Fitness is a behavior issue. It’s not a knowledge issue. Here are the steps you need to take to address the real issue.
Fitness is a lot like personal finance. We know what we need to do. It’s doing it that’s the challenge. Everyone knows you should spend less than you earn, pay off debts, and save for retirement. Everyone also knows they should eat healthier and move more than to just pick up their phone. It’s not that complicated. We just have to do it.
Dave Ramsey introduced me to this idea as it relates to money, but the parallels to health and fitness are obvious and many. All of my training clients (online and in-person) know what they need to do. I routinely ask them what their biggest issue is. They always have very accurate answers. It’s right on the money, but they haven’t found a way to make it happen.
Having seen Dave Ramsey’s success with getting people to take the actions they know they need to, I’ve started following his model with my training clients.
Get motivated and take baby steps until you are successful.
The key to success in any health and fitness transformation is getting and staying motivated even when it’s tough and making the steps small enough and easy enough that you never have an excuse not to do them.
Let’s address the motivation piece first.
Transforming your body is going to take a while. Months or years in all reality. It’s really hard to stay motivated that long, so developing a habit of motivation is vital. You need to find the triggers that will get you to do the work and then remind yourself of them constantly.
The best way I’ve found to do this is making lists. Two lists in particular.
The first list is all the benefits getting healthier will give you.
Write down all the things you will be able to do when you lose the weight and get in shape. Write down all the ways your life will be better. Your improved performance at work. The relationships you’ll foster and improve as a result of you taking care of yourself. Your ability to be a better spouse or parent. Find everything you possibly can that will improve when you do. This is your carrot.
The second list is all the pain you’ll experience if you don’t take action.
While some of the things on this list will be physical pain, I want you to address emotional pain as well. What will you look and feel like in 10 or 15 years if you don’t fix your diet, sleep, and exercise? What example are you setting for the people you care about? How much will your medical bills cost you? Will you be the best employee or employer you can be? The more negative effects that you can come up with by not doing the work will be the best motivation you have. This is your stick.
Make sure your negatives list is longer than your positives. You’ll always do more to avoid pain than gain pleasure.
The next step is to place these lists in as many places as you’ll see them as possible. Tape them to the fridge. Put them in the snack drawer at your desk with all the food you know you should be avoiding. My favorite is to take a picture of one of them and make it the background on my phone.
To avoid getting used to seeing them all the time, it’s a great practice to remake these lists weekly and update them. This way, you’ll stay motivated and constantly remind yourself why you’re doing all this work. Changing their locations or what you’ve written them on is also a great way to keep them in the front of your mind.
Constantly motivating yourself in this way is a major behavior so many people overlook. Typically, we have some trigger that gets us really motivated for a while. Over time, the emotion tied to that trigger fades and we start to slack off. Simply by taking 15 minutes a week to remind yourself why you’re working so hard will completely change your life and advance you towards the results you crave.
Once you have the motivation piece, it’s time to work on the actual behaviors that will help you get healthier. You’ll notice they are all simple and doable just like Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps. They may not seem like much, but they add up over time and produce results whenever they are followed.
I like to call these the Healthy Steps.
I. Allow yourself 8 hours to sleep every night.
You might not get 8 hours of sleep the first night or the first several, but your first step to succeeding is allowing yourself that time. Back up from whatever time you need to wake up and then set a bedtime for yourself and stick to it. If you need to be up by 6am, you need to be in bed with lights out by 10pm. This is your first Healthy Step.
This step doesn’t require changing anything but your schedule. You don’t need to start cooking, get to the gym, or do anything else. Just go to bed.
When you’ve done this successfully for 2 weeks, it’s time to move onto step 2.
II. Remove the worst item in your diet.
We all have a problematic food in our diet. For some it’s soda. Others prefer ice cream or some other dessert. It doesn’t matter what it is, just get rid of it. Maintaining your sleep schedule, devote all of your remaining energy to correcting that single problem with your diet.
Do not move to Healthy Step 3 until that item is gone and the cravings quit. I don’t care how long that takes. Stay focused on this single issue until it isn’t one anymore.
III. Move for 20 minutes per day.
Healthy Step 3 is all about moving your body. I don’t care what kind of exercise you choose, just move for 20 minutes a day. Walking, dancing, swimming, cycling, running, weight lifting, yoga, and prancercise are all great options. Just move your body intentionally for 20 minutes.
Don’t make it complicated or so hard that it leaves you sore and exhausted. Make it easy so you keep doing it. It doesn’t need to be the same every day, but it’s fine if it is. It really doesn’t matter what you do as long as you’re doing something.
Continue this for 3 weeks before moving on. This will establish daily exercise as a habit. That habit will silence the voice that tells you can skip a day. When you do it every day, even if it’s something incredibly easy, your body and mind will get used to it, and you’ll go move no matter what kind of mood you are in.
