These 8 tricks to staying disciplined only work if you do them. My advice is to glance through them, then choose 1 or 2 that will work best for you. Actually, take time to consider which will make the biggest impact. I’ve also included either how to implement each one or why they are important.
I’ve seen people have more success with #7 than any other tip below. It’s my personal favorite.
1. Set Process Goals
Losing weight is no easy feat, and it requires discipline to stay on track. The best way to stay disciplined during your weight loss journey is to create clear goals that you can work towards. It’s important that these goals are realistic, measurable, and achievable, so you can objectively see your progress during your journey. For example, instead of saying “I want to lose 10 pounds in two weeks” try setting a process goal such as “I will walk for 30 minutes every day this week” or “I will eat five servings of fruits and vegetables each day this week.” Setting process goals like this will help keep you disciplined throughout your weight loss journey.
2. Track Your Progress
Tracking your progress along the way can be an effective tool in keeping yourself disciplined while on a weight loss journey. Tracking metrics such as body measurements (waist size), body fat percentage, daily caloric intake or weekly calorie deficit can help provide insight into how far you have come and how close you are to reaching your end goal. Keeping records of multiple metrics allows you to see progress in different areas. This is especially helpful if results take longer than expected! Additionally, tracking progress may reveal unhealthy habits that could be hindering success. Once you’ve identified these trends, you’ll be better equipped to create an action plan based on your needs.
3. Celebrate Small Wins
Losing weight isn’t always about the number on the scale; celebrating small wins along the way is important to stay disciplined and continue making healthier decisions consistently over time. These small consistent decisions ultimately lead towards bigger successes down the road! The small celebrations include things like eating breakfast everyday, not skipping meals, or meeting daily step count goals using a fitness tracker device. Whenever you feel like giving up, remember to celebrate the little victories. They add up big time in the long run!
4. Reward Yourself
Reward yourself after hitting certain milestones within your weight loss journey. Reaching long term goals is hard and rewards can help reinforce the habits you need to succeed. Even though food will likely be on your mind if you’re dieting, rewards do not necessarily have food related. Other ideas might include buying new workout clothes or planning a fun night out. The important part is that you choose something you’ll enjoy doing and receiving as a reward for the hard work put in!
5. Find Inspiration From Others
Craft your social media accounts to send you inspiration from others. Social media algorithms are powerful. By interacting with positive pages and posts that provide encouragement during your journey, the social media algorithms will continue to send you similar content. Finding accounts and individuals that share similar stories and experiences can provide the positive support you need to stay focused on your goal. You may glean useful information about how others overcame the similar challenges you’re facing. Creating an environment that drives your success is critical.
6. Make Exercise Fun
Exercising doesn’t have to be a boring chore you check off your daily list. Instead, plan to incorporate ways you enjoy moving. This can include regularly participating in a sport, joining a dance class, or taking yoga. Find creative ways to incorporate physical activity into your life. It’s recommended that resistance based training be the foundation of your exercise, but this recommendation isn’t exclusive to other types of movement. It’s more important to make exercise fun and find something you love.
7. Create A Support System
Creating a support system with family members or friends who understand what it takes to maintain healthy habits is key in staying disciplined while losing weight. Having people in your corner who cheer you on encourages better behavior choices, especially when those supporting you are familiar with the effort that goes into achieving success with the diet plan or exercise routine you’ve chosen. When someone else holds us accountable, it adds extra incentive when we need an extra push! Many gyms also offer group classes where people can go together and encourage one another during their workouts – providing both physical activity guidance from professionals plus social interaction which makes exercising more enjoyable overall! If you’re local to our facility, check out our Small Group Boot Camp or Semi-Private Training programs.
8. Stay Positive
Lastly, maintain a positive attitude throughout the entire process. You can expect to have ups and downs, but it’s essential to stay true to the plan you laid out from the beginning no matter the outcome. Even though your goal is weight loss, your success lies in your ability to maintain lifestyle changes long term. This is the real determinant of losing weight and keeping it off. Don’t let negative self-talk distract you, but remind yourself of the positive changes you’ve made thus far to prevent falling back to old behaviors and undoing all progress you’ve accomplished. Stay the course. You can do this!
Are your limiting beliefs running your life? If you have excuses for why you haven’t pursued what is important to you, then the answer is yes. That may not be what you want to hear, but it’s the truth. As a coach I find that a person’s ability to overcome their limiting beliefs is strongly correlated with their success. When you are ready to take responsibility for your choices, you are ready to overcome the beliefs that previously held you back.
