Downsizing Your Diet and Fitness Life
As you move through life it seems that progress or success is associated with concept of addition and making your life bigger. When you’re young you add more friends, more social activities, more responsibilities. You go from a small school to a big school, from no job to a part time job, perhaps you add in a sport or hobby. Then you may add a relationship, and responsibility of a more important job, or maybe new credentials, licenses or certifications.
Maybe you just need a little less of what you already have
From there you might to add to your resume with more responsibility, a bigger title, a bigger family. Then it expands to more money, two cars instead of one, bigger tv, a bigger house, more vacation time, more social events and so on.
For most of your life the concept of success and progress is quite literally tied to the idea of adding something, anything, to your life.
This concept of addition = success may fall apart on you when you consider the unique situation of diet/fitness/health and weight loss.
Many people make the mistake of assuming the path to a healthier body, a better looking body, being in better shape, improving their fitness and losing weight is the result of adding yet another piece to their life that has been missing.
The addition could be a supplement, a new workout, a new cardio routine, a new yoga routine, a new functional training program, a new kettle bell, a new bosu ball, a new magazine subscription, a new trainer, a new functional food, a new diet, another new diet, another new diet, another new diet (this wasn’t a typo…I’m just trying to capture the concept of how many diets most people try), more supplements, more functional foods, more healthy food choices…more more more.
Most people never consider the concept that what they need to get in shape is simply less of what they already have. Less food, less magazines, less diet and fitness information, less supplements, less functional foods, less workouts get caught up deciding what to do with, less diet books to read, less of all of it.
Simplifying your diet and fitness life is likely the first step that most people need to do nowadays before they can make any real progress towards getting in shape. Once you start down the path of diet and fitness ‘addition’ there is no end to the amount of things you can add (and money you can spend) without making any progress.
In direct contradiction to the rest of your life, diet and fitness progress is almost always made when you take the path of less not more.
Your job is to find the sweet spot and add only what is necessary to make progress in diet and fitness without overloading on too much of everything. In most cases you and I and everyone else has already added way more than what we need. This means your main order of business is downsizing what you consume (both food and information) to get in shape and stay there.
John
9 Responses to “Downsizing Your Diet and Fitness Life”
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September 19th, 2011 at 4:30 pm
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September 21st, 2011 at 5:00 am
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September 21st, 2011 at 7:43 am
Sometimes less is more.
I think getting away from all the misleading information and information overload that often times leads to analysis paralysis is one of the best things to do right now.
If people would just search the market and pick one approach that seems most logical and is very simple to incorporate into their lifestyle, they would get ten times better results than they are getting now.
It would also make them probably a bit more stress free.
September 21st, 2011 at 1:50 pm
Excellent, John! ‘Sweet spot’ is the operative term. I just turned 55 recently but am leaner than I was when I graduated from highschool. My approach: fewer meals per day and less exercise, albeit plenty of walking.
September 21st, 2011 at 5:01 pm
Finding maintenance to be greatly enhanced with MUCH LESS FOCUS on food and training, i.e. more of a JUST DO IT mentality. I guess, once you have the answers, i.e. your body size is how much you eat and your body shape is how you train, it’s kind of an “end of the journey” type thing and unless FITNESS is your business, it’s probably time to get a new hobby or passion. But maybe it’s difficult to let go of all this stuff if you feel like this is the only place in your life where you’re something of an expert and you need to maintain THAT
October 25th, 2011 at 2:46 pm
This article is spot on and it’s a well deserved slap in the face to much of the weight loss industry. I just recently made the decision that I was going to tolerate hunger more and eat less. From June to October, I have been eating reasonably and working out intensely, but I only lost 4 lbs in 15 weeks, which is just over 1/4 lb per week. So in terms of calories, I was eating slightly less than I was burning. I didn’t keep track of my BMI but since I’m a “hardgainer”, I would say that I didn’t exactly gain a whole lot of muscle.
But 2 weeks ago today I started to eat approximately 1/3 less, and added a more intense HIIT routine to my workouts, and I’ve already lost 5 lbs or 2.5 lbs per week. So I lost 10 x more weight because I am in a much higher caloric deficit and that is the simple key to losing weight. It’s not easy to be hungry so much, but it’s far easier than suffering through nicotine withdrawal. And staying hydrated makes a huge difference. To hell with agonizing over what diet program, pill, routine or book to follow or how many carbs, grams of protein or vitamins to eat or not eat. JUST EAT LESS!
December 27th, 2011 at 10:46 am
[...] can chose whatever you want to eat, the rule is to limit the amount. Do that and you will lose [...]
February 13th, 2012 at 12:00 pm
[...] the beginning he pressed for a larger deficit when he had the most fat to lose and ate really low calories the first few [...]
May 14th, 2012 at 9:08 am
[...] Contests last year, Kris wanted to just maintain her physique. This contest for her was all about finding a way to put the least time and effort into the training and diet to stay looking good. She wanted to spend as little time as possible in the gym to keep her look [...]