Work. Whether you have a career or your own business, there’s no getting away from the fact that it can take over your entire life. Between meetings, calls, reports, sales, marketing, fulfilment, accounts, and whatever else crops up on a Friday at 4:45pm just as you’re about to go home… there’s no denying it can be all consuming at times.
It can be difficult to admit that work can have some negative impacts on your life. Especially because, like me, you probably love your job or business. And you’re good at it. People rely on you, so you show up every day and put the hours in to make sure the job is done. You prioritise it over a lot of other things – especially your health.
Now, if you’re anything like most of the folks I’ve trained over the years, you’ve probably neglected your health and fitness for some time. Work, family and everything else has just been too busy and too demanding of your time and energy to even think about it. But in recent years it’s been harder to ignore. The waistline is starting to creep up to a level you’re not entirely comfortable with. You’re noticing you need 3 or 4 coffees in a morning to get going, when in years gone by one would have done the trick. Climbing the stairs too quickly or running for the lift is leaving you alarmingly short of breath. Catching yourself in the bathroom mirror as you’re about to take a shower produces feelings you’d rather not talk about. If any of this is sounding familiar, I get it. And you’re not alone. In this article, we’re going to talk about how to start addressing these issues, without taking anything away from your busy and demanding work and family life.
The Minimum Effective Dose
I want to start with some good news. Because, if you’re like most people, you’re probably not doing much of anything to look after your health or body composition right now, making progress is super easy. And you don’t have to make many changes to your life to start seeing results. In fact, it’s probably better in the long run if you don’t completely overhaul your entire lifestyle. Not only would it be totally unsustainable for you to maintain around your busy lifestyle, but it would be objectively and physiologically the wrong way to try and change your body. And you’ve probably already experienced this first hand. Let me explain.
By now, most of us know that energy balance plays the major role in what the scales say when you hop on them before breakfast. By this I mean the amount of calories you consume versus the amount of calories you burn off. If you’re consuming more than you’re burning, you’re in a calorie surplus, and you’ll gain weight. If you’re burning off more than you’re consuming, you’re in a calorie deficit, and you’ll lose weight. I know, riveting stuff. But it matters.
Now, back to you. You’re probably not gaining or losing weight right now. Your average weight week to week is likely quite similar, right? So you’re in a state of balance. You might not like that state of balance, but at least we know your current lifestyle is maintaining your current body shape & weight.
Therefore, in order to start seeing results, we really don’t need to make many changes. We literally just need to push you slightly out of balance, and into a calorie deficit. This is where most people go wrong. They decide to lose weight, and the impatience kicks in. They rip out any sense of joy and excitement from their diet. All that’s on the menu is protein shakes, lettuce and if they’re feeling adventurous, a diet coke. Then, not being satisfied with their current level of misery, they proceed to add in 3 hours of cardio per day.
Does this work? Absolutely. The weight will fall off you if you do this. For about 3 weeks, if you’re lucky. Because that’s usually the point where 99% of people quit. They have a bad day, they go home and order a pizza and drink a bottle of wine. Then they think they’ve ruined their diet, so go into full eating mode for a week, gaining back all of the weight they’ve lost and then some, because now they’ve crashed their metabolism with the restrictive diet.
Can you see why this isn’t the most sensible approach to take when you have a busy career and home life? You might have even tried something like this in the past and found out first hand how it just doesn’t work. If so, it’s time to find another way. A way that compliments your lifestyle, instead of trying to turn it on it’s head. A way that gives you the freedom and flexibility to have a date night with your partner, go out with your friends or just enjoy a home cooked meal from time to time. A way that you can implement and live by for the next 20 years, instead of the next 20 days.
The way I’m talking about I like to call the minimum effective dose. I learned this term from the Tim Ferriss podcast a number of years ago, and it fits perfectly with how I like to coach people in your situation. Instead of utilising every tool at your disposal from day 1, we make the minimum possible changes to your life to get the maximum possible results. Not only does this protect your energy and time for the things that matter to you (work, family and everything in between), but it allows you to create real, sustainable change to your body. We can then start not only dropping the body fat, but building some lean muscle mass, correcting your posture, getting rid of those niggling aches and pains, improving your sleep, reducing your caffeine dependence and increasing your self-confidence. Done right, fitness should improve your life both personally and professionally, not make it worse.
Creating Your Structure
To begin with, the changes you’ll need to make are fairly minor – but their effects will shock you. It’s all about knowing what to change. The first part is creating some kind of predictability in your fitness and nutrition, so having a think about the kind of structure and routine that works best around your current lifestyle and commitments is essential.