“The only thing that holds you back is yourself.” — David Minishian
Limiting Beliefs
A limiting belief is an acceptance that something is true about the world, others or ourselves. These are beliefs prevent us from taking actions that we would otherwise take if we weren’t limited by the belief. Limiting beliefs stop us from progressing and pursuing goals before we even try. Often these beliefs take the form of excuses and we use these excuses to express that there were circumstances outside of our control. As long as these limiting beliefs exist, we can’t be our best.
Why We Have Limiting Beliefs
Limiting beliefs provide us with certainty. We like to be able to predict certain outcomes. If we do X, then Y will happen. But the truth is we don’t know that we can’t cook; we don’t know that there isn’t enough time in the day to exercise; we don’t know that our kids won’t exercise with us. It’s easier to claim that it won’t work than to test how it will. It’s easier to take a stance of certainty than to entertain the what is possible, especially when those possibilities aren’t in our favor.
Overcome Limiting Beliefs
The first step to overcoming a limiting belief is taking responsibility. By taking responsibility, you claim the power you have to accomplish your goals. Instead of expressing challenges as excuses, transform the way you think about challenges by changing the way you speak about them. For example, switch “It’s impossible to workout because (insert here)” to “I am capable of working out despite my 12 hour shifts, -despite caring for my 3 young kids, -despite the responsibilities and commitments of my days. I am capable of staying consistent even if they are 10 minute workouts.” Your language is important, because saying something is impossible makes it so.
Ready to build the body you want with a sustainable lifestyle?
David is the owner and head coach at Sculpt Fitness in Long Beach, CA. He leads the mission at Sculpt to educate, equip, and empower the local community to make the best decisions for their health. For over 10 years he has coached exercise and nutrition, helping clients create sustainable lifestyle to build the body they want. When he's not training, coaching or cooking, David is on an adventure with his wife and kids or teeing up his next shot on a golf course.
Regular and Routine are the most important words around exercise.
A regular exercise routine is an important part of your health, and it may be the largest obstacle between you and your goals. You know that you need to exercise and maybe you do exercise. But is it a regular routine and what should a regular routine look like?
To maintain your long-term health, your body needs to be taken care of regularly. Arbitrarily exercising, albeit better than nothing, isn’t going to do the job. You need a specific plan of action. You need a plan that works.
To create this plan, let’s focus on the two key words Regular and Routine.
Regular
Your exercise routine needs to be regular, consistent. Exercising a couple days a week isn’t going to do the job. The first step you need to take is to commit to 4 days a week.
Why 4 days?
You should exercise more often than you don’t exercise. It’s pretty difficult to claim you exercise regularly when you take more rest days than active days.
Regular exercise promotes a number of health benefits:
Lowers blood pressure
Decreases stress
Improves mood
Boosts energy
Maintains a healthy weight
Enhances memory and cognitive function
Promotes better sleep
But regular exercise also means regular as in commonplace, normal, and nothing special. You probably don’t hear fitness professionals telling you to just do regular exercise routines, mainly because it’s not ‘sexy’ to market normal. Normal sounds boring.
In reality, regular is what you need and regular will out do every exercise modality fad.
Why am I promoting a regular routine?
Because you don’t need all the bells and whistles. In fact, all the extra stuff takes away from the fundamental movements that are proven to get the best results consistently.
Now don’t get me wrong, regular still means personalized to you and your goals. You just don’t need to incorporate every ‘cool looking’ exercise or use the latest and ‘greatest’ equipment. Doing what is regular works best.
Routine
The best exercise routine for you is highly dependent on you and your goals. This is why I interview prospective clients. I want to get to know them and their goals before accepting them into a program. The program, the goal, and the client all need to match.
Without getting into the specifics of various routines for different goals, here are the fundamental rules that routines should follow.
Compound Movements: A majority of the exercises should prioritize compounds movements to build the muscle, improve body control and balance, and maximize calories burned.
Progressions: Lifting the same weight over and over will result in a plateau. You need to gradually increase the weight and difficulty of the routine to see further progress.
Appropriate Variety: Find the balance between incorporating every exercise you can think of and the basic compound lifts. Variety will stimulate the muscle to improve growth and control, but too much variety will hinder your progress and actually prevent improvement.
