In this episode we’ll go over the top 2 things you can do for a very simple but very effective “plan” to start losing weight fast, but in a sustainable and healthy way.
Transcript:
All right, welcome to Episode 1 of the TrimHabit podcast. I’m Nate Norton. I’m the host. And I’m also the founder of TrimHabit.
So in this podcast and these videos, we are going to focus on replacing the idea of going on a diet with lifelong healthy habits that will also lead to achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight. You know, I’m I’m obviously not a fitness model or anything like that. I was pretty overweight several years ago. And it was one of the hardest things that I’ve had to figure out in life was how to lose weight and keep it off, you know, and eventually realizing know, trying all the diets and then eventually realizing that this is going to have to be things that I can actually live with on a long term basis. Hence the idea of a habit versus, you know, trying to go on a diet for three or four weeks or something like that. So in this episode, we’re going to start with trying to help you get a quick win, something that you can do, the highest leverage thing to lose weight, narrowing it down to just one thing and, framing that with the title of the episode. What is the best way to start losing weight? We’re not going to talk about specific diets in this episode. Here’s what we will cover. We’re going to cover the big thing that people don’t realize when they try to start a weight loss plan and specifically kind of the idea of the New Year’s resolution where someone’s just been going along and they’re just going to, they pick a date in the future and that’s when their program’s going to start and they’re going to do all these things different. We’re going to talk about why that very rarely works out. The mental and the psychological things going on behind that. We’re also going to talk about the number one way to avoid failure, how to have a quick success so that you gain momentum up front. You’re meaning you’re getting results quickly, and not from doing anything drastic like a crash diet or anything, which also leads to a lot of motivation to help you keep going. We’re going to cover the one change to make that will lead to lasting success. And then we’re going to cover exercise made easy, that works. I promise it will be, it will, it will be made easy. So we’ll also go over in or go into how to put this all together, how you can get started with just the simple ideas that we’re going to cover on this episode. So my story real quickly, you can see the before and after and then you can obviously see me on camera here, of course, on video. And so one thing to realize with this is I’ve always worked out I played sports in high school. I worked out three times a week almost unless I was sick or something, I mean, never missing a week. However, that was always lifting weights. So I wasn’t getting any really cardio aspect, but I was I’d be doing hour-long workouts, always had a gym membership, always go to the gym. And it was just around age like, 25, things completely changed. Within a year or two I had gained 30 pounds and from there I just kept going up. So I always worked out a lot. I realized I was always tired. You know, I was working in a regular kind of corporate, corporate job. Always tired. The afternoons were an absolute train wreck because I would go eat lunch, go out to eat with everyone. Eat a cheeseburger or just something really tasty. And the afternoons were just a nightmare, you know. Then just be drinking caffeine, coffee all afternoon just to try and feel, just to try and stay awake. Just a very bad, a very bad cycle. I really indulged in food at this stage. I mean, I kind of always had. But like I said, at age 25, it was like a switch flipped. And a lot of people have that experience. I also, the other thing I would do is I basically ate all day every day. There were no kind of time limits or no, no notion of, stopping at a certain time or starting at a certain time. As you’ll hear, now I do intermittent fasting. And besides all the other benefits that comes with that, it just, at least it gives me like a eating schedule, which is it’s helpful on its own. So like I said, I weighed 240 pounds being 5′ 9″. On the BMI scale, that’s in the really obese range. Coming to current time, I still work out a lot. I do a lot more cardio based stuff. I still lift weights a lot. But you do have to get the heart rate pumping. That is that is just something that everybody, every adult should be doing multiple times a week. I eat mostly at home. Made a big shift to, taking lunches, eating at home, making really good recipes, but at home. It’s just a completely different thing from like a calorie nutrient dense perspective versus, you know, like making your own things at home from real ingredients versus from the back of a Cisco truck, you know, from restaurants. Like I said, I do intermittent fasting. I’ve just, as far as food items, I have just kind of permanently replaced a lot of the treats that it used to eat with more healthy items. My go to snack at night is just a is a piece of toast on whole wheat and then some regular cows milk. And that is just as satisfying as the tastiest dessert. You know, there are certain times where I would really prefer a piece of cheesecake, obviously, like everyone. But that’s just been a big step, just replacing some of my favorite things with healthier versions. I’m also a supplement junkie at this point. Hence the whole TrimHabit thing and our focus on providing healthy supplements that kind of support this idea of healthy, lifelong habits. There are a lot of supplements out there that kind of go with all the fad diets like keto salts and things like that. You won’t see any of that at TrimHabit. We focus on the supplements and vitamins that have real research behind them and actually support kind of our idea of lifelong habits. And then at the same time, you know, being healthy, being at a healthy weight at this point. You know, it doesn’t solve all of life’s problems or anything like that.
