Being fit, being fat, and being fab; my newbie perspective.

MachiavelliNZ

I have been eating healthily and recording all of my intake for around 40 days now. Most of that time I have also been attending the gym three days a week (I believe only skipping one intended visit).

My goal has been weight loss. Obviously lean muscle gain and fitness improvement is a longer term goal. I have managed to lose an average of around 1 kilogram a week for the last four weeks. That is twice as fast loss per week as my intended weight loss over the next 12 months but I expect some of this is "noob gains" and loss of "water weight".

Here are some thoughts I have had about motivation and fitness:

1. Educate yourself. There is plenty of good information online about fitness science. Don't just believe what some blowhard on a forum tells you :P. Don't stop educating yourself if a girlie magazine tells you what you wanted to hear about becoming a supermodel by eating special fatblaster muffins. If you learn the right things then you can skip the school of hard knocks and move straight onto the path to results.

2. Whether you are trying to gain lean muscle or lose weight, be scrupulous about knowing what you are eating. Chronically skinny people probably don't eat enough, overweight people probably graze too much (I know, it's easy). Don't waste your time. Record it all or go home. Your natural inclinations are what got you into the state you're now in and want to change. Don't trust your brain until you've retrained it properly with nutrition practice. I use both myfitnesspal.com and the android app to keep track of caloric intake and exercise output (and it has been great!).

3. If you've mastered step 2, you only need to make tiny changes to achieve your goal. If you eat 5% less than your body needs to maintain itself then you will lose weight even without exercising. Don't eat more than 20% under what you're supposed to or you'll lose weight too fast without making the required life changes to make your new eating pattern habitual. Besides, starving sucks. On the flip side, if you eat what is required to maintain your bodyweight and you do even a small amount of exercise then you will also lose weight. If traditional exercise is too hard then try going for 30 minute brisk walks a few times a week. Don't kill yourself trying to achieve everything all at once. Make small, positive changes and keep at it.

4. Be patient. One study I read about suggested that people can't build more than 1 ounce of lean muscle a week, and that's the physiological best-case upper limit. Some trainers give figures of five pounds of lean muscle a year. Fat can be lost faster than muscle can be gained but, depending on how much you have to lose, your goal is still going to take months or even more than a year (my goal is 25kg in 12 months). A toned physique and ironman fitness levels isn't going to happen by next month; your best bet is to keep goals small, realistic, and encouraging and make healthy life-choices that you can embody rather than artificial habits that you won't stick at.

5. Goals: don't listen to anyone else or try to impress them, make goals for yourself alone that you can really own. Decide what you would like to change about your situation now. Decide where you want to be later. Decide why it's worth the effort to get there. If you take too many cues from other people then you won't have the internal motivation to keep on doin' your thing when nobody is watching you. Own your life. Go hard.

6. Measure your progress in as many ways as possible. Measure your weight, take tape measurements of your body, measure your bodyfat / lean mass, record all runtimes or distances, record all sets and weights at the gym. Just because the scale says that you have hit a plateau or maybe you feel like you were flaking out on your last run, it doesn't mean you aren't making progress. You could have been lifting more, you could have a thinner waist, or larger arms, or whatever! The body is complex and gains can come in a variety of forms. When in doubt, remember #4: be patient. The person who gives up is guaranteed to make less gains than the person who keeps going despite a plateau. The person who has enough measurements of progress that they know they aren't really in a plateau is going to be happiest of all.

7. Don't forget to reward yourself. If your goal is weight loss then you are going to have to see how "cheat days" work for you (it may set you back too much or it may be great motivation, you decide). Putting simplistic rewards like cheat days aside, figure out rewards for yourself that are tied to your medium-term goals. If you are a runner then you might reward yourself with a nice new pair of running shoes for hitting a goal time on your 10K run. If your goal is weight loss then you might buy yourself a new set of clothes for hitting a goal. If you like gadgets then you might buy yourself a polar fitness computer for hitting a serious goal. It could even be a non-fitness-oriented reward like a beach holiday somewhere overseas! Decide on meaningful rewards and tie them to your medium-term and long-term goals. Meeting your goals should be fun and rewarding and not just about hardening-up and pumping iron until your ears bleed.

8. Sleep. Seriously, sleep. Science has been telling you this for years. Want to be measurably improved at the gym? Get proper sleep. Want to feel less depressed? Get proper sleep. Want to think more clearly? Get proper sleep. Want to recover your aching muscles and actually get stronger? Get proper sleep. Really, go to sleep more. Get about 8 or 9 hours daily. This one isn't hard. It's basically a lazy freebie that works for fitness and health, too. Carpe noctem.

That's all I have for now.

Sometimes making life-changes can be very hard. It can be all too easy to order the pizza and sit on the couch. Nobody else can tell you what you want or make you go out and grab it. However, I do think that there are smart ways of achieving goals and... less smart ways. There's no point in making change harder than it needs to be. If anyone has any ideas, comments or suggestions then go ahead and mention them!