Best Habits For Weight Loss

Implementing the best habits for weight loss is the only way to achieve long-term sustainable results.

Today, I’m gonna show you 5 eating habits all lean and healthy people do in some way, shape, or form.

After reading this, you can now follow those exact same footsteps.

Best Habits For Weight Loss

I’ve shifted my nutrition approach quite a bit over the years as I’ve learned more about it. You have to constantly evolve in this industry.

This is also feedback from coaching thousands of people by proxy for almost a decade now.

I’ve always been a firm believer of taking a multifaceted approach when it comes to achieving a successful weight loss transformation. 

But I focus a lot more these days on encouraging the behaviours that lead to better eating habits, versus the mechanisms of nutrition. Especially when people are just starting out. 

But just as important, I believe, is to know what doesn’t work. You can’t just tell someone that they need to be on a calorie deficit to lose weight. 

And that’s one of the biggest problems in the health and fitness space. There’s a lot of bad information out there. 

You’ve got a lot of trainers and “influencers” still preaching this calories in vs calories out model. It’s all about the calories. You know, burn more calories, eat less calories, and it’s totally failing. 

In fact, if you look at studies, it’s got about a 99% failure rate. It fails almost every single time. Why? Because it’s such an over simplistic way of looking at the human body. 

It fails because now you’ve got people trying to manually burn calories which is a terrible approach. An hour of hard cardio for example only burns 500 calories. That’s not a lot for an hour of suffering. 

And if you go with that approach, your metabolism eventually adapts by slowing down. Which is not something that you want to happen because it makes it infinitely harder to lose weight. 

This is why I can’t stress enough the importance of doing resistance training to build and maintain muscle. 

Having a lot of lean muscle mass is the key driver of your metabolism. It’s your metabolic currency. The more you have, the more you get to eat. It’s what pays for the dance.

Don’t get me wrong, the CICO model is the base of weight loss. I’m not denying that.

But it’s so much more nuanced than that. The human body is more than just a simple mathematical equation. 

Telling someone who’s overweight or obese that they just need to be on a calorie deficit to lose weight is akin to telling someone living in poverty that if they wanna get rich, they just need to be on a money surplus. 

They obviously just have a money imbalance. They just need to make more money than they’re spending.

Do you see how ridiculous that sounds? Yes, technically that statement is true. But it’s not very helpful.

Rarely do I ever tell someone these days to track calories. Because I don’t even do that. 

What I get people to do instead is simple. Simple is good. Simple works. You wanna incorporate things into your life that encourages behaviours that naturally makes you eat better. 

Here’s the problem. If you’re constantly focusing on TRYING to eat healthy, you’re gonna fail. Eventually, your willpower is gonna run out. 

That’s why motivation is garbage. It’s fleeting. You only have a finite amount of it. I’ve never had to talk a client who’s motivated into eating right and working out. It just happens. 

The trouble is when that motivation runs out like it always does. Here are 5 things you can do instead:

Take away all distractions while you’re eating.

Don’t worry about counting calories or whatever. Every time you eat, make sure you’re not on your phone, you’re not watching tv, you’re not reading a book, and you’re just focused on eating your meal.

What does that have to do with weight loss? Everything. 

Non distracted eating naturally results in fewer calories consumed. When you’re distracted, you easily eat 15% more calories.

Here’s why it works. When you tell someone to track their calories and measure their food down to the gram, it can be mentally challenging because it’s tedious. 

Plus, the actual number of calories on the nutritional label sticker can be off by as much as 20%.

When you’re coming home from work after a long day, do you really want to be typing every food on a macro calculator and weighing everything on a food scale? No. It’s just not practical. You’re hungry. You just want to eat.

But if I tell my client to not worry about that for now. Just sit down and eat your food. Again, don’t watch tv or scroll through your phone. Everyone can do that. 

It works because they don’t feel deprived. They’re not cutting out anything. Oddly enough, people usually report fat loss after a month or two of doing non distracted eating.

Next, I don’t have hard and fast rules about food other than not going fully plant based aka going vegan. Simply put, optimal health is impossible without animal foods. 

That’s actually one of the ways I qualify people when they want to join my coaching program. If they’re vegetarian or vegan, I don’t work with them. Because it goes against everything I’ve learned about nutrition. I’m not a magician.

I’m gonna go as far as saying that not eating meat is one of the worst pieces of advice you could ever give to someone. Going vegan also doesn’t save the environment. 

But you won’t have a hard time finding a short list of people losing their menstrual cycle, erections, hair, teeth, muscle, and general health when they go vegan. It’s really confusing why people still think it’s a good idea.

My other hard rule for nutrition is not eating heavily processed food and don’t drink your calories. 

I guess that’s kind of a two-for-one deal. Save them for special occasions. But they can’t be part of your daily diet. 

Doing that one thing alone will automatically make you eat around 500 calories less every day without you even trying.

You’re gonna lose weight and improve your overall health because you’re deleting the big bad three from your diet which is ultra processed carbs usually made out of refined grains, sugar, and industrial seed oils.

