Weight Loss: A Better Approach

How to make change when change is hard.

There is almost always a better way to do what you’re trying to achieve than what you’re currently doing.

Hi everybody, Dr. Cobb back with you. Hope you’re again having a fantastic week.

This week we’re going to take a quick test to get everything started.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to ask you a question, I want you to hit pause, answer the three questions and then hit “un-pause” and then we’ll keep going. Alright?

Weight Loss: A Better Approach – Your Top Three Things List

Here’s your test.

I want you to think about fat loss or weight loss. Now we’re not only going to talk about weight loss as a fat loss because that’s what most people want, but I want you to think about the three top things that you could do with regards to food or your diet to help you lose fat. Alright, hit pause and comeback when you’re ready.

Now, here’s my guess. My guess is if you hit pause and you actually wrote down your top three things that you can think of to changing your diet or food, to lose fat, virtually everyone that’s listening to this, I would guess 90%+ all three things that they listed had to do with food choice. Most people when they think about their diet or think about losing fat, losing weight, they’re like, “Okay, uh, I need to eat less.” And when they say eat less, they’re usually thinking eat less of something.

Usually what I hear, when I ask people this question, is well, “I need to cut out sugar, I need to cut out gluten or cut out fat or whatever the flavor of the week is with regards to the media telling you what to eat, what not to eat.”

Now the reason I’m bringing this up is a while ago I did a blog and then in that blog I said, “You know, there’s a fantastic book out there called Switch.” It’s a fantastic book because it talks about, “How to make change when change is hard.”

One of their basic rule is there is almost always a better way to do what you’re trying to achieve and what you’re currently doing.

Now if you took that test and everything that you wrote down was related to what you’re choosing to eat, that’s probably a strategy that you’ve tried thousands of times, meal to meal or maybe it’s something that you try for a dedicated 12 months or whatever.

But when we stop and look at the research around diets in the big wide world, the fact is they constantly getting people to focus on what they’re eating doesn’t seem to work because when you do this long term studies and we look at people and go, “Okay, did they lose weight?” Yeah they lost weight and then over the next year they gain back and then gain it back.

The most recent study I looked at was looking at short-term weight loss or fast weight loss versus long-term weight loss and they track them for three years. The first group lost weight in 12 weeks, the 2nd group lost over almost a year and then they track them for three years and into the three years both groups have gain back around 70%-80% of the weight.

That’s what we see, across the board.

Weight Loss: A Better Approach

Weight Loss: A Better Approach – Out With The Old

In terms of creating something sustainable, very often I think it’s more important to look at behavior than what is on your plate, especially in the beginning. I’m going to recommend to you once again, it’s something you’ve heard from me before.

I want you to take it a journalistic approach to your diet, to your fat loss efforts or whatever it is you’re trying to achieve with your body composition because that’s really what this is about.

Remember in basic journalism, you have the five W’s and an H. Who, what, when, where, why and how. Who, what, when, where, why and how. If you want to take, write that out. Who, what, when, where, why and how and then put a big circle with an X through it over the “what” because I would love for you to take a month out of your life and quit worrying so much about what you’re eating and instead explore something out of one of the other categories.

How do you eat? Do you eat slowly, do you sit down with your family, do you move away from a television, do you eat and put your fork down between bites, do you chew, remember I’ve done a blog on chewing?

All of those different “how’s” incredibly important. When you eat? Do you eat in a car, do you eat very rushed at lunch? Whatever it is. You can kind of go through who, what, when, where, why and how. Who do you eat with, where do you eat, when do you eat, why do you eat, how do you eat?

Weight Loss: A Better Approach – Try Something New

My hope for you in listening to this is that big reminder that, “Hey maybe I’ve tried something multiple times and that thing that I’ve tried is what do I eat, what do I eat, what do I eat.” If you ever heard the classic definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result.

I think most of us in the body comp world see insanity all the time. We think, “Ah just one more time in eliminating this particular nutrient or this particular substance and I’ll be fine.” That rarely works. What works is looking at your environment, looking at your life and then figuring out how to approach this whole thing differently.

Weight Loss: A Better Approach – Next Steps

Your next steps, this month take about 10 minutes. Don’t make this into a life study, just take about 10 minutes. Write out who, what, when, where, why and how. Cross out “what” and then come up with one thing in each category that you could change and then pick one of those and try it for a month. Maybe it’s you know what, one meal a day I’m going to sit down with my family and just see what happens to your body, see what happens to how you feel.

Once you’ve done that, give me some feedback.

This is one of the things that I’m really emphasizing in all of our training is that we want to look at our environment, we want to look at our behavior and I love to know how this works for you because I believe that the long term solution that we all need has more to do with this than it does with demonizing any particular nutrients that we maybe eating.

That’s my thought for this week.

Hope you have fantastic week.

If you have any questions about this, please let us know.