What I Do
You're here because you want results. I'm here to guide you past the BS and toward your goals. "Weight loss hacks," expensive supplements, and "celebrity secrets" are all BS marketing tricks that are not effective.
The basic, science-based fundamentals are all you need to lose weight. You will get results when we apply these fundamentals to your situation.
Many people regain fat after dieting, but you will develop a lifestyle that you can maintain even after you lose weight! You will learn how to make adjustments to your strategy so that you can use it for the rest of your life.
Three Pillars of Weight Loss
1. Diet / Energy In
We need to find a way to eat less energy (measured in calories). This does not need to be over-restrictive. If you don't like salad, I won't ask you to eat salad.
2. Exercise / Energy Out
While exercise is not always required to lose weight, it is extremely helpful. However, it will be required for certain secondary goals, like looking toned.
3. Psychology / "Motivation"
This is what helps keep us consistent. Stress and self-judgement can become overwhelming, which stops us from making decisions that align with our goals.
My Story
I used to think eating healthy meant eating salad. I thought all exercise meant running until I was out of breath. I thought "being healthy" was not for me because I did not want to do these things. I was not happy and I did not like my life. I felt stressed, depressed, and hopeless.
I desperately wished I was a different person because I could not "fix" myself.
In college, I was lucky enough to meet friends that changed my attitude. Others showed me the basics of diet & exercise. I had a HUGE motivation to change, but it wasn't until I had the help of others that I started believing I could actually change.
I started to believe that I could actually become the person I wanted to be.
I was obese when I went home for summer break going into my senior year. I came back with abs. People were shocked. I looked completely different.
This battle can be won with pure determination/motivation or whatever you want to call it, but it's not easy. If I had to do it again, I probably couldn't do it in this way. I was coming out of an extreme low point in my life, and that gave me the mental energy to do whatever it took.
Problem #1: Losing Weight Quickly
And this is the first mistake I think most people make. Because losing weight quickly is a possibility, it's the most appealing option. Who wouldn't want to lose a ton of weight in a short amount of time?
You might even know someone that's lost a ton of weight in a short amount of time, just like I did. And it's tempting to think that's the standard, but it's actually the exception. It's an outlier. Out of all the people that try to lose weight quickly, most do not succeed. So yes, it's possible to lose weight super fast, but we have to think about the odds.
Because at the end of the day, is your goal to lose weight quickly? Or is your goal to successfully lose weight?
In order to increase the odds of successfully losing weight, we need to make the task in front of us easier. This means getting slower results, but this also means more consistent results. This is a hard thing to grapple over, but this is the reality that we live in.
The last thing I want you to consider is, I'm not saying you should NEVER try to lose weight quickly. If you're dead set on wanting to go this route, then work your way up. Start slow, prove you can be consistent, and increase the amount of work you're putting in. Don't START by exercising every single day, but build up to this over weeks and months.
Problem #2: Forcing Yourself To Do Things
Again, we're looking at odds of success
It's important to recognize there's an abundant amount of strategies that you can use to lose weight, but there's nothing magical about any of them. These strategies work by applying fundamental weight loss concepts to your life.
For example eating salad is a low calorie, very satiating option. But I don't like doing it. This is not an effective strategy for me because I won't be able to consistently force myself to eat salad. I just won't do it. That doesn't make me "bad" or "broken." It just means I need to find a different strategy.
We have to get out of this mindset that there's any "one best option" to lose weight. There's not.
When we can recognize this, our strategy revolves around doing things that take less effort for you to do. For me, I enjoy lifting weights. I love the feeling that I get in my muscles when I'm lifting something heavy. Taking caffeine and blasting my music enhances this feeling. So when I look at my strategy, not only am I lifting weights but I'm structuring how I lift weights in order to maximize my enjoyment. This skyrockets my consistency, and consistency is what leads to results.
If instead I forced myself to run 3 miles every day because Maddie and John on instagram said this was the "secret workout" to fuel my metabolism or whatever BS, I would not get results. Because I wouldn't be able to consistently force myself to run. And I would spiral into not running at all, and then not exercising at all.
Because inconsistency has downstream effects. If I try to run everyday but don't, now I feel a little more like a failure. Now I'm more stressed and sad. I'm getting more cravings. It's harder to eat less calories.