But to quote Forrest Gump, it is just one less thing to worry about. And there’s a lot of spillover effects into a lot of other areas. I feel better. I have a lot more energy. All the things that you hear people say, it’s just one less thing to worry about.
And you feel better each day and everything that goes with that. So changing habits getting into this now. Here’s the thing about changing habits, you always hear that it takes 21 days to establish a new habit. And there’s, there’s different opinions on the research on that. But the biggest thing is understanding that big lifestyle changes usually require changing a lot of habits all at once, which is why if we go into what I mentioned earlier, the New Year’s resolution. Kind of this idea where, someone is chugging along and a lot of adults do this and everyone kind of goes along, you start January, you have all these new ideas that you want to do. These new goals. And if you’re lucky, you know, you kind of work on them. Maybe until July or maybe like August or September, but the holidays inevitably come around each year and people just kind of lose steam. And even if you’ve managed to lose, you know, fifteen, ten, fifteen, twenty pounds throughout the year, those holidays come and November starts getting ugly.
There’s something about fall. You know, most adults just kind of struggle with this cycle year to year of trying to lose weight, kind of stay trim and then just gaining it all back in the last few months of the year. And the bad thing about getting older is you usually, the bad parts of the year usually outpace the good parts. And so year to year, most people overall, like net, gain five or ten pounds as the years go by. Now, New Year’s resolution, getting more specific. All the things that that requires if you’re going to do it successfully, if you if you think about this, like I said, it requires changing a lot of habits all at once. You’re going to start eating new food. And and most people jump right into it and they kind of go extreme. You know, they go from eating the kind of things that they want to eat, which is satisfying, very enjoyable. To eating what they know are diet foods, you know, likes boneless, skinless chicken breast and broccoli and brown rice. And if you’re just jumping into a diet, you don’t really know any better than that. That’s just everyone knows those are like the healthy foods. The problem is eating that kind of stuff every day sucks. And so people don’t stick with that because it sucks. If you’re going to go beyond those, you know, three or four staple healthy foods. That means you’re going to be doing meal prepping. You’re going to be, you’re either going to have to know how to cook healthy and have it still taste good or you’re going to have to learn that. You have to get used to not eating out as much or when you do go out to eat, ordering healthy stuff. So there are all these, there are all these habits and then there’s there’s the whole aspect of sleep and keeping better routines and cutting out the unhealthy stuff. A lot of people have kind of rituals tied in with their bad eating habits, like grabbing a bagel at your favorite spot in the morning along with coffee. And the coffee has sugar and a bunch of cream in it. And it’s more, it’s almost more of an emotional behavioral thing than it is about just getting coffee in the morning. There are just all these things wrapped up into our daily habits or rituals and thinking that you’re just going to jump into a completely clean, healthy eating plan and stick to it. What you’re really doing is you’re trying to change 10, or 15, or 20 different habits overnight. So it’s no wonder that these these new plans that people jump into don’t last longer than a few weeks. We only have the capacity to make a few big changes at once. That’s a very important thing about human behavior and just our capacity to change. It’s just important to realize that and understand that. So the best approach is to choose one or two things that will really count, that will really move the needle. Now, before we get into that, there are a lot of things that really don’t do that much. And these are a lot of things that you would find on blog posts out there, tips, healthy things or healthy? and a lot of these I mean, we would recommend you’d see them on our other blog posts or mentioned, but by themselves, they don’t really do that much. So one thing that people will do is they will make this long list of, these are the, these are the new things that I’m going to do.
It’s things like taking the stairs at work instead of riding the elevator. So you go up four or five flights of stairs instead of riding the elevator, or parking far away at the grocery store.
