Client Interview: Suzette

[Author's Note: This one is special, it's an interview with my mom!  After some prodding over a long period of time, I got her into the gym with me... now she's down 32.5 pounds.  My dad jumped on the wagon as well and is down 14 pounds.  That's 46.5 pounds by simply eating like adults!]

Brandon: First question, what made you decide that you wanted to lose some weight?  Where there any special motivating factors?

Suzette: I wanted to be a healthier grandmother.  I had been working out some and getting stronger, but hadn't had any significant weight loss.  Brandon challenged me to a 30-day plan of eating only meat and vegetables, and I accepted the challenge partly to please him and partly because I figured I could do anything for 30 days.

B: What methods for weight loss have you tried in the past?

S: Low-fat diet, First Place, Weight Watchers.  First Place worked well for me because it gave me good guidelines of what/how much to eat every day.  It was a group effort with weekly meetings, Bible study and encouraging leaders. 

B: How much weight have you lost?  How long did it take?

S: To date, I have lost 32.5 pounds.  I started on April 15 and am still eating basically meat and vegetables, occasionally some fruit, no grains or sugar.

B: How difficult was it to lose the weight?  What kind of lifestyle changes were necessary?  Did it require a lot of sacrifice?

S: In the beginning, I felt like it was a lot of extra work.  I had to plan more, grocery shop more, cook more.  I felt like it was so much trouble--no wonder people lose weight eating like this!  It's so much trouble that it makes you not want to eat at all!  Since I committed to the 30 days, I stuck to it and the weight dropped quickly.  That was motivating. I found that eating only meat and vegetables was satisfying, and I didn't really miss eating the other stuff. It was much less difficult than I thought. 

B: What were the biggest challenges?

S: Since my husband is not a vegetable eater, I had to make two different meals and keep cooking things I had chosen not to eat.  It took more time to shop and to prepare foods from scratch.  Also, explaining to people that I'm choosing to only eat meat and vegetables was a challenge when other food items were available.  Sometimes it was easier just to eat a few bites of the other foods than to listen to the negative comments.

B: What lessons did you learn through the process?

S: I feel better when I eat better.  It doesn't hurt to not eat junk.  It works better with exercise (even though I haven't been able to go to the gym much during these 3 months for various reasons).  I don't do well exercising on my own--I do much better with guidance and direction from my fantastic personal trainer!  

B: Any comments you would like to add?

S: On the day that I reached 30 pounds, my non-vegetable-eating husband of 35 years decided that he's "in".  In the last few weeks, we've eaten a LOT of green beans and he has eaten vegetables that he hasn't eaten since I've known him...carrots, broccoli, asparagus.  He doesn't like it too much, but he's trying.  That makes cooking much easier!

Client Interview: Trevor

[Author's note: Trevor is a local friend with whom I have had the pleasure of working with off and on over the last year.  I asked him to answer a few questions after hearing him celebrating losing 30 pounds recently.  Without further ado, here's the interview.]

First question, what made you decide that you wanted to lose some weight?  Where there any special motivating factors?  I accidentally lost my first 10 pounds.  I was recently on a trip to Denmark and Sweden in which we walked and biked everywhere.  When 10 pounds dropped with basically zero effort, I realized how much nasty weight I must have been carrying and how weight I could lose with little more than zero effort.

What methods for weight loss have you tried in the past?  Light running and weight lifting with no diet change.  I saw frustratingly minimal results.

How much weight have you lost?  How long did it take?  Over the past 5 1/2 weeks, I've lost 30 pounds.

How difficult was it to lose the weight?  What kind of lifestyle changes were necessary?  Did it require a lot of sacrifice?  It wasn't difficult to lose weight, it was difficult to make the lifestyle changes and sacrifices that would result in immediate weight loss.  I drastically changed my diet - I only eat meats and veggies (with small amounts of fruit), no grain, no dairy, no sweets and no processed foods (which means very few trips to restaurants) and I drink only water and black coffee.  I permit myself one "cheat" day a week (usually Sunday) where I eat what I want.  Interestingly enough, however, what I want has evolved as well.  Knowing how poor junk food makes me feel, eating junk food has lost its luster.  Although it was a sacrifice initially, my body has grown to love leaner, cleaner food.

I also implemented regular exercise (4-5 days a week).  I alternate between lengthy runs or bike rides and short, intense body weight workouts.  Again, although it was difficult to overcome the inertia I'd developed over some time of inactivity, I've grown to enjoy exercise because of how it makes me feel.

What were the biggest challenges?  Breaking old habits and building new habits, particularly in skipping the drive-thru.

What lessons did you learn through the process?  Since beginning my leaner, cleaner eating and exercise, I've lost 30 pounds, my eczema has gone away, I sleep better at night, I'm not tired all day, I don't have daily headaches and stairs don't wind me - all this to say the lesson I've learned is junk food and a sedentary lifestyle aren't worth how awful I feel with it and how great I feel without it.

