15 Minute Weight Loss – The Plan Of Attack (Shift415)

The #1 New Year’s resolution has to be “I’m going to lose weight”. People who are die-hard gym-goers have stories about how swamped the places are in January, only to be empty again in April. No lasting change is usually made, because the cycle repeats itself the next year.

So how do we get on the path to real, lasting change? We implement the “Get Specific, Get A Framework, Get Momentum” plan I outlined in my earlier post. Let’s dive in!

The Overview

We need to define some action that we can take to help us with weight loss. Since weight loss is inextricably tied to your eating habits, that’s as good a place as any to start.

Think of the food you eat as belonging to three basic groups. There’s the food that’s really good for you (like fresh veggies), food that’s really bad for you (like triple-chocolate ice cream), and food that’s somewhere in the middle.

Before we go any further, I can already hear the objection. “Wait, nobody can agree on what’s really healthy or unhealthy – everybody tells me to eat something different!” The interesting thing is, there are “really good” and “really bad” groups that tend to be agreed upon by most health authors. You’d be hard-pressed to come up with a diet that wouldn’t let you eat fresh veggies, and you’d be even harder-pressed to come up with a diet that would allow you large quantities of triple-chocolate ice cream.

There are two basic ways you can change your eating habits. You can start eating things that are really good for you, or you can stop eating things that are really bad for you. For this exercise, we’re going to focus on the latter.

Get Specific

Identify things that you eat right now, but should probably eat less of. There might be a lot of things, and that’s okay. Make as complete a list as you can.

Once you have the list, pick the one that’s likely to make the biggest difference. If you eat a pint of ice cream every day, that’s a good place to start. Soda is another. Delivered pizza is a good candidate too!

You’re going to significantly reduce your consumption of just that one item. If there are more items on the list, save the list – you can repeat this process as necessary!

Now do two simple things:

• Find Your Frequency - How often do you currently eat the item on your list? Once a day? Once a week? Make a note of it.
• Re-Tune Your Dial - Now create a new frequency. If you were eating delivered pizza once a day before, switching to twice a week or once a week would be reasonable. If you were eating a big bowl of ice cream a few times a week, once every week or once every two weeks would be a good place to start. The idea is to eat it less often, not to cut it out entirely.

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