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Summary
On episode 11 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan continues his Foundations series with the three keys to success: patience, progression, and persistence.
He argues that weight loss has to be treated as a long term project, broken into achievable milestones with non food rewards attached, rather than expected to happen overnight.
Allan also explains why gradual, steady changes to diet and training beat drastic ones, and why sticking with the plan through plateaus is what ultimately separates people who succeed from people who quit.
Links
- https://40plusfitness.com
Key Takeaways
- Patience means accepting a long timeline. Since the weight took 40 plus years to accumulate, Allan says it’s unrealistic to expect it to come off in a week, a month, or even a year; the mindset has to shift to a long term project.
- Break the goal into milestones. Rather than fixating on a large total, such as 20, 30, or 50 plus pounds, Allan recommends setting smaller weekly or monthly targets, like two pounds a week, that feel achievable.
- Attach a real, non food reward to each milestone. Allan is explicit that food can’t be the reward; instead, pick something meaningful like a new purse or a movie, and keep a visual reminder of it, such as a photo on the fridge.
- Progression means making things gradually harder as your body adapts. Incremental changes, like cutting sugar by small amounts or adding a little more weight to a lift, are what drive continued results as the body gets used to what it’s doing.
- Small, gradual changes beat drastic ones. Allan warns against doubling a run distance overnight or jumping a large amount of weight on a lift, since drastic jumps risk injury or an unsustainable diet crash, both of which stall progress.
- Weight loss doesn’t move in a straight line. Some weeks bring a bigger loss, some weeks nothing, and some weeks even a small gain from water retention; Allan says as long as training and diet are progressing, the results will eventually follow.
- Persistence is what carries you through plateaus. Allan identifies the two most common failure points as never starting at all, and quitting once it gets hard, and says persistence is what gets someone through that difficult stretch.
- Reconnect with your original why during hard stretches. When persistence is tested, Allan says to go back to the commitment established in episode one and remember the reason the journey started in the first place.
“If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.”
Albert Einstein, quoted by Coach Allan