However, the most important part of a routine is actually having one and following it.
Most gym-goers use a couple machines at best, avoid the free weight section, jump on the treadmill or bike for the remainder of the workout, and call it a day. This is not a routine or plan that will get continuous results. You may have gotten limited results doing this, but you will plateau.
By creating an actual routine and following it, you will have remarkably greater outcomes and be in control of your progress.
If you haven’t been doing this on your own and you want consistent results, you may want to check out our Small Group Training or Semi-Private Training Program. Register for either one, and we’ll help you find the right fit for you.
Follow these simple rules to eat what you want at social events.
Social events are a major pitfall of losing weight. Work events, family parties, anniversaries, family trips, and sports gatherings are just a few of the social gatherings people participate in regularly. When planning our health and fitness goals, spending time with other people is a part of our lives that we cannot ignore.
Why?
Because many, if not most, social events have food. Think of how we incorporate food into these events: potlucks, bbq’s, pizza nights, Superbowl snacks, and the list goes on.
We love food and we also love to share it and experience it with others. It’s a fact of life you should accept unless you want to be the person that brings there own food to a party. No judgement if you do, but 99.9% of people don’t do this and won’t do this long term.
So how do you eat at social events and not get fat?
Follow these simple steps:
1. Portion Control
Eat what you want, but portion control the meal. If you find yourself going back for seconds, stop and ask yourself if you are actually hungry. It’s easy to overeat when you’re enjoying delicious food, but try your best to contain the urge to keep eating. Just because the food is there doesn’t mean you have to eat it.
Portion control is a tried and true method to dial in your food intake. It can be used not only at social events but also while in the comfort of your own home, with your own food, without the party.
2. More Volume Less Calories
When choosing the foods to fill your plate, still pick the foods you love but make this one small tweak: Fill your plate with higher volume foods. This is going to make a huge difference in the nutritional outcome of your meal. When you eat foods that are higher in volume (aka foods that physically take up a lot of space but are lower in calories), you naturally reduce the number of calories you consume without the sacrifice.
Eating healthier isn’t about sticking to salads for every meal, but about find the right balance of foods that gets results.
3. Hydrate First
Depending on the party you might have a plethora of different drinks: sodas, lemonade, iced tea, beer, hard liquor, etc. If you enjoy a drink with some flavor, go for it!
But follow this one rule: HYDRATE FIRST.
Before “quenching your thirst,” actually quench your thirst by drinking a couple glasses a water. Drinking your calories is an extremely easy way to gain weight, but you can help curb that outcome by hydrating your body. The only reason we need to drink fluids is to hydrate, so fulfill what the body needs. Then feel free to drink for enjoyment.
When you put what you need in front of what you want, good things happen.
If these tips were helpful in navigating social events, you’ll get a ton of value from our Nutrition Coaching. It’s our nutrition program designed to help you build the body you want with a sustainable way of eating.
The way you build good habits is the same way you build bad habits.
The Best Way To Build Habits For Health
What is the best way to build habits?
Habits have a clear impact on your health. They determine what you eat, how much you sleep, and the amount of exercise you do. Habits help you find shortcuts to completing tasks or solving problems without copious contemplation like brushing your teeth, drinking a cup of coffee, or getting dressed for work. But they aren’t only practices you do consistently, they fundamentally shape who you are down to the neurological network in your brain. Habits are hardwired into you as mental shortcuts. These shortcuts largely influence your daily actions, and those daily actions effect your health.
This habit to health association makes addressing your habits the best place to start when seeking a specific health outcome. However, most approach the development of habits all wrong. They rely on sheer willpower or the ability to “just do it.” But in the end, this approach will likely fail you.
Why?
Well you tried to force a habit.
Build Habits – Good and Bad
Building habits isn’t difficult. In fact, you’re a pro and you just don’t know. (this was my attempt at making a rhyme.) How can I say that? Because you build habits and continue to reinforce them all the time. You’ve been doing this for years and it has worked consistently.
Not convinced?
Consider the bad habits you want to forget. How did you start that habit? What actions have you taken to keep it up? When do you practice it? How does it make you feel? Why do you do it? Why can’t you stop it?
There are reasons you built bad habits, continue to reinforce them, and can’t shake them. Discover those reasons and you’ll have your key to breaking bad habits and building new habits.
The way you build good habits is the same way you build bad habits.