This is why I always say that what you stop eating has far more impact to your health than what you start eating. Addition by subtraction.

Next, we all have trigger foods. It’s your caloric kryptonite. 

For me, it’s sweets. I love cookies and cake. Carrot cake and cheesecake are my favourites. I could go the rest of my life without chips. I don’t really care for them.

But if there’s cookies in the house, I will go full cookie monster and eat it. I just know myself. 

So now I tell my clients, you can eat whatever that trigger food is for you. 

You can eat them, they just can’t be in the house. 

If you really want them, you have to go out, walk or drive to the store and get a single serving. You can have it, no problem. Don’t stress about it. 

What am I trying to accomplish there? All I’m doing is I’m creating a barrier between you and your impulse. That’s it. 

Because the foods that we tend to overeat are usually caused by impulsive behaviours.

Human beings are lazy by nature. So by creating barriers between you and that behaviour, it gives you a space to become aware of what’s going on. Because you’re a smart and capable person. 

If you end up driving to the store, that’s fine. But there will be enough times where you actually think to yourself, do I really wanna drive to the store? 

Or maybe on your way there, you ask yourself, “Why am I feeling this way? Oh, right. I’m stressed. I think I’m okay. I should probably deal with whatever is stressing me out.” 

That’s all you need. Create barriers to encourage better behaviours. 

Next, let’s talk about sequencing your meal.

This is actually such a ninja trick. Protein is extremely satiating. Think about a nice piece of ribeye steak. Same thing with non starchy vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower. 

So I get my clients to eat those two things first. 

Protein, specifically animal protein, is the one thing that you need to prioritize. The rest, you can figure out as you go. Again, I don’t even take anything away from people’s current way of eating when they’re just starting out.

Let’s say you’re 180 pounds at 20% body fat. You should eat 100 grams of protein every day. I don’t care about anything else. 

I used 0.7 grams per pound of lean body mass to get that number. 

Some experts like Dr Gabrielle Lyon even recommend 1 gram per pound of ideal bodyweight. So if your ideal bodyweight if 160 pounds, you wanna eat 160 grams of protein every day.

I also want you to eat at least a palm size serving of animal protein for every meal. That should cover the minimum of 30 grams to trigger muscle protein synthesis. 

Because I know that if you sequence your meal that way, you would eat less. Guaranteed. Again, protein is extremely satiating. 

Leafy greens and non starchy vegetables are also basically free calories. Eat as much as your heart desires. 

This is why I always say that weight loss in its very essence isn’t about counting calories. It’s about controlling hunger. Because being hungry sucks. 

Lastly, and this might be the most important one of them all in my opinion. 

You wanna do this because you love your body, not because you hate it.

Stay with me here. You’d be shocked at how much more effective you’ll be when you come from a place of love.

You’re eating healthy and working out because you wanna take care of yourself. Versus, you’re eating right and exercising because you hate the way you look.

The former feels good, while the latter feels bad. No wonder people stop their diet or stop working out and say that they just wanna enjoy their lives.

Whenever someone goes MIA at the gym and I randomly run into them. I ask them why they stopped working out. Their response is usually that they just wanna enjoy their lives.

Which makes no sense. The reality is you’ll enjoy your life more because you’re fit and healthy. You’ll have a way better quality of life because you’re fully functional and badass human being that can do all kinds of cool stuff.

But people come at it from this negative self loathing place. Even saying that right now doesn’t feel good. And if you hate your body, what is exercise? Punishment. 

That’s why you see people trying to manually burn calories on their favourite cardio machine which again is the wrong way to go about it.

If you hate your body, what is eating right? It’s full restriction. It’s taking things away. You think you’re depriving yourself. 

Which has now resulted in this misguided body positive movement led by wokesters who doesn’t want to try anymore. 

So they let themselves go and now proclaim health at every size. Listen, there is nothing healthy about being overweight or obese. If you look at what’s going on in the world right now, 80% of hospitalized people have 4 comorbidities.

Instead, if you come in with the mentality that you’re making these changes because you wanna take care of yourself. It’s a completely different ball game. 

What is exercise? Exercise is a form of self care. Movement is medicine. If the benefits of exercise could be put in a pill, it would be the single greatest blockbuster medication of all time.

What is proper nutrition? You’re fuelling your body with the good stuff. You’re gonna feel better and have more energy. 

The difference between those two approaches are night and day. The results are also so much more permanent. 

Whereas, you can’t wait for the diet to be over if you’re coming from a place of self loath. That’s why people keep yo-yoing back and forth.

If you focus on behavioural changes, you enjoy it so much more. Eating healthy becomes habitual. Exercise becomes addictive. That’s when you hear people say, “I love going to the gym. I really enjoy it there.”

Versus, “I don’t really want to do this today. I can’t wait for it to be over.” 

Just remember that you change best when you feel good, not when you feel bad.

As always, if this was helpful, share it with a friend who could benefit from it as well!

Need More Help?

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