Any comments you would like to add.  I spent years playing organized sports and exercising so it took a good bit of humility in confessing I'd grown into a slob.  In addition, it took a great deal of humility to listen to a coach tell me how to exercise.  Fortunately, Brandon was gracious in easing me along, showing me the sorts of lifestyle changes and physical activity necessary to drop weight and exercise well.

Goals: Long Term Vs. Short Term

"When there is a choice between the short term and the long term, there is no choice." -Jim Wendler

You are a marvelous adaptation machine.  Your body is capable of way more than you will probably ever demand of it.  You can see examples of this by watching Ironman triathlons, the Olympics, the Crossfit games, or going to a local powerlifting meet.  What does it take to realize the levels of performance that the athletes competing are expressing?  If you've read this blog at all you can probably guess my answer: long term hard work.

Training is cumulative.  

Donnie Thompson didn't smash a 3000lb total in powerlifting with 6 weeks of training.  Rich Froning Jr. didn't become the "Fittest Man on Earth" by following a 3 week muscle magazine training program.  Usain Bolt didn't become the fastest man on earth because he started running the same year as his first Olympics.  This list could go on forever.  There is no such thing as an overnight success.  Every overnight success story you have ever heard follows years of hard work, usually with little to no recognition or compensation, that built up the base of the pyramid until it was large enough for the tallest point to poke out above the clouds.  Just like get rich quick schemes are too good to be true (or at least legal), get jacked and tan quick schemes aren't worth the paper they are printed on.

If that's the case, and it is, then how do I choose the right programs and strategies for me?  Easy!  You start out with long term goals and back track your way to the present.  So what kind of goals should I set?  SMART goals of course.  Even more specifically, I recommend performance goals over any other option.  Why performance goals?  Because you can generally control the factors that lead to increasing performance. If you are carrying a ton of body fat around but you want to get faster and stronger, you'll lose the weight working towards the performance goals.  If you set the goal to only lose the body fat, you'll become a slave to the scale.  It will drive you crazy.  Besides, simply losing the weight is too short term, you want to keep it off and continue to be faster, stronger, and healthier.

How do I do it?

So let's work through the weight loss example together as an opportunity to set a long term goal and then several short term goals to measure progress towards achieving the long term goal.  Let's say you're about 23 lbs overweight, and you're fed up with it.  You might think the best long term goal is to lose 23 lbs.  I think that is more of a short term goal.  A better long term goal could be to lose 23 lbs and keep it off indefinitely.  Most people who have struggled with weight loss have had short term success, even reaching goal body weight before overeating back to their pre-diet body weight.

Simply losing the weight requires a short term change in habits.  Losing the weight and keeping it off requires a long term change of lifestyle.  Here is how I might write my goal to lose 23 lbs and keep it off.  The overarching long term goal is at the top followed by several short term goals that will let me know I am making progress.  Each short term goal will have 1 or more steps that I am going to take to make each happen.  The discerning reader might even find some helpful tips for fat loss below...

BIG GOAL: Lose 23 lbs and maintain my new body weight indefinitely.

Goal 1: Lose the first 5 lbs within 30 days.
Step 1: Drink plenty of water.  (1/2 my body weight in ounces.)
Step 2: Cut out sugary snacks.

Goal 2: Lose the next 10 lbs within 60 days.
Step 1: Stop drinking calories.
Step 2: Move around for 30 minutes 3-5 days per week.

Goal 3: Lose the remaining 8 lbs within 60 days.
Step 1: Find a training program I enjoy and will commit to for at least 3 days per week forever.
Step 2: Learn more about healthy eating and how to cook healthy foods for myself and my family.

The example above is very simple, but it shows how you can work from a broad long term goal through several short term goals and action steps to get you to the end result desired.  If you have a fair amount of fitness knowledge, you can apply this process to yourself fairly easily.  If you don't think you could have come up with the example above, I am always happy to help.  You can comment below or email me at disruptivefitness@gmail.com.  Don't forget our facebook group for like minded people who are interested in improving themselves through smart, hard work.

Goals: Be SMART

Goal setting is a pretty popular target among our self improvement culture.  It should be, because nothing sets you on the path to success like deciding what success looks like and then working hard to get there.  There is something almost magical about thoughtfully choosing the outcome you want, writing it down, and then formulating a plan to make it a reality.  Almost nothing in life is more motivating than real, measurable progress towards a goal.  It will get you out of bed early in the morning to train hard no matter what, when nothing else will.  If goal setting is the process of moving from point A to point B, you need to figure out both spots.  Where are you?  Where are you going?  There are two problems I've encountered working with trainees, they don't know where they are and they don't know where they are going.  Since they don't know where they are starting from, it's hard to set concrete goals.  Because their goals are nebulous, they never know if the goal has been achieved.  That's a shortcut to giving up.

Instead, you're going to set some SMART goals so you can measure your progress and know when your goal has been achieved.  This concept isn't brand new, a few guys (George Doran, Arthur Miller, and James Cunningham) published it in 1981 in Management Review.  (P.S. Why haven't you been setting smart goals since then?)  So let's examine this acronym a little more closely before looking at a few examples of how you can apply this principle to your training.

