by jc | Jan 16, 2024 | homepage, mindset
It’s that time of the year when people start the new year motivated and on a mission. It becomes mid to late January and then…. Some have already quit. Some are about to quit or are thinking about quitting. Some are still going strong. Some didn’t start recently and are still on a break from a long time ago. Some have never even attempted to start. Chances are, you are at one of those stages. Hopefully the still going strong stage. But if not, there is still hope and no matter where you are, it’s not too late!
This is the time of year (well, really all year) people quit on their health and fitness. For every great success story out there, I see 9 others who quit. While yes, some just give up, most are due to life getting in the way. Some valid reasons, some not. But the end result is the same – throw in the towel and lose any results or momentum you had. The one thing I can say without a doubt though is that the one out of ten that I see who stick with it, ALWAYS gets results. No matter what. If you keep moving forward and stick with it you will get results. You can’t do the right thing and get the wrong results. It really is simple math and logic.
But the majority still quits. Why does this happen? It is exercise warfare. The exercise devil is going to give you every reason not to continue with your diet and exercise. In your faith journey, you will have spiritual warfare. Satan will do everything he can to keep you from living the life God calls you to live. The same with exercise. He will do everything to keep you from exercising. Because he knows it’s good for you. And often times we listen to him and justify quitting.
I see so many reasons for people quitting on their health and fitness and quitting their workouts. Such as illness, injury, work issues, schedule changes, finances, kids activities, travel, lack of motivation, lost interest, burnout, laziness, and so on. These are all real things, and happen to everyone, myself included. And the ones that are valid excuses make it very easy for us to justify quitting. “It’s not our fault”
But remember – EXCUSES DON’T BURN CALORIES. Valid or not, any excuse or reason not to exercise still ends in not exercising….
The key to success with your health and fitness is the priority shift. How are you going to let events like these effect you? Exercise shouldn’t be optional. There are things in your life that aren’t optional, like your faith, your spouse, your kids, and your work. None of which work well if you are not healthy. Your body and your health is a constant moving product. It is either moving towards a better place, or moving to a worse place. Rarely does it stay the same. If you exercise and eat good most of the time, your body and health will move forward. If you do not exercise and you eat junk all the time, your body and health will go backwards.
You have to prioritize things. I have 4 kids, I am a business owner, I coach multiple youth sports, work 10 hours per day, sleep only about 5-6 hours per night, etc. Life gets in the way. Trust me I get it. But….I don’t let it keep me from taking care of myself. When life gets in the way, I adjust. Not exercising is not an option for me. It is going to happen regularly, regardless of what life throws at me. Some times may be tougher than others, but quitting is never an option. I may miss a day or two here and there when life throws me a curve ball, but I never completely quit and miss weeks and months at a time. When life is difficult, my relationship with God, my marriage, my parenting, my work, and my health and fitness continue on. Other things may get put to the side or put on hold, but those things continue on. Especially my exercise, because the other top priority things in my life are effected by my health and fitness.
The theme this year is consistency. Be standing at the end of the year. Regardless of what life throws at you! Life may knock you down a time or two. You may miss exercise days here and there and mess up on your diet. But get back at it. Never totally give up.
When you get sick or travel or take off work for any reason, when those missed work days are over, you don’t just quit work because life got in the way, you go back to work when the event is over. But for some reason when we miss our exercise or mess up on our diet, we quit totally or let one day turn into a week or one week turn into a month or even several months. The exercise devil says to us, “well you were doing good, but now you totally blew it, so what’s the point? Just quit.” And we listen to him and quit. Fight the good fight! Don’t give up. Get back at it.
Remember, it’s never to late to do the right thing. This can apply to everything in life. Especially your health and fitness. Have you missed workouts lately? No problem, just get back at it. The longer you wait, the further from your goals you will be. There is no better time than now to start. And when life gets in the way, and it absolutely will, work through it and don’t quit. Think about the top 3 or 4 things that you spend the most time and money on? This will tell you what your top priorities are. Is your health one of them? Do you think it should be? Invest in a better future for yourself by making exercise and eating better part of your life from this day forward.
To easily get started and lay the groundwork for your health and fitness routine, message me about our 60 Day Total Body Transformation – which can be done in person at Hoover Fitness or remotely if you do not live in the area.
Need help with the weight training? – Check out my Virtual Trainer
Need help with the diet? Try the easy to follow Calorie-Budgeting system
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by jc | Oct 27, 2023 | Diet/Nutrition, homepage, weight loss
Below are 7 easy weight loss diet tips that you can start using today to get results and that will set you up for a diet that is easy to maintain for a long time. Chances are, you have probably gone on and off of diets for years. You start a diet and lose a little weight, then you realize you are miserable and the diet is not sustainable so you quit and gain back more than you lost, then eventually you repeat the process again and on and on until you have dieted your way to misery and to overall weight gain. These tips are designed to not only get you some quick results, but also to keep you from quitting and allow you to enjoy life while getting results.
