Everyone wants the magic pill. A quick fix. A short cut. The newest “fat burner” pill/food/powder or 15 minute high intensity workout (that ALWAYS includes box jumps) which will somehow correct all the takeaways and lack of sleep they’re getting during the week. A magic pill or 1-hour HIIT workout cannot fix the 167 hours of lack of care that you provide to your body.
A hack is temporary. A lifestyle change is incremental but permanent.
So how do we integrate incremental lifestyle changes to get to where we want to be? To look good and feel good, to spend time on our hobbies and bodies equally, and to spend time with the people that matter to us?
Here are a few suggestions:
· Set a goal and break it up into smaller achievable goals. Your goal has to be internally driven rather than externally validated or driven (Sevild et al, 2020) Celebrate your wins.
· Tell as many people about your goal. Ask them to keep you accountable
· Realise that focusing on yourself and getting fitter, faster, stronger, better will help others (your friends, family, children) (Sevild et al. 2020)
· Don’t focus heavily on your weight. Focus on getting stronger.
· Reduce your food intake by 10-20% depending on your goals (do this by cutting out butter, cream, fat, oil and any foods that contain fat as it has the most calories). I have more about how to easily do this in my e-book “Eat good, feel good, look good”.
· Sleep for around 8 hours a day. The less you sleep, the more you eat the next day, and the less fat you burn (even if you don’t eat more the next day)
· Go for a brisk walk for 30 mins a day (or run in place for 10 seconds x e.g. 30 times a day)
· Strength train (high resistance, low repetitions– a short workout)
· Write down everything that you eat (or track it into an app) to hold yourself accountable
· Analyse your behavioural patterns e.g. do you eat when you’re stressed? What do you eat? Now attempt to make small changes when that happens.
We’ve all heard the story – through our ancestors, our bodies were made to store fat to protect us against food scarcity. We were hunters and gatherers with no guaranteed outcome that we would find or catch our food for the next meal. Our bodies are incredibly smart and stored any excess food that it could as fat, and reduced our resting metabolic rate (i.e. the energy required to main basic biological functions like breathing and maintaining body temperature etc.) whenever it could (Wadden, 2020). Fast forward to now and our bodies are still primed for being hunter gatherers, but now at the first instance of feeling hungry, we have access to food – and what took hours of walking and possibly intense activity, is replaced with a chair, a computer and a bank account which we get paid into.
Good food is increasingly hard to find in takeaway and fast food stores, and they play into our new-found habits where meals are ordered-in or eaten out and contain so many more calories than if we prepared it ourselves[Roberto, 2015]. Daily energy intake has increased whereas daily energy expenditure has decreased.
Being healthy as a lifestyle rather than a hack can have many benefits. Exercise itself can aid to combat depression, reduce risk of coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and more. Exercise and creating good lifestyle habits can even give your life meaning! (Kinoshita et al. 2020) In one study done in 1996 to combat type 2 diabetes, scientists took 3234 people with an average age of 51 years and broke them up into groups:
· Placebo
· Medication
· Lifestyle changes (around 20 mins of physical activity per day)
The group that were allocated the lifestyle change lost the most amount of weight and as a result reduced their risk of diabetes by 58%compared to those who took medication alone (Knowler, 2002). In the 10-yearfollow up the “onset of diabetes was delayed by about 4 years by lifestyle intervention and 2 years by metformin [diabetes drug] compared with placebo”(Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group, 2009).
The instagram trainer/influencer with 1 million followers that you’ve subscribed to (or the local influencer at your favourite gym)cannot provide you with a hack good enough to sustain that “feel good” feeling or that flat stomach or 6 pack abs that you’re looking for either. Yes they have it, but do you really want their lifestyle?
To get where they are, most fitness professionals miss out on dinners with their friends, or only order the salads, count the calories in every single bite, and weigh themselves day in and day out. To me that’s just the opposite of how I want to live my life.
Make small changes, one at a time, and in the long run you will be unrecognisable – and for the better.
References:
Roberto, C. A., Swinburn, B., Hawkes, C., Huang, T. T.,Costa, S. A., Ashe, M., Zwicker, L., Cawley, J. H., & Brownell, K. D.(2015). Patchy progress on obesity prevention: emerging examples, entrenched barriers, and new thinking. Lancet (London, England), 385(9985), 2400–2409.https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(14)61744-X
Wadden, T. A., Tronieri, J. S., & Butryn, M. L. (2020).Lifestyle modification approaches for the treatment of obesity in adults. The American psychologist, 75(2), 235–251.https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000517
Knowler, W. C., Barrett-Connor, E., Fowler, S. E., Hamman,R. F., Lachin, J. M., Walker, E. A., Nathan, D. M., & Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group (2002). Reduction in the incidence of type 2 diabetes with lifestyle intervention or metformin. The New England journal of medicine, 346(6), 393–403. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa012512
Diabetes Prevention Program Research Group, Knowler, W. C.,Fowler, S. E., Hamman, R. F., Christophi, C. A., Hoffman, H. J., Brenneman, A.T., Brown-Friday, J. O., Goldberg, R., Venditti, E., & Nathan, D. M.(2009). 10-year follow-up of diabetes incidence and weight loss in the Diabetes Prevention Program Outcomes Study. Lancet (London, England), 374(9702), 1677–1686. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61457-4
Sevild, C. H., Niemiec, C. P., Bru, L. E., Dyrstad, S. M.,& Husebø, A. (2020). Initiation and maintenance of lifestyle changes among participants in a healthy life centre: a qualitative study. BMC public health, 20(1), 1006. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-09111-8
Kinoshita, S., Hirooka, N., Kusano, T., Saito, K., &Nakamoto, H. (2020). Does Improvement in Health-Related Lifestyle Habits Increase Purpose in Life among a Health Literate Cohort?. International journal of environmental research and public health, 17(23), 8878.https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17238878
Move without pain?
Say goodbye to diets and salads?
Spend less $$$$ on professionals that ONLY offer you short term fixes?
Live a life that is both achievable AND enjoyable?