Now, those are all good things to do. But if that’s really, if that’s kind of all you’re doing, these turn into motivation killers because, after a week or two, you will feel like you’re kind of putting this time and effort into these new habits, but you’re not really seeing results, and then you start thinking, this is ridiculous. Nothing works. I’ve got this list of 10 new things that I’m that I’ve been trying to do every day and I’m doing them. And it’s really annoying to park far away. It’s really annoying to take the stairs. I’m kind of like sweaty when I get to my office and you just start to get annoyed because it’s not really working. And it’s because these things, these aren’t things that really move the needle. These aren’t things that really make a difference. Also, you know, these are like healthy things like you should be doing these things, drinking more water, eating more fruit, eating more vegetables. But again, those alone, they are not going to help you cut down the tree, so to speak. At best, these things, by themselves, are like reaching up and picking some leaves off the tree when you’re trying to cut the tree down. These are the kinds of things like parking further away or taking the stairs. These burn like 20 or 30 calories at a time, which is honestly the same amount as like one Cheeto. So it just it doesn’t do anything to really move the needle and help you either burn a lot of calories or avoid a lot of calories. Now, what really does move the needle? Here’s the thing that you need to understand. The biggest realization or the biggest thing that you need to “get” and understand in weight loss and being healthier. It is so much easier to avoid calories than to burn calories. It is so much easier to avoid calories than to burn calories. Alright? One hour of nonstop exercise, meaning walking or jogging on a treadmill for an entire hour, like nonstop. That burns somewhere between 200 and 400 calories for the average person. The ease of which you can put calories down your throat in your body. It’s so easy to eat 800 or 1,000 calories, nd it’s very hard to burn off that 800 or 1,000 calories. It takes a lot of work. So walking on the treadmill, you might burn two to 400 calories and then a regular sized McFlurry has eight hundred calories or more, and you can eat that in five minutes. So it’s kind of just this cosmic joke, and I would talk about this with my wife when I was kind of going through this process. Just how unfair it is that cheeseburger and fries from my favorite place is like two thousand calories. And I would have to go to like three workout classes to burn that same amount of calories. And so just the effort involved is, you know, is so unbalanced that it’s just so much easier to avoid calories than it is to try and burn calories. So consuming less calories is by far the easiest way to make a big impact. That does not mean, and I want to be very clear on this, that does not mean you have to starve yourself. Food choices, substitutions, your eating schedule?. These are all ways to, you know, avoid all these extra calories without, it doesn’t just mean not eating, doesn’t mean starving yourself. You can make huge shifts in the amount of calories you’re consuming each day by just changing the kind of things that you eat. And again, it doesn’t have to be, you know, like boiled chicken breast and steamed broccoli. Doesn’t have to be that. You can make huge changes in the amounts of calories you’re consuming week to week by just using food substitutions. And it doesn’t have to be drastic. Now, how do do all that? That’s not the point of this episode. Here is where the advice comes to you, what you need to do with this. Now, you most likely have one or two big, what I would call dieting, downfalls or obstacles to losing weight. And you probably know exactly what they are. It might be eating out every day at lunch. It might be snacking late at night. It might even be snacking all day. You know, you just happen to have junk food in your house. Mean, it doesn’t really matter what it is. So whatever your big dieting downfall is, you need to make a plan for a healthier version of that, whatever that is. So just a few basic suggestions. Eating junk food late at night, if that’s what your dieting downfall is, then switch to eating a more nutrient dense dinner, maybe having a protein shake as a snack and then taking apple cider vinegar with dinner because you know, you can drink the vinegar or you could try our, the TrimHabit ACV capsules, so you don’t have to drink the vinegar. But either way, apple cider vinegar, it does a lot of things to kind of aid weight loss. It, it helps your body be more efficient with the way that it burns carbs from a big meal. It makes you feel fuller longer. And then it just helps with digestion, mostly of carbohydrates. What our customers kind of experience is, you take the ACV with dinner, and then you will just feel fuller and more satisfied. So it’s just easier