When it comes to most of us, we’re going to want to lose some weight, lose some body fat. Also, we’re probably going to want to gain some strength and some muscle.
The Most Important Thing
When it comes to weight and fat loss, the most important thing is your nutrition. It is what you’re eating and what you’re drinking. There is nothing else that is going to replace it, compensate for it, or make the result happen better.
The most important things are what we’re eating and how much we’re eating.
What About Exercise?
When it comes to exercise, to training, to movement, the primary goal of that, the number one thing, is to gain or retain movement, muscle and strength. No burning calories, no torturing ourselves. If we want to do movement for fun, that’s great. Pick something you’ll enjoy, but don’t be going out doing a run or doing a swim and thinking it’s burning calories off, and somehow going to compensate for nutrition.
The only reason to ever bring in exercise as a form of fat or weight loss is when we have hit the lowest intake possible, where consuming any less food will be unhealthy. That’s where we bring in the exercise. But the caveat with that is if and when it works, we’ve got to keep doing that for the rest of our life, or all that progress that we’ve made will be lost.
What To Do
This is why building in healthy, sustainable, easy habits and practices around nutrition are going to be the best thing to get the result.
The Hierarchy Of Nutrition
Within nutrition in terms of the hierarchy, these are the most important parts:
What To Eat and How Much to Eat
First is knowing what to eat and how much to eat. What are the types of food (fats, protein, carbs and veg) and how much of each type of food to eat. Once you know that, that’s going to be your foundation.
Habits and Practices
The next bit is putting in habits and practices that are aligned with who you want to be. Start with easy small changes that you can naturally put within your day.
Some examples:
- drinking more water,
- protein at every meal,
- eating more vegetables,
- working on, or thinking about your sleep, the hours and the quality,
- thinking about the stress in your life, how you reduce that, how you deal with it better.
How do you form a habit?
To form a habit can take time but using these steps it can speed that up:
- Checking in each day. Are you doing that current habit, that current practice, that current thing that’s going to have the biggest impact for you? Yes or no. Most of us fall down on guessing if the thing we are currently doing is working or not. But because we are not consistent with logging it, we don’t know.
- Once we have consistent feedback to go off, we can understand if it’s really working or not.
- The next bit if it’s not working is trying to improve what we’re currently doing. Can we do that habit a bit better? Can we make it a bit more consistent? Can we make it simpler or easier?
- And then after that, the next level is starting to educate ourselves, understand why we’re doing what we’re doing and how to do it better.
The inevitability is we’re going to get the results we want. If we start trying to overcomplicate and think, I need to exercise more, I need to do things more intensely, I need a meal plan, you’ve already lost. Switching to that mindset where easier is better. What’s the simplest thing we can do right now to make a change? That’s going to have the biggest impact.