These tips are more mindset than anything. They are designed to keep you from failing. I know you probably are looking for “eat this” and “don’t eat this” but TRUST me here, the information you will read in this article is much more valuable than telling you exactly what to eat. You have probably tried that a thousand times already with little success, so give this a shot!
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1. Do Good Not Great
The biggest problem for people with dieting is that they try to be perfect. They think that they cannot get results unless their diet is perfect. They go on a strict diet and try to do great and deprive themselves of foods they love, thus depriving themselves of happiness and then eventually quit.
One super easy weight loss diet tip is to do good, not great. Good means eating better most of the time, not all of the time. do bad some of the time. Do Good forever, not great for a short time. When you try to be perfect with your diet you quit and end up just eating bad all the time. You go from 100% dieting to 0% dieting and over the course of time you probably averaged good dieting like 25% of the time. Think 80/20 rule. Eat good 80% of the time and bad 20% of the time, but doing this forever. Get out of the all or nothing mindset. You will get better results in the long run.
I have spent my entire career teaching people how to get results and still be able to enjoy the foods they love. Basically how to be a normal person and get results. These tips will easily get you on your way, but if you want to read even more tips that will help you get amazing results, check out my latest eBook that explains even more how you can live a normal life and still get results.
2. Budget Your Calories – Treat Them Like Money
Remember to look at the day as a whole, the week as a whole, and the month as a whole. With that being said, you have the ability to “budget” your calories. Save calories here to have calories there. What ultimately matters is if at the end of the day, week, or month, your calorie totals are where they need to be. And, the answer to that is that they need to be less than you are burning. Remember – eat less and burn more. It’s that simple.
With calorie budgeting, don’t waste calories. If you are eating good, then do good. Don’t waste any calories on the good days. Save your calories for your cheat meals. So, find as many ways as you can to reduce calories on your good days and save them up for your cheat meals.
Think of this like a savings account. You save up for something and then you buy it instead of charging it to a credit card. If you have the money and are able to buy something, then you are financially ok after the purchase. If you do not have the money and you buy something by charging it to a credit card, then you have to work and work to pay it off over time. The same goes for dieting. If you are trying to get 2000 calories per day, then you have 14000 per week to work with. If you are planning on having a cheat meal that is 2000 calories more than normal, then you should try to cut 2000 out of the rest of the week. If you cut those calories out in other places, then, after your cheat meal, you would still be at 14000 for the week. If you didn’t cut your normal days down some, and just added the cheat meal, then you would be at 16000 calories for the week, thus increasing your weekly total by 2000, which ultimately will lead to body fat gains. You will be working and working to burn those 2000 calories over time, just like you would be working to pay down that credit card.
Treat your diet analytical, but also don’t over-think it. Keep it simple. Think of it like a bank savings account. The more calories you can cut here, the more calories you can have there!
3. Exercise
Yes, one of the weight loss diet tips is to exercise…. When you treat your calories like money, your calories that you eat are like the money that you spend and the calories that you burn are like the money that you make. If you are wealthy, then spending money doesn’t hurt you financially. The same can be said about calories. If you burn a lot of calories, then when you eat calories it doesn’t hurt you as much.
Exercising regularly takes the pressure off the diet. Everyone will fail at dieting. Like death and taxes, diets are also undefeated. The problem is that normally people do not exercise so they place all of their success on their diet. Then when they quit their diet they are back to no diet and no exercise. Get super consistent with your exercise and make it a part of your life moving forward that way when you fall off of your diet (hopefully for only a short period), you will still have your exercise going and still be able to get results or at least maintain and not go backwards.
Not sure where to get started with your exercise? Check out these 9 Easy But Effective Workout Tips For Beginners.
4. Make the Obvious Changes First
One of the big mistakes that people make with dieting and trying to eat better is that people tend to go too far too fast. They also tend to over-think things and try too hard. These mistakes ultimately lead to another failed attempt at improving your diet. Remember to keep it simple! Don’t try too hard too fast.
With dieting and eating better, the two most important things that you need to know are (1) that it is relative to you and your current diet and (2) all you have to do to get results is improve upon what you are currently doing. Too often people pick a diet and switch from their current diet to this new and crazy diet that is light years away from what they are currently doing. The change is too much and this leads to failure. All you have to do is improve on your current diet. Simple logic tells us that if you improve what you are doing, no matter how small or large the improvements are, you will see results. Remember, keep it simple!
So, how do we improve? Start with making the obvious choices first. Don’t overthink your “new” diet. Your new diet is simply an improvement on your current diet. Make the easy changes first. Change the things that you know in your head are better choices. If you can say to yourself “I know better than to eat that” about a specific food, then you already have enough knowledge to improve your diet. At first, make the easy choices that you already know. Get help later. Start with less soft drinks, less fried foods, less sweets, etc. Everyone knows how to diet at this level. This will get the ball rolling and get you some much needed results. Trust that your knowledge will evolve as your diet does. You need to be gradually improving over time. You will hit road blocks along the way, and when you do, then you can ask for help or advice.