Your goals should be:

S- Specific
M- Measurable
A- Achievable
R- Relevant
T- Time-bound

Specific

I've written before about people wanting to get "in shape."  I often retort that round is a shape, you need to be more specific.  I would be willing to bet 100 burpees that many of your goals for training and performance are not specific.  Examples I have heard recently, "I want to get bigger (or faster or smaller or stronger)."  That seems pretty specific, right?  Wrong!  So how would I make those more specific?  Instead of I want to get bigger, I want to gain 10 lbs of lean muscle.  Instead of faster, I want to run a 40 yard dash faster than my current time of 5.1 seconds or a sub-20 minute 5k.  Instead of I want to be smaller, I want to lose 10 lbs of fat.  Instead of stronger, I want to set a 5 lb personal record on my squat.  You could be even more specific than that, but saying exactly what you want to achieve makes it real.

Measurable

This is a safety net for your specific goal requirement.  If your goal is not specific, you cannot measure it.  If your goal is measurable, then you know when you have achieved it.  For example: I know my weight gain goal has been accomplished when the scale tells me that I have gained 10 lbs.  It is unambiguous and simple to measure.  This is why "I want to get in shape" is such a terrible goal when left on its own.  How will you ever know if you're in shape?  There is nothing to measure.  Making your goal measurable gives you clear data points to track your progress, keeping you motivated to continue working towards your goal over time.

Achievable

Let's be reasonable here.  If your goal is to get 6 inches taller in the next 6 months, your goal is not likely to be achievable unless you're a 13 year old boy, and even then it's a stretch.  Making the goal achievable puts the ball firmly in your court.  You should set goals that rely on you, not on what other people can do for you.  Following the weight gain example, I can control what I eat and drink.  It will take discipline and planning to make sure that I eat and drink enough of the right things, but doing that is totally achievable for most people.  Simply choose goals that you believe you can meet that are above simple performance standards but are not impossible.  It is better to set a series of smaller, achievable goals and knock them down one by one than to set a goal for the end state you are trying to achieve and make it there in one jump.  Training is a process, whether you want to be faster, lose body fat, increase lean body mass, or simply run your first marathon.  Trying to accomplish everything at once is a recipe for failure.

Relevant

I want to make sure that my goals actually fit in with what is important to me.  If I set a goal to watch 96 hours of television without stopping, that is not relevant to health, fitness, or performance.  I need to choose goals that make sense and are relevant to my overall direction for training and life.  Continuing in the weight gain example, if I want to gain weight, setting a goal to read a book a week is not going to help me gain weight.  Instead I need to set goals to eat a certain amount of protein per day based on the body weight I want to achieve.  My goals need to jive with what I am trying to accomplish.  This can be a tricky one, and sometimes benefits from a coach.  It would be easy to assume that reading about nutrition or searching forums about training programs would be a relevant to my goal of putting on lean mass.  Most of the time, that's simply not the case.  Try to use Occam's Razor when making decisions about what is relevant to your goals.  Choose the simplest path towards what you want to accomplish, the more complicated it gets, the less likely you are to do what needs to be done.

Time-bound

Set a deadline.  If your goal is open-ended there is no sense of urgency.  You will likely allow that goal to be crowded out by the general business of daily life.  When there is a deadline, you know you have to make daily progress in order to make your goal a reality.  If I wanted to add 10 lbs of lean mass to my frame, I would set the goal for 6 months or a year so that I am motivated to work towards my goal every single day.  It's also important to remember that simply doing the next right thing that will move you towards your goals day after day is the real secret to making progress.   The older I get, the more I realize that I need to get all I can done each day because there are less and less days ahead of me to spread out the work.  That deadline will keep you honest!

Examples

After all that, here are a few examples of SMART goals based around some of the most common goals I see.

I want to lose some weight.  UN-SMART.  I want to lose 10 lbs of body fat in the next 6 months.  SMART.

I want to gain some weight.  UN-SMART.  I want to gain 10 lbs of lean body mass in the next 12 months.  SMART.

I want to be faster.  UN-SMART.  I want to run a 5k in 21 minutes at my next race which is 12 weeks out.  SMART.

I want to be stronger. UN-SMART.  I want to increase my total by 50 lbs at my next powerlifting meet which is 16 weeks out.  SMART.

Can you see what makes the difference between the UN-SMART examples and the SMART ones?  We take a generalized, unspecific goal and make it specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely.  We make it SMART!  I encourage you to set the following goal right now: "I will spend 30 minutes to 1 hour before this week is over thinking about and setting at least 2 SMART goals that will positively effect my training and life outside of the gym."

If you enjoyed this article, please take a moment to click one of the little buttons below and share it with your friends.  There are a lot of other posts you might find interesting, and if you'd like to get updates in your email, simply enter it in the window to the right.  You can also join our group on facebook to see what others are saying about goals.  Lastly you can follow me on twitter and instagram @disruptivefit to see what's going on in training and life.  As always thanks for reading!