to not have the cravings late at night. And a lot of people report they sleep better when they take them with dinner. If you’re dieting downfall is eating a lot of frozen food just because it’s easy and convenient or just not so healthy food, whether it’s just eating, not healthy food, whether that’s takeout or freezer food, you want to find a few go to recipes that you can make with real ingredients at your house, mostly from whole foods, and that you still really enjoy. And again, that will be replacing, I mean, when you order takeout? Chinese food or burgers and fries, I mean, whatever it is, stuff that tastes really good from a restaurant is going to be somewhere in like the fifteen hundred to two thousand calorie range for one meal and maybe even worse. But if you switch that with recipes that you’re making from home, from your own ingredients, it can still be stuff that is really tasty, that is much more satisfying because junk food just leads to more cravings, as you probably are aware, whereas these nutrient dense meals make you feel full for a really long time. And that’s more to the tune of like five hundred to seven or eight hundred calories. So it’s like half the calories and you feel fuller longer and obviously it’s much, much better for your body and all its processes. So it’s it’s like a win win win. And the only downside is that it does take more work to make your own meals than to order something on door dash. And then another thing that you might try is intermittent fasting. And again, the point of this episode isn’t isn’t to go into intermittent fasting and explain all the ins and outs of it. But a really good summary in three words is basically just not eating breakfast. Now, you’ve probably always heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and that’s been proven in a lot of studies to be a myth. Our bodies are very adaptable. The thing with intermittent fasting as far as not eating breakfast is so you kind of lower your, or you shorten your eating window to basically you start at noon. So you just start with lunch, and then you you just kind of eat until eight o’clock. Now, the really nice thing about intermittent fasting is it’s a very simple way to basically cut a third of your normal calories out of your day. And most people don’t feel very hungry in the mornings. And if you just kind of have coffee and that will help your body burn fat until lunch, and then once you start eating for the day, you can have two pretty big meals, you know, like eight or nine hundred calories each. And two of those, you will feel very full and satisfied after a meal that big. One at lunch, and then you have a big dinner and you’ve only eaten, you know, less than two thousand calories for the day. So almost any adult, if that was kind of what you were sticking to each day, you would lose weight over time. Intermittent fasting is just an easy way to kind of just put some controls in place for when you eat, when you kind of limit, when your body gets food. Your body is much more effective at processing and digesting that food. A lot less of it gets stored as body fat. And there’s just all kinds of benefits to intermittent fasting, all kinds of studies on it that that prove it. And again, we won’t go into all that here, but it might be something you think about trying. Now, here’s the next thing. You want to do some exercise at least three times a week, not exercising at this point – you should honestly view this as like as bad as smoking. If you are an adult and you’re twenty five years old or older, you need to be doing some form of exercise. I mean, any doctor in America would tell you, would tell you that everyone should be doing exercise, some exercise three times a week. I mean, most doctors say that people should be doing some kind of physical activity every day. So at a bare minimum, you should be doing some kind of exercise three times a week. And the benefits are endless. And everyone knows this. I mean, this is like indisputable. You can’t argue with this. You feel happier. You feel more motivated for doing productive things in life. It reduces stress. It fuels weight loss. It’s good for your body. It’s good for every part of your body, every process in your body. It increases energy, reduces the risks of chronic disease, helps your skin, helps your brain function. Basically everything under the sun. There are no downsides to exercise, especially kind of healthy, low impact exercise. Now, the other reason is or the other reason why there is no excuse at this point in time to not be doing exercise is whatever your profile is?
What I mean by this is if you’re a woman that’s in their 50s or a woman in their 70s or you’re a 30 year old dad who wants to build a little bit of muscle, or you’re a 40 year old dad who wants to lose stomach fat or you have a shoulder injury. I mean, you can honestly, there are YouTube channels and home exercise routines specifically for whatever your personal profile is.
