Listen up.
Would you cut down trees with a butter knife?
No!
You would use the right tool for the job. Maybe a chainsaw? But let’s be honest, some of us don’t know what the best tool for our fitness goals is.
Before we get started, you need to know what the job is before you pick the right tool. If you haven’t yet listened to our goal setting podcast, do it. It’s only 3 minutes and could completely change this challenge for you. Listen here:
www.princetonfit.com/pod/goals
If you want today’s lesson, read on or…
~ Listen to it below ~
Muscles and body fat. The 2 dials we can turn to make us look, feel and move the best. And whether your focus is changing fat, or building muscle, food is key. Food is literally what your body is made of. Muscle comes from your food (and a training stimulus). Fat comes from your food.
Here’s a perspective shift. Right now, you are burning calories. If you didn’t you would die. Your brain & beating heart require hundreds of calories a day that you get from your food or energy stores like body fat. This means that every minute of every day, you’re losing weight by burning calories and there’s nothing you can do about it. Our job is simple: don’t mess up what our bodies are naturally doing anyway.
So, if your goal is weight loss, yes, that’s an oversimplification, because eating less is difficult, so here’s something more useful that you can take away and implement today.
Most of us eat the same thing for breakfast every day. Most of us have a different dinner every day of the week. So, if I wanted to make the biggest impact for the same effort, I would focus on breakfast because by doing that I’ve changed 7 meals a week, rather than if I put the same effort into dinner – I would have only changed 1 meal that week. In order to make the same impact, I’d have to make 7X the effort or 7X more boring, because we’ve conditioned ourselves for variety there.
If this is true for you (even if it’s a different meal), all you need to do is replace the meal you can currently make with your eyes closed, with a better meal. Change is hard, so the work is to find an easy recipe that becomes 2nd nature quickly. Don’t change cereals (easy to make and clean up) with a 35-minute, 3 pan fry (difficult to make and clean). Are you seeing this?
Finding this meal can be an easy and impactful action goal, remember the podcast. And because it can have such a big impact, you should try and make it a non-negotiable, not a push goal. Hopefully now we’re starting to see the cumulative effect this challenge can have. Keep at it, folks!
We also have a few recipes that our staff put together to make your life easier. They’re relatively low calorie, high in protein and easy to put together:
Let’s get to it!