Three things I wish I knew before I started my fitness journey.

When I started noticing that my body composition and my nutritional habits were not the best, I did not know how to start or where to start in order to change those habits.

First thing I did was starting to gather some information about the routine I wanted to try at the gym. It took me a couple hours to find what I thought at the moment was the best routine for me. It was composed by simple and easy to accomplish movements so I thought it was the best option. After I decided what my rutine was gonna be like (with literally no knowledge in the matter) I started to look for a way to adjust my nutritional habits to what I always saw on internet, like eating chicken and broccoli, drink protein shakes, be scared of carbs, not too much fat, a bunch of protein and that was it.

So as I started doing all these stuff consistently I started seeing some results, which was nice, but I did not know how much longer this plan was gonna be useful for, which made me think I was walking on thin ice and that was a terrible feeling that was constantly making doubt what I was doing. After few weeks the results stopped and I didn’t know what to do. Maybe I was doing something wrong, maybe i wasn’t working out hard enough, maybe my genetics were not so good, I started questioning every step of my journey and I lost a lot of motivation but somehow I managed not to stop.

I had to investigate (which was good cause it gave me a better understanding of what I was doing) and deal with all the miss information out in social media which was very hard, because I didn’t know what to believe. Everyone talked about as they had the final word and it took me years to accomplish something that nowadays I’m sure I could do in months.

What I learned from this is that there’s one thing that can guide you through it and it only keeps clarifying more and more concepts and information about fitness and that is SCIENCE. So if you are ever doing this journey by yourself and you don’t have enough budget to pay someone to guide you, stick to science.

This are the 3 things I wish I knew when I started.

1. The more right/science based information you gather the greater are your steps foward. If you gather the right amount information you could go from getting your desired results in years to getting similar or better results in just months. This is a huge difference and I never thought about it when I started.
2. You can not out-exercise a bad diet. I heard so many times this «you can eat this and you burn it at the gym later». That I thought it was real. I told myself if a lot of people are constantly saying this it must be real. Guess what it does not matter if you kill yourself at the gym 5 hours if you don’t adjust your diet correctly. You can not exercise your way out of a bad diet.
3. You most likely are going to move backwards and that happens is when you need to focus on getting back on track again. Defeating this cycle of overeating one day and feeling guilty after only get worse if you don’t get back on track as soon as possible. If you learn this you are gonna save yourself a lot of time cause in one day of overeating 3 – 4 meals a day you can really destroy a lot of progress. Imagine repeating that for 2 – 3 days. The longer you go the worse the outcome. So put yourself back on track right away after having and episode of overeating or not going to the gym for few days.