You know, if you need exercises that are really easy on your lower back, you can literally type that exact thing in and your age. And if you want it to be yoga based stuff or pilates based stuff or resistant band stuff or cardio type stuff, you can type in anything to YouTube at this point and get almost unending results of easy at home workout videos that you can follow. You can do it standing there in your socks and your underwear. I mean, just there, there are just no excuses to not be, you know, moving your body, making the blood flow, getting your heart pumping. Everyone should be doing some exercise three times a week. So even if, even if all you do, if you are the biggest exercise phobe ever and I have a few relatives that just refuse to exercise for whatever reason. I mean, there are people out there like that. And I think what it comes down to is if you’ve gone through like your 30s and 40s and you never exercised, it’s almost kind of this mental limitation or it’s almost this easy excuse to hang on to like I just hate exercise. I mean, I just hate it. You know, it’s okay. Is that really what you’re going to cling to? You know, to not to just kind of keep gaining weight, getting more and more unhealthy? Year after year, like at some point, you just have to be honest with yourself. You, you have to just admit. I know that I should be exercising. There are just no excuses at this point because you can find a YouTube channel that puts on free workout videos for whatever your profile, health profile and whatever your exercise or music kind of tastes are. There’s just something out there that can make it fun and enjoyable for you personally. So in the beginning, if all you do is, you know, spend an hour just trying to find some of those videos and you just stand there in front of your TV and kind of move a little bit, just commit to at least doing that for an hour, three times a week, trying to find, you know, that channel that is like for you. Just do that. Start with that in the beginning. The other thing that I really like, I lift weights a lot and then three times, actually four times a week. I do these long walks. What I actually have is a treadmill in front of our TV upstairs. And I stand there and I play X-Box while I walk for an hour. And then I have my headphones in and I’m listening to audible audio books or podcasts. And I always just refer to this as learn and burn. I love listening to stuff that helps me learn things. Kind of just makes me better as a person while I’m standing, while I’m not standing there, while I’m walking and I’m playing Madden at the same time. You don’t have to have that kind of setup. Anyone can walk out the front door, go on an hour long walk. You will feel amazing when you start walking, doing these long walks three times a week, three or four times a week, a one hour walk. You don’t have to try to walk fast. The point is to get out there, move your body, just do something. And when you pair it with coming up with a solution for your number one dieting downfall, you will start seeing results within the first week or two. You know, instead of trying to do all these little things to kind of convince yourself you’re doing something, but they’re not really making an impact and then, you know, give up after two weeks, you just pick the one big thing that you need to do and then add in working out three times a week. It can be very low impact, very simple. You just find some YouTube videos that you like and you just do that in the comfort of your own house and then try to go on some walks.
So to recap, I mean, we basically just went over all this. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that things that don’t really work are all that you need to do. Instead. Identify your number one dieting downfall. Number two, make a plan to deal with it and fix it. So that’s really just one thing. Identify it, make a plan to fix it or do better at that one big thing and then start exercising three times a week, whatever that is for you, and then just make a goal. Just commit to doing those two things for 30 days. That’s that’s it. That’s all you have to do because the best plans are simple and they’re doable. So you don’t need to make a bunch a new meal plans.
You don’t need to come up with, you know, every solution for every possible instance or thing that could happen. You don’t have to have this all, this comprehensive plan. You don’t have to work with, work with a nutritionist or hire a personal trainer. Anyone can make dramatic progress in four weeks or 30 days by doing these two things. Identify your number one dieting downfall and then start exercising three times a week. Make it very simple. Find a YouTube channel you like, do three of those workouts a week or go on three one hour walks. That’s all it has to be. Please like and subscribe. If you found this useful, subscribe on the podcast app leave review and the Apple podcast app or on Stitcher or Spotify wherever you’re listening to this.
This is a free way to support what we’re doing and keep our free content side of things going. Like I said, most of all because the podcast and YouTube channel are new. Subscribe and leave reviews on the podcast, then leave a comment on the YouTube video. So so here’s the viewer poll for this video. Go to the comments and just answer the question.
What is your biggest dieting downfall? And actually taking the time to think about it and ride it out will be a huge step to kind of solidifying, you know, that you’re kind of taking, taking steps to move forward and start to work on this.
So in the comments go down and just let us know what is your biggest dieting downfall? Now, also, you can get it if you’re a new listener or viewer. You can get our free guide, the Healthy Habits Handbook, its 10 habits that can transform your life and health for good.
You can get that at trimhabit.com/free or you can just text TRIMNOW so one word, TRIMNOW as one word, text that to 44222 and we will send you a link to download this guide. So thank you for watching and keep your eyes open for the next episode.
