If you didn’t read part one, click here. For a quick refresher, the tips we’re sharing during this series are not scientific facts based entirely on research done in a lab on the campus of some university. Instead, they are from firsthand accounts of members at our gym and other gyms who have lost a significant amount of weight. We gathered up our data, combed through it looking for patterns, and synthesized it into a few tips. You can consider this “the best practices for weight loss.”
You can lose weight by just dieting. You can also lose weight by just exercising. However, if you really want to light the fat loss inferno, the magic happens when you add a diet TO exercise. Every single one of our 20+ pound weight loss success stories followed some kind of diet along with exercise. Zero exceptions. Not one outlier.
So what kind of diet was most commonly used? 3 options:
1. The majority of members that have lost and maintained a significant amount of weight loss were members of some kind of nutritional group, with Weight Watchers being the most common. Although there’s nothing special about the diet Weight Watchers recommends, there is something special about a group of people who are fighting the exact same problem meeting weekly/monthly. It’s powerful. Those same behavioral psychology underpinnings also are the reason why joining a gym with friends tends to produce better results than exercising at home.
2. Other members followed a diet from a popular weight loss book. Either the book was recommended by a friend who had success with it, a member saw it in one of the magazines they read, or they stumbled upon it by sheer luck. The diets varied wildly. Some were low carbohydrate. Some were low fat. Some were Mediterranean. Some were Atkin’s. The type didn’t really matter. What really mattered was they followed that diet and that diet only. They didn’t try to mix and match various diets. They didn’t take what they liked from the diet, and ignored what they didn’t like. They followed it exactly as was written.
3. And then there were some members that didn’t need a book or weight loss group to tell them where they were sabotaging their weight loss efforts. They knew exactly what their bad habits were, and they started to eliminate them one at time. Some members drank 2-3 sodas per day. Others had candy for their snacks. There were a few that ate nothing but junk food for breakfast. Slowly and steadily, they replaced a bad habit with a good one, and the fat continued to trickle off.
Don’t make it complex. Don’t make it miserable. Don’t look for a quick fix or a magic weight loss pill. It is a journey that has ups and downs, much like life. Make a commitment and follow the process even if it looks like you aren’t going anywhere.
In part 3, we’ll take a closer look at the point in time when the members started doing less cardio and more resistance training to get over that fat loss plateau.