If you’re coming from a ‘standing start’ (i.e. you’re not doing anything active right now), you’re in the best possible position. From an activity standpoint, all we need to do is get you moving. Set a basic step goal that’s a little more than you’re doing right now. Most mobile phones and smart watches track your steps, so have a look what your average step count is, and bump it up by 500 per day. So if your step count is 3000 per day, make 3500 your new minimum. That’s an extra 3 or 4 minutes of walking. It’s not impossible – you could just park further away from Sainsbury’s and you’ll probably hit it.
Next, you’ll want to introduce a bit of resistance training. This will help to build strength and correct any postural imbalances, but the main thing it will do is give you more lean mass to increase your metabolic rate. Essentially, the more lean mass we have, the harder our body has to work to maintain that mass with oxygen, nutrients and blood flow. This has an energetic cost, so we burn more calories at rest by having more lean mass. Getting into a calorie deficit without getting up off the sofa? Sounds like my kind of programme. Two full body weights sessions per week about 45 minutes long each will be more than enough to get you going.
Finally, track how many calories you’re taking in on an average day. This means being VERY honest with yourself. You can use a free app like My Fitness Pal or Nutri-check on your phone to do this. Essentially, everything that passes your lips that contains calories goes through the app for 3 days. Every biscuit, every grape, every sugar in your tea. The current amount of calories you’re consuming is maintaining your current bodyweight, so we need to know what that number is.
Once you have that data, we can start to design your diet. How to do that is beyond the scope of this article, but in short, if you can define the easiest amount of meals and times of those meals you’re eating per day, control for the amount of calories you’ve found out in your tracking phase, and base your meals around some good quality protein sources, you’re pretty much there.
Building In Flexibility
The whole point of this process is that it doesn’t just get results, it gets sustainable results. What’s the point in getting in shape for 3 weeks if in 6 months time you’re right back where you started? It gives you a bit of confidence temporarily, but in the long-run you end up feeling worse for letting yourself go again. So, we need to build in some leeway from day 1. We need to be able to go out for meals, have different kinds of foods to keep things interesting and plan for days where you’ll be stacked out with work. Failing to do this sets us up for a fall as soon as something out of our routine happens, which it will. You can bet on that.
So, we have our fallback plan. The fallback plan is very simple: As long as you hit your calorie & protein goals, you can eat whatever you want, whenever you want. Sounds ridiculous? Not so fast.
Every study on weight loss & fat loss has shown that as long as you control for calories and protein, timings and other macronutrient ratios makes absolutely no difference. So as long as you tick those big two boxes, you’re golden. Is it “optimal” for health, hormone function, neurotransmitter function and a list of other things? Of course not. But right now we’re not concerned about optimal, we’re concerned about getting you losing weight and keeping it off. And this approach is lot better than what you’ve done so far, right?
So, to recap:
As long as you can hit 2x 45 minute weight sessions, hit a specified step goal and hit your target calories and protein each day, you can create sustainable weight loss. It really doesn’t have to take over your life or stunt your career. You just need to know how to set things up, and then stick to it. Which brings us to our final point…
Accountability
The “secret” about all of this that so far has gone unspoken is that this only works if you’re relentlessly consistent. If you hit your goals three days per week and throw it away the rest of the week, you’re not going to see anything change. You must tick the right boxes every day, without fail. If you’re due to have a workout that day, you need to get yourself to the gym (or the spare room if you’re training at home). If you’ve hit your calories by 4pm, you need to be disciplined enough to stop eating until tomorrow. If you’re 500 steps short of your step goal, you need to get out and walk to the end of the street and back. It’s not complicated, but it does need to be done every single day.
This is where a lot of people stumble. When they go it alone, they have no outside source of accountability to keep them on track every day. It’s really easy to veer away from what you should be doing, even when you’ve set yourself up for success using the principles we’ve just gone through. That’s why hiring a coach is one of the smartest things you could do.
Not only will the coach (if they’re good and experienced enough) know exactly where your starting point should be, they will hold you to account and make sure you tick the boxes every single day. This is honestly a huge part of a coach’s value, whether it’s in business, finance, or health. The work needs doing. Having someone that you don’t want to let down (aside from yourself) will drastically increase the likelihood of you doing it, and the results will follow.
If you need some help with this, we have a few spaces left on our men’s and women’s programmes respectively. Come and check us out, book a call to chat on the phone and take advantage of our 10+ years experience working with people just like you. Follow the link below to apply to work with us:
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.
Andy Clements
Owner & Head Coach – DC Personal Training