Articles

With all of this talk over which diet you should choose…

Noone is teaching you how to actually stick to your diet, once you’ve chosen it.

That’s what this article is for.

Why is this important?

According to this study, it doesn’t actually matter which diet you choose.

People with the most successful weight loss were those who could stick to their diet, regardless of which diet they chose.

Secondly, the people that manage to stick to their diet during the fat loss phase, are those who also manage to keep it off. 

So how do you ACTUALLY stick to your diet?

Number One: Set your diet up around your preferences.

Do you love pizza? Donuts?

Then going keto is one of the worst decisions you’ll ever make.

Do you love fatty fish, peanut butter, cheese?

Then don’t pull your fats so low you can never have those things.

Don’t make dieting harder than it needs to be.

The more you keep the foods you love within your diet, the easier you’ll find sticking to it.

The easier it is to stick to, the greater likelihood you have of losing weight and keeping it off.

Number Two: Have Realistic Expectations

If you’ve slowly gained weight over a number of years.

Expecting to lose it all in a number of weeks doesn’t make sense.

Yes - there are insane transformations floating around the internet with wild amounts of weight lost within very short time frames.

This ‘expectation’ is pushed on you even more by TV shows like The Biggest Loser.

Want to know what happens to the majority of contestants after the show?

Most of them gained all of the weight back. Some of them gain even more back because the crash dieting suppressed their metabolism and dysregulated their hunger and satiety hormones.

Instead of aiming for some random number per week, aim to lose 0.5 - 1% of your bodyweight per week.

This means implementing a reasonable deficit.

Dieting is a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t go too hard, too fast and burn out, leaving you back at square one.

Set realistic expectations and you won’t be disappointed.

So that’s how to set up your diet the right way, now you need to know how to succeed during the diet.

Number Three: Update Your Food Environment

When you come home from a hard day of work, do you trust yourself to take the meat out the freezer, cook the rice, chop up the vegetables…

When it’s SO easy to just order that pizza?

Don’t get me wrong, we’re all about pizza. Even when dieting. Especially when dieting. But we use macro cycling to fit in within our weekly calories, rather than having it every single night.

If there are foods you want to have more of - like fruits and vegetables and meals that fit your macros…

You need to make them more visible, accessible and convenient.

This can be as simple as taking the time on a Sunday to stock up on the foods you want to be in your diet.

And maybe putting that cookie jar a little further out of reach, if you know you can’t trust yourself to just have the one or two that fit your macros.

The food environment doesn’t end in the kitchen. 

Your office space is next on the list for an audit.

Make sure the foods you’ve got readily available to you when you’re bored, stressed, busy or all of the above serve your goals, rather than inhibit them.

Speaking of changing how you’re eating, not just what you’re eating:

Number Four: Eat Mindfully

This means eating with no distractions. Put your phone down, close the laptop and focus on the meal in front of you.

This sounds weird but just try it once and you’ll understand…

Chew your food 20 times before swallowing.

There’s some “maybe” digestive benefits but the real win here is your meal is going to last you long enough that by the time you’ve finished eating, your hunger and satiety signals will have kicked in.

This means you’ll actually be full rather than hungry.

And it’s going to help you stick to your deficit. 

Speaking of staying full:

Number Five: Eat Big Meals, At Similar Times Each Day

When you constantly graze on snacks and small meals throughout the day…

You never give your body enough of a reason to actually be full.

But opting for big meals, and eating them at roughly the same time each day, helps you make the best use of your hunger and satiety signals.

Leptin is your satiety hormone which signals to your brain that you’re full;

Ghrelin is your hunger-inducing peptide hormone which is produced when your stomach is empty to signal you need food.

When you eat big meals your leptin goes up so you’re more full and your ghrelin goes down so you’re less hungry.

But - won’t having larger meals mean you’ll be hungry in-between meals?

At the start - it might. Especially if you’re a chronic snacker or grazer. 

But you can change your internal body clock. 

Hunger is like an emotion - it comes and it goes.

Rather than listening to your body, you make your body listen to you.

After a while your body will start expecting meals at certain times and your hunger and satiety hormones will adapt around that.

Number Six: Sleep more.

Not only does lack of sleep make you hangry, increase your cravings and make your diet exponentially harder…

It actually might prevent fat loss, too.

In this study the participants were split into two groups.

Group A were allowed in bed 5.5 hours per night.

Group B were allowed 8.5 hours.

Both groups lost weight, they were in a calorie deficit.

But the sleep-deprived group lost more muscle AND less fat.

That’s not ideal.

And you might think you don’t care about keeping your muscle… But the more muscle you have, the faster your metabolism will be, the easier it is to lose future weight.

You need your beauty sleep!

Number Seven: Set up your Macro Cycle.

Macro cycling means eating a little bit less on the days when you’re not hungry, to create WAY more room for the foods you love, when you actually want them.

It’s as simple as thinking about your calories as a weekly rather than daily number.

Let’s say your maintenance is 2500 and you want to be in a 500 calorie deficit, so your daily calorie target is 2000 calories.

That’s 14,000 per week.

You can do 2000 calories 7 days of the week.

Or you can do 1800 calories Monday to Friday, then have 3000 calories to play with on Saturday followed by 2000 on Sunday.

Either way, it’s 14000 across the week!

Like the idea of using macro-cycling to make it easy to stick to your deficit?

You need The SHRED Method. 

This will teach you exactly how to set up your own diet in a way that allows you to fit in all of the foods you love, within a schedule that actually works for you.

To get your hands on a copy, simply head to the Guides Section in our private community: Fat Loss Hacks For Frustrated Dieters..

We’ll see you in there!