If any of this sounds familiar, we need to take a step back. Think about what your goal is. Is your goal to force yourself to follow a particular weight strategy? Or is your goal to lose weight? Because if your goal is to lose weight, lets focus on odds of success.
Problem #3: Weight Regain
Lets say you had the drive to overcome problems 1 & 2. You were able to force yourself to eat only salad and you exercised every day. Because of this, you lost a bunch of weight. You're incredibly stressed out, but you feel good because you were able to hit your goal.
Now what?
If you go back to doing what you did before your diet, you're going to gain the weight back. So that's not an option. But you're also sick and tired of eating salad every day.
The problem here is the strategy you chose didn't teach you anything. You just followed a static plan, and now what do you do when you don't want to follow that static plan anymore?
This is why I emphasize lifestyle change. This is also why I emphasize the teaching aspect to my coaching. When we're done, I want you to have everything you need to never need coaching again.
While my goal is to help you lose weight, my goal is also to give you everything you need to maintain your weight loss for the rest of your life. As you get older your situation, your wants, and your needs are going to change. You will be armed with the ability to adjust your healthy lifestyle no matter how your life changes.
My Approach
Weight Change =
Energy In (Food You Eat) - Energy Out (Exercise)
So in order to lose weight, we need to either decrease Energy In or increase Energy Out!
Energy In
We want to track what we eat in order to better understand how much energy (calories) we're consuming. Often times we can find replacements for certain foods that significantly reduce 'Energy In' without adding much stress. The less energy available from food, the more your body uses stored energy (fat).
There's a lot of misconceptions around what "healthy eating" really means. It's common to think heavy restriction is healthy, but I would argue that's actually unhealthy. It also sucks. We're not bodybuilders. I like to start from ground 0 and help re-define what "healthy eating" actually is.
Energy Out
Purposeful exercise is the part of 'Energy Out' that is in your control. Rather than think about what the "best fat burning workout" is, we want to find things that you can consistently do.
The one rule with this is duration. The higher intensity the exercise, the less you have to do it. So you'd have to walk for way longer than you'd have to sprint, but that doesn't mean one is "better" than the other.
"Better" depends on your situation and what you can consistently do.
Progression
As you lose weight, your body adapts by making it harder to lose weight. This is why you can't permanently diet down to 0 lbs. We can't control this adaptation, but we can combat it by going slow and progress efficiently.
Everyone wants to lose weight quickly, but I want you to prove that you can lose weight slowly before we try losing weight more quickly. Most of my clients find losing weight slowly without much stress is preferable. But I'm here no matter how you want to go about it.
Measure Results
We want to have some kind of consistent measurement in order to track progress. If we aren't progressing, we need to change the strategy.
Plateaus are part of the process. It's important to note that an extended plateau is not your fault, it's the strategy's fault.
Dieting involves a constant battle of adapting the strategy to your results. Basically that means eating a little less energy or exercising a little more.
Coaching
"It takes courage to be open and honest about your challenges. That's the first step to working on them. Now that we have those out of the way, I think I have a few ideas that could help you, if you want." - A wise old coach
The benefit of coaching is more than just giving you accurate information and sending motivational emails. Good coaching listens, supports, and guides you to where you want to go when you can't get there yourself.
I'm not here to yell at you because you missed a workout. This is not enjoyable for either of us, and it's not even effective. Yelling and shaming doesn't get you to where you want to go. Instead, I'm here to figure out why you missed that workout and make adjustments to our strategy as needed.
This doesn't mean I'll be going easy on you, because going easy on you is also not effective. We have to accept that change only comes from consistent action. We have flexibility in how we implement that consistent action, and that's what we'll talk about on our weekly calls. We'll check-in to see how you're feeling, go over the previous week, prepare for the upcoming week, and answer any questions.
In-between our calls I want you to text me if you run into problems. Whether it's issues around exercise or dealing with hunger, a few minutes of text support can go a long way. This can even direct the theme of our next call to really help get you through a specific roadblock.
I coach because I want you to become a better version of yourself. And I'm not just talking about weight loss. I'm talking about the person you become when you go through this process. Dieting is not easy. I heard a statistic that 95% of diets "fail." If this feels familiar, I would argue nothing is ever a failure unless you stop working at it.