it a key part of your social life. There’s a good chance you’ll want to train frequently, like 5x per week.
Maybe you’re a busy young professional who works a 9-5 job and has a social life on the weekends. 3x per week could probably work well for you.
Maybe you’re a parent with a family, lots of responsibilities, and not a lot of time. Fitting in training 2x per week is probably your best bet.
Once you know your schedule, we can build a training regimen that serves your needs. Personally, during my journey towards losing 25lbs., I strength trained between 2-4x per week, depending on my workload and travel schedule. I also opted to walk as often as I could.
Given that this is my demographic, let’s look at an example program that a young professional might use during a typical work week:
M – Full body
T – Off
W – Full body
Th – Off
F – Full body
Sat – Off
Sun – Off
Full body workouts should follow some basic movement patterns:
– Push
– Pull
– Squat
– Lunge
– Hinge
– Carry
Examples of these movement patterns are…
Push – Push ups, bench pressing with barbells or dumbbells (flat, incline, decline), overhead pressing with barbells or dumbbells, bench or overhead pressing on machines, dips.
Pull – Rowing with dumbbells, barbells, bodyweight, or on machines, pull ups, chin ups, lat pulldowns.
Squat – Squatting with your bodyweight, dumbbells, barbells, or kettlebells, single leg squats, machine squats like hack squats.
Lunge – lunging forward or backward with your bodyweight, dumbbells, kettlebells, or a barbell. You could alternatively do a step-up style movement here, also with the aforementioned equipment.
Hinge – deadlifts with a barbell, hex/trap bar, dumbbells, or kettlebells, romanian deadlifts with the aforementioned equipment, kettlebell swings, hip thrusts, back extensions, cable pull-throughs.
Carry – farmers walks with either two hands or one hand, carrying things such as dumbbells, a hex/trap bar, or kettlebells. This includes carrying things overhead, but given most people do not possess the proper mobility to establish a solid overhead carrying position, I would opt for standard carries.
Now that we know how often we should strength train and what we should do when we’re in the gym, we need to design some workouts. Please note that these are purely examples and won’t necessarily apply to your specific situation. When in doubt, pick exercises that you’re able to move pain-free through a full range of motion. I’m opting for a moderate rep range and would encourage you to leave a rep or two “in the tank” on each set. Over time, try to add a bit more weight or a few more reps to each set, always focusing on proper form.
Day 1
– Push Ups: 2 sets of 8-15 reps
– Dumbbell Rows: 3 sets of 8-15 reps
– Romanian Deadlift with Dumbbells: 3 sets of 8-15 reps
– Bulgarian Split Squats: 3 sets of 8-15 reps
Day 2
– Overhead Press with Dumbbells: 2 sets of 8-15 reps
– Lat Pulldowns: 3 sets of 8-15 reps
– Goblet Squat with Dumbbell: 3 sets of 8-15 reps
– Hamstring Curl on Machine: 3 sets of 8-15 reps
– Farmers Walks with Dumbbells: 3 sets of 30sec. walks
Day 3
– Hex/Trap Bar Deadlift: 3 sets of 8-15 reps
– Reserve Lunge: 3 sets of 8-15 reps
– Incline Dumbbell Bench Press: 2 sets of 8-15 reps
– Cable Rows: 3 sets of 8-15 reps
So. We’ve covered our food. We’ve covered our workouts. But there is one final principle we still need to talk about…
9. The Mental Game
One of the hardest parts of developing a healthy lifestyle and maintaining it is the battle you fight in your head.
Temptations, peer pressure, and doubts can all be progress killers. I was told several times by those around me that I “don’t need to be doing that.” I was poked fun at, questioned, and criticized for trying to change. These rebukes come with the territory.
Because of this, we need to focus on winning the small, “1% battles” every day.
For example, while out at a dinner party, you may be tempted one night to get a big ice cream sundae for dessert. This is a “1%” situation – it’s you being confronted with a choice that will impact your progress.
But if you opt to respect that small moment between “stimulus” and “response,” you can take control. You can remember your “why.” If that’s powerful enough, you can hold strong and opt for a smaller, less calorie-dense dessert instead.
As we’ve discussed in a few principles above, we need to internalize the idea that weight loss, and indeed a healthy lifestyle, is a lifelong pursuit. It is not optimally achieved in 30 day challenges, transformation competitions, or via some super intense workout, diet, and supplementation program.
Because we’re in this for life, we’re gonna mess up. Thus, one of the most powerful drivers of progress – one that is so often ignored – is FORGIVENESS.
Mainstream or fad diets will demonize missteps, encouraging you to feel shame for nothing other than BEING A HUMAN BEING. We aren’t perfect. It’s not a matter of “if” we will slip up, but “when.” We might order way too much food, have one too many drinks, or skip workouts.
And that’s okay.
What’s more important than dwelling on these mistakes is what we do next. What should we do when we slip up?
We accept it. We forgive ourselves. We take the next best step to make progress.
Missed your scheduled workout for the day? Go for a walk instead.
Ate a little too much at brunch with your friends? Opt for protein and veggie-rich meals for lunch and dinner.
Strapped at work and stressed up to your eyeballs? Take 10 minutes to destress and forget about focusing so much on your diet.
Remember: your overall wellbeing – physical and mental – are MUCH more important than following a meal plan or how ripped your abs look in the mirror for Instagram. We’re doing this to be healthy. To be our best not just for ourselves, but for our loves ones, too. We owe it to ourselves to adopt an approach that brings results, but not at the expense of our lives outside of the gym or on a dinner plate.
Commit to the long road. You’ll be happier you did.
———-
Phew. Okay. We made it. How do we feel?
Hopefully, if you’ve read this far, you’ve learned a thing or two that will help you live a healthier lifestyle. Hell, even if you DIDN’T learn anything, I hope my efforts adhering to these principles and losing 25lbs. of fat inspire you to kick more ass in your own life.
Health and wellness – like life – is a beautiful, sometimes messy journey. We chase goals. We make mistakes. We accomplish great feats. All the while, we learn a little more each day about how to be the best versions of ourselves. One way we can start is by looking inwards and embracing the challenge of building strong, healthy bodies.
I’m confident that if we take the first steps on that journey, we’ll all be successful in our own ways, because we’ll be doing it together.
Anywho… all this talk about healthy food is making me hungry, so I’m off to eat dinner.
I love you all very much. If you want to talk about this or anything else, I’m always here for you.
Big snuggles and smooches,
Ian
This post was originally published on June 22nd, 2019
Ian Estabrook 