Achieving Your Weight Loss Goals

I have had a long standing interest in fitness and nutrition, and read a lot about diet and the trends that come and go. It’s very hard to find solid science on the subject of nutrition, mostly because it is very difficult to perform controlled experiments over a period long enough to provide reliable information.

In the 1990s, I read Diet for a New America by John Robbins and it convinced me to become vegan so that I could save the animals, the planet and my health. I became fanatical about it and was the closest I’d come in my life to being religious - evangelical even.

But after almost six years eating only plants, my body was not doing well. I was a committed bicycle rider at the time, putting in as much as 250 miles a week, and my joints hurt. My testosterone sank (perhaps from all the soy I was eating) and my mood was one of anger and depression. My cholesterol, which initially dropped, rose to over 300, disproving the link between meat and cholesterol. These symptoms, except for the cholesterol, resolved themselves when I resumed eating meat.

Which brings me to the latest in my nutrition search. I have no need to lose weight, but still read on the subject. I recently finished reading two books at the same time which took radically opposite approaches to the problem of losing weight. One book advocated eating a Low Carb High Fat diet, the other a diet of at least 50% carbohydrates supplemented with weight training. Both books provided evidence of their effectiveness, with the pro-carb book providing dozens of impressive before and after pictures of the successful followers. So which one is the right one?

While it does seem to be clear that eliminating excess carbs is in everyone’s interest, both books make the same admonition. For the plan to work, you have to work the plan. Either way you go takes discipline and commitment until the advised way of eating becomes natural, and in that case, either will work.

That’s where most of us fail. We can stick with a diet for some period of time, but we don’t make the commitment to stay with it forever. And social and environmental influences are often detrimental to our fitness and health goals. That is why it is important to not just Sprint on a weight goal until it's reached, but to continue to sprint on it forever, or at least until the way of eating that maintains your ideal weight is so natural you don’t have to think about it.

I’ve talked about the importance of keeping maintenance goals in your backlog and in your Sprints, and weight maintenance is a perfect example. We all know what happens when you let your guard down, gain back the weight you lost plus more, and then have to start all over again. STOP THAT! Make a lifetime commitment to maintaining your weight, make that a cherished value, and align your goals with it every single day.