Just start improving. It is that simple! Don’t give yourself the excuse, “I don’t know what to do to eat a better diet.” So, the good news is that you already are armed with the knowledge to start eating better. The bad news is that you actually have to do it and you can’t use this excuse anymore!
5. Fix Breakfast and Lunch
The purpose of my weight loss diet tips is not necessarily to give you weight loss foods or just healthy diet tips, it is to show you how to eat to lose weight and still be able to enjoy life. If you eat 3 meals per day, then let’s focus on fixing 2 of them.
Simple math tells us that if you fix your breakfast and lunch you and leave dinner the exact same then you will have improved your day by 66%. Like everything else in this article, this is a mindset change. Remember, it’s all relative to what your current diet, not to a perfect diet. If you normally eat bad 3 meals per day, then you eat good two of those meals and eat what you normally eat one of those meals, then you have improved your daily diet by 66%, while still eating what you normally eat one meal. You have to get out of the mindset of if you do bad then you can’t get results. If you ate bad one meal and you still improved 66%, you will still sea results!
I always recommending fixing breakfast and lunch and leaving dinner the same. For most people this works best because you are more in control of breakfast and lunch and you can apply a little more discipline to those meals and tough it out a little and then you can enjoy dinner with your family and eat like a normal person. The toughest meal to fix for most people is dinner, so leave it the same for now. Don’t make it worse, just leave it the same.
6. Skip a Meal
The overall main weight loss diet tip is to cut calories. The easiest way to cut calories is to skip a meal. And from the previous paragraph, the easiest way to fix breakfast and lunch is to skip one of them.
You don’t have to eat 5 times per day and not eating will not mess up your metabolism. These are diet myths. (If you want to overcome several other diet myths that are probably holding you back, check out my eBook). Don’t ever eat because you think you have to. The goal is to burn more calories than you normally burn and to eat less than you normally eat. The greater the deficit the faster the body fat falls off. All that matters at the end of the day is that you created a deficit. Just like your money, all that matters is that you make more than you spend.
So if you can, skip a meal. Have a cup of coffee or a water or a zero calorie drink instead of those calories you normally have in a meal. This is also a way to enjoy the other meal or meals a little more. Don’t cancel it out by adding the same amount to your other meals, but if you cut out 500 calories at lunch and then add 250 to dinner, then you still came out 250 ahead!
7. Drink Lots of Water and Take Supplements
Drink more water! Shoot for a minimum of 64oz. per day. Try for more though, 100oz or more if possible. Since hopefully you will be exercising, your body will need more water. Plus if you drink a lot of water, it will help you feel more full, thus hopefully help you eat less.
I am a huge advocate of supplementing your diet with certain products. If you take the right things, then you can get results with little to no effort, which is always a good thing to keep you going and keep you happy.
Think of taking supplements like an athlete having the best gear. A baseball player having the best bat and cleats and then taking supplements to get the most out of his training. Or like If you get into running, and you wanted to get serious about it, you wouldn’t just start running without doing anything else. You would probably start by getting good running shoes and then taking supplements for your performance.
There are a lot of quality supplements out there that can help you get results in the gym and with your diet. While there are a lot of great supplements on the market today, I am going to talk about the supplements that I take and recommend professionally. As always, do your own research. But if you want my professional opinion, then I would advise these.
As for workout performance supplements, I personally take and professionally recommend Prestige Labs products. If you are looking for something to help you lose weight and burn body fat without having to do anything other than take a product, then take a look at the Prestige Heat and the Prestige Crush. These are two of the most popular products we sell in our weight loss workout programs. Check out all of their amazing products by clicking HERE.
As for health-type supplements, I recommend Juice Plus+ fruits and vegetable capsules. I have personally been taking Juice Plus+ for almost 20 years and it is a great way to get real, whole food nutrition without having to eat a ton of calories. The recommended amount of fruits and vegetables is 7-13 servings of raw fruits and vegetables per day. If you eat this amount, then you will reap amazing health benefits, including heart health, feeling better, better immune system, and much more. The problem is that it is impossible to physically eat that amount. Plus the cost and the calories would be way too high. Juice Plus+ gets you this amount of fruits and vegetables daily, in a capsule! learn more at by clicking HERE.
Final Thoughts
The 7 super easy weight loss diet tips that you can start using today will go a long way in helping you achieve sustainable results. Do good not great, budget your calories and treat them like money, exercise, make the obvious changes first, fix breakfast and lunch, skip a meal(s), and drink lots of water and take supplements and you will lay the groundwork for a successful weight loss journey.
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