IV. Start fixing one meal per week.
This is the next major dietary fix. Pick one meal and fix it. One of your meals tomorrow is best, but you can pick any meal you want. Just pick one meal and make it healthy.
You don’t need to fix the whole day or that meal for every day. Keep this really easy. We’re going to add to it over time, so don’t worry that it’s not enough.
Just to be very clear, my definition is healthy is eating real food. Whole foods, proteins, vegetables, while avoiding all the garbage you know you shouldn’t eat. Avoid processed items and sugar. It doesn’t need to be perfectly balanced macronutrients or strict Paleo or anything like that. Just eat like your parents wanted you to when you were a kid.
The next week, keep the meal you fixed this week perfect and add one more. Now you’re eating 2 healthy meals per week. Keep adding to the list one meal at a time. It will take a few months before you’ve changed most of your diet, but it will be an easy process that is constantly building on itself and gaining momentum.
Be patient and don’t try to do too much. Stick to only one meal so you don’t overwhelm yourself. If you try to fix everything, you’ll come up short and quick. It’s really important that you keep this easy and follow the plan.
When you reach 20 healthy meals per week, move to Healthy Step 5.
V. Include two full-body strength workouts per week.
These can count as your 20 minutes per day. You don’t need to do extra. If you’re already doing this, move to Healthy Step 6.
A full-body strength workout includes some kind of pushing, pulling, squatting, hinging (dead lifting), and some core work. The exercises you pick are totally up to you. I like one exercise from each category and I do them for 3 sets of 8–12 reps, but you can do whatever you want there as well.
These workouts doesn’t need to take more than 20 minutes or incredibly difficult, but it will do great things for your body. They will stimulate muscle growth, help you stay balanced in your physical development, and tell your body to produce all the hormones that will help you get healthier.
The other 5 days you can do whatever you want, but make sure to include two strength workouts every week.
By this point, you should be getting amazing results and well on your way to your goals. If you’ve maintained your motivation and made it to Healthy Step 6, you’ve totally changed your life.
Take a minute and look back at how far you’ve come. You’re giving yourself the time to sleep you need, your diet is miles ahead of where it was, and you’re exercising daily. That’s an incredible transformation.
The last three steps are accelerators and for troubleshooting. There’s no need to do them if you’re already getting all the results you want and you shouldn’t do them until the previous steps are all part of your lifestyle.
In the same way you don’t need to worry about advanced investing techniques when you’re broke, you don’t need to worry about these last steps while you’re still eating McDonalds 4 days per week and staying up until 2am every night.
VI. Dial in the sleep.
Now that everything is coming together, it’s time to start tuning things up. This step is where you try to get the best sleep possible. Invest in blackout curtains, find the perfect temperature for your bed, dim your phone an hour before bedtime, start drinking sleepy time tea, and tell your spouse to sleep in the guest room. These are just ideas and you don’t need to implement them all at once. You can find your own and incorporate them over time.
The key is to find things that work for you that will help you get better sleep. Start making little improvements in your nightly ritual until you have amazing sleep every night.
VII. Dial in the food.
You might need to continue tweaking your food a little bit. During this Healthy Step, you can start getting into the details a little more. You can look at macronutrients, experiment with intermittent fasting, or try an elimination diet to see how food is really affecting you.
By this point, you probably don’t need to do much, but you can try to perfect your diet if you feel the need to. Again, make sure you’ve done all the other Healthy Steps first as this won’t be your biggest area for improvement if you haven’t.
The options here are truly endless and change with every new headline. It’s important to try one thing at a time and stick with it long enough to see if it’s actually helping or not. If you try keto, intermittent fasting, and Paleo all at once, you’ll have no idea which one is actually helping if any are.
VIII. Dial in the exercise.
This Healthy Step gives you the most freedom. By this point, you’re already doing great. You sleep is excellent, you’re eating really well, and you’re already exercising daily. If you still want to do more physically, this is the time though.
Now you can create some focused fitness goals that aren’t related to weight loss or something cosmetic. Maybe you join a race and start training for it specifically or you get interested in a sport and want to start practicing with a team. You can really do anything you want to add more movement to your life.
The key to this Healthy Step is doing it because you want to and making sure you have fun in the process. Don’t add something you’re going to dread or because someone told you it was the “best” way to workout. Find a way you like using your body and just do more of it.
It’s also completely optional if you’re already getting the results you want. There’s no need to add more if you don’t need to.
These are the behaviors that will change your life. I’m sure none of them are revolutionary for you. None of them required knowledge that you don’t already have. The Healthy Steps are simply a series of actions that I have seen work over and over again.
If you’re not making the progress you want on your health and fitness goals, this is your blueprint. Get motivated and follow the steps. Do them in order and maintain them as you move to the next one. If you can do these things, you will absolutely get results.
I do offer online personal training to help people go through this process in a personalized and ongoing way. I can help you through every step, help keep you motivated, and hold you accountable. If you would like to discuss your goals and situation, please send me an email at brian@yourstrengthcoach.com.