If your bad habit is drinking soda, I’m sure you didn’t force yourself to drink it consistently by sheer willpower. So don’t take the same approach when developing good habits. Use the method that already works for you. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
Change Your Environment
Your bulletproof formula for building habits may not be clear to you at the moment. However, I promise you have one that is working for you and your ENVIRONMENT is a part of it.
Create a conducive environment for your habits to flourish and you will drastically increase your chances of building habits. The habit building process relies on key levers that make you want to practice them, and your environment is the main lever. It wields the most power to create change.
Consider these examples:
Example 1: You know eating fruit is a good for your health. However, you don’t eat fruits nearly enough. One reason is accessibility. If an apple is in the fridge, in a drawer, pushed to the back, your chances of eating that piece of fruit decline. Now, move that apple to the kitchen counter or next to your car keys and your chances of eating the fruit drastically increases. Next time you leave for work, you take that apple with you. With your environment changed, so did your action.
Example 2: Say your favorite fruit is pineapple. You buy one and put it on the counter like the apple. After a week you realize it’s not getting eaten like the apple. You decide to change your approach by cutting up the pineapple and putting it in the front of the fridge. Within days the pineapple is gone. Why? Because you increased your accessibility to the pineapple by eliminating the preparation step of cutting it.
These examples are focused on how you can change your environment to promote action. The more consistently your environment promotes those actions, the sooner those actions develop the habit you want to achieve. You don’t need to will your way to building habits; you just need to shape your environment to reduce the friction for good habits and increase the friction for habits you want to stop.
If you’re interested in building habits to gain control of your health, register for our Small Group Program.
Subscribing to a diet is not the right solution. It could be hurting your chances of success.
Diet Subscription
Starting a new diet is like a temporary subscription. You try it for awhile. See how it feels. Tell your friends and family about it. It’s fun at first, maybe even a little exciting as you figure out new recipes and flavors. After a couple weeks you’re seeing results (down 5 lbs!). The diet is working and you feel incredible!
Maybe you’ve been there and had that initial feeling of success. Well you aren’t alone. Many have seen immediate “results” on a diet and have been quick to share their success. Others hear the diet works, get inspired, try the diet for themselves and have the same experience. The cycle repeats.
But fast forward 3 months and you’ve gained the weight back. The success didn’t last. So…what happened?
You were victimized by the Diet Subscription Trap.
This is a nasty trap that has been used for decades to SELL DIETS. Why sell diets? Because no one makes money telling people to eat fruits and vegetables, reduce processed food intake, and consume smaller portions. Although this is great health advice, it doesn’t sell. However, if the nutrition information is packaged into a specific diet that is easy to follow, it can be sold as a “cure” by savvy individuals who write books. Consumers buy the books, subscribe to the diet, share their results, and promote the diet.
The truth is: it’s all hype. Anyone who restricts their food intake and makes healthier choices will get results. In this way diets are not unique or special. Don’t be a victim of someone’s Diet Subscription Trap. I know several diets look promising. They are backed by science, testimonials, and professionals who advocate for the diet claiming it’s better for XYZ reasons. But none of that matters.
Why?
Because it’s not your diet.
Your Diet
Your diet is the way you eat. It includes the foods you most commonly consume. Everyone has a diet they currently adhere to and depending on the person that diet can fluctuate drastically or be very limited in scope.
Your diet is uniquely yours. It is tailored to your likes and dislikes. For this reason, trying to subscribe to someone else’s diet is like attempting to fit a square peg in a round hole. It doesn’t fit. It was designed by another person who has their own likes and dislikes. Taking their diet won’t work for you.
You have to create your own diet tailored to your goals.
Your “goal oriented” diet will include the foods you enjoy eating. It will also take into account:
Required preparation times
Willingness and ability to cook
Food availability
Take out options
Nutritional knowledge
These numerous factors won’t be taken into account with someone else’s plan. This is why I advocate for creating your own personalized plan, an ideal diet.
Creating your ideal diet is a great place to start, because it provides a diet framework to follow that isn’t food exclusive, but inclusive. This framework is at the core of our Nutrition Coaching to continuously improve their personal diets.
Our Nutrition Coaching is designed to address diet fluidity, because our diets constantly change over time, as the contributing factors I described above change. (This is why rigid diets like meal plans don’t work long-term.) Your ideal diet can be developed in an afternoon, but it requires time and effort to prepare, considering all the factors involved.
