If you know what to do, then why CAN’T you control your weight?
The simple answer to the question is motivation, because everyone knows how to lower their weight – everyone. Yes, ALL adults know (albeit many are in denial) that their undesirable or oversized fat stores are a result of eating or drinking more than they need. Therefore, everyone knows the one and only answer is to eat less, move more or a combination of the two – hello!
I travel and lecture all over the world and I have yet to meet an adult who truly doesn’t know that they’re overweight because they eat or drink too much. Nor have I met a person who wants to become overweight. So why is the majority of the adult population overweight? The first part of the answer is that people can’t see or feel daily weight changes. The average adult gains 1-3LBS per year, or in daily numbers, ~1/365 -1/182LBS per day (or an average of 10 to 30 calories per day more than you burn). This leads to the second part. Body fat creeps up so slowly it’s easy to ignore it until you’re forced to put energy into losing weight – and the perceived effort, which is any weight loss program or method, requires motivation. Motivation to change your lifestyle means motivation to change your behavior, and it requires lots of thinking, planning, actions and sometimes counseling. And the method you choose may not fit your lifestyle, which means you ultimately achieve weight regain. Yet, as previously mentioned, you DO know why you are overweight.
How do we lower the need for motivation?
Let’s go back to where we started. You are overweight because you ate more than you moved, meaning more than necessary. You also know that now you need to eat less and/or move more to fix it. Okay, nowhere in this conversation did anyone tell you what to eat or how to move, right? So what’s the simple answer to reversing the problem WITHOUT life-changing or threatening motivation?
You CAN eat ANYTHING you want – you just CAN’T eat EVERYTHING you want
Meaning, do what you do but just a little less and/or a little more. Reverse the behaviors that got you here. That’s right, no lifestyle change is required, just a minor adjustment. The rest will take care of itself. As soon as you make a big deal out of losing weight, you take your first step toward failure.
To succeed you only have to pay attention to a number, but you need to know what that number is.
You WON’T manage what you CAN’T see and you CAN’T manage what you DON’T know
To successfully achieve your goal weight YOUR way, you need to know how many calories you use every day so you know how many you can eat to lose weight or not get fat. Now you have something to manage that’s controllable daily: simple numbers. And remember, numbers don’t lie.
Motivation will come from seeing body fat coming or going in real time at any time -- hourly, daily, weekly, etc. When you can SEE your daily body fat gains and losses, it’s simple to manage them because it doesn’t take much effort to eat one less bite or take 10 extra steps to stay on track. The “icing on the cake” is that you will actually be motivated by having visibility into real time changes in your body fat. When you use a flexible program like dotFIT, you can view hourly and daily changes in weight and body fat as opposed to waiting until they are confirmed by the scale or change in clothing size. Flexibility is critical to your success. We’ll explain why and how in
Part 2.