Why You Keep Regaining Weight and How to Break the Cycle

If you’ve ever lost weight and gained it back, this episode breaks down the real reason why.

It’s not discipline.

It’s one of three patterns:

• Seasonal habits
• Life disruptions
• Unsustainable systems

You’ll learn how to identify which one you’re in and what to do immediately to fix it.

If you’re tired of starting over, this is your roadmap.

💭 Thanks for listening to The Lifestyle of Fitness Podcast with Coach Mike Caulo - NBC-HWC health coach, retired pro Muay Thai fighter, father of 4, and founder of the LOF 100-Day Comback System, 

Transcript

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So if you've gained or lost twenty pounds and then you've gained or lost it again and you've refined yourself repeating this cycle, this is for you. We're gonna go over why you're regaining the same weight and then losing it and regaining it. And it's really gonna fall into three reasons, three buckets, that's it. There's really three categories they fall under and we're gonna go over action items you can focus on for each one of these buckets that you can start immediately tonight. And it'll have a massive impact and ultimately solve the quote unquote problem of you regaining weight and having to lose it over and over and over again. First, I actually want to talk about a little bit of a story so you guys can relate to where I'm coming from, or maybe you can have some context. So to be honest, even though like I don't look like I was always obese as a kid, I was obese as a kid. I was like very heavy and overweight. And I lost at one point over a hundred pounds. I way too light i was at the time five eleven i'm six foot now way too light i ended up losing my hair a lot of stressors at sixteen that's not great for the body and then i end up now kind of reflux in about two hundred pounds that's where i hold and i feel good i'll fluctuate about ten pounds come from the winter to the summer for a variety of reasons we're going to get into that that's one of the buckets the seasonal change is going to be one of the buckets that happens on an annual basis i'm But what I figured out throughout this process is in my own journey of losing a hundred pounds, and then also being able to put on about twenty to thirty pounds of muscle back through that process, going from a basically obese high school athlete baseball player that was cut from his varsity baseball team to now a retired professional Muay Thai champion with the WKA and being able to travel the world and working with amazing athletes and now working with parents that want to reclaim their health and if you want to lose that twenty to thirty pounds of body fat and keep it off that's who we serve that's who i get to work with that's why i create the content that i do so again let's talk about the three buckets it's ultimately going to fall into if you find yourself gaining weight and then trying to lose it and regaining it back number one It's going to be either a seasonal or annual habit or pattern. It's a yearly fluctuation you find yourself falling into. We're going to dive into why that is the case. Number two, it's going to be an acute stressor and or a one-off life event that just is something you can't really account for, whether it's divorce, losing a loved one, a hurricane, a natural disaster, something like that, maybe a sobriety transition, moving, a job loss, something really acute that comes up that you don't necessarily schedule or plan for. And then bucket three is ultimately the sustainability issue where you find yourself going through a crash diet, but you don't actually address a lifestyle or sustainability. You're just going into a thirty day challenge or a program or you might be starting the new year with a goal and maybe even lost again the weight. but it wasn't very sustainable. You weren't considering the long-term. These are the three buckets we're going to look at today. And what I'm going to give you an action plan for each one of them broken down that you can start tonight and actually see results starting today. Now, if you have questions on this, if you're not sure, feel free to drop them live. Or if you're watching a replay, feel free to again, drop that. And if you want to seek support with all of this, you can go to our website, lifestyleoffitness.com. I got tons of great resources, free things you can take action on. You can jump on a call with me or someone on my team. I will navigate through that with you and see if everything's a good fit. And if not, we'll give you some actionables you'll take action on and be able to incorporate in your life. But let's go back to number one. Let's go back to the seasonality of things, the yearly fluctuation. So first thing I want to highlight is a certain amount of fluctuation is normal. Day to day, season to season, month to month, there's a certain natural fluctuation that can take place. However, there is with the however, the caveat to that, we want to be mindful of how much because past a certain point, it's quite detrimental to our lives, quite detrimental to our overall health and longevity. But first going back to some kind of data around this, I'm going to pull some things from PubMed. I'm going to pull some things from National Institute of Health. Everything is going to be peer reviewed as far as what I'm referencing here. So on average, I'm sure this will make sense to you as we look through it, but you tell me what you think. I want you guys to guess what season do you think is typically related to weight gain? Summer, fall, winter, or spring. Which of these seasons would you have to guess, or if you had to guess, which would you guess is related to weight fluctuation, ultimately weight gain? I'll put a little like do, do, do, do, a little Jeopardy music, theme music on. Yeah, winter. Exactly, Mary. That's a great guess. So Mary's spot on there. Winter it is. So winter is, and if you think about it, why would winter be the case? For most of us, unless you're growing up in like Miami or something or somewhere tropically warm year round, the winter time is where as the weather changes, you're going to naturally be outside less. On average, you're going to have less movement. Also, what tends to align with that is more socializing and social events, social eating around holidays, and you have more pattern disruption. We've talked about that in the past, how pattern disruption, exactly holidays, impacts our routine. So if you think about whether it's Christmas or Hanukkah, New Year's, Kwanzaa, that time of year is quite substantial. And being able to impact our routine, plus combined with less daylight, combined with colder weather where you're not getting outside and less active, it would make sense why that's going to be in bucket one, a seasonal or annual fluctuation. Another component to is the holiday specifically that you mentioned, Mary, is where weight gain is going to come into play in small amounts that build up. One day, one weekend isn't going to do it. But when you think about from, let's say, November to January, that's three months that you could put on or aware, or even if we are, it's a matter of I'll deal with it later. But if we don't actually have a plan in place, later tends not to come and or we find ourselves in the same spot next year. So the problem isn't necessarily the fluctuation itself. The problem is letting a temporary situation or bump or whatever you want to call it, disrupt and become our baseline that we allow that to become the new norm. And then the I'll start Monday becomes, I'll just not start until next year until like, we just don't start anymore. We don't go back. We don't, we allow that pattern disruption to become the new norm. So here's some of the things I want to invite you to see. Is this you? Is this something you can relate to? A, you can just know, right? Maybe right off the bat. But here's something that's not particularly clear. I want to give us some assessment questions we're going to go through for each of these buckets to see if you fall into this bucket. So number one, does your weight usually rise around the same time of year? This is going to be a good indication. You have a seasonal or yearly fluctuation. We're going to also get to what you're going to do with all of this. But first, I wanted to just give you guys some ideas here. Number two, do you tend to go between or gain between late fall, and the beginning of the new year. So again, thinking about that fall to winter time, this is more than likely going to fall in that category. Do weekends, holidays, travel, and birthdays create the same pattern over and over and over again? So looking at these benchmarks and a common pattern comes up where like, all right, I'm going to go on vacation. I'll splurge here and then I'll go back to it on Monday. But then for like two weeks, we don't go back to it. It When life returns to normal, so when you get back from that, does your behavior return to structure? This is also an important question or interesting component to it. So now let's look at if some of this, if you've answered yes to these, then this is going to be the bucket you fall into. Ooh, craving chocolate. That's a good one too. And that's something we can go over on an actionable. And there's some insight to gain what our cravings can actually tell. Tell us what we can kind of do about that, because I'm not going to sit here and say, hey, you're never going to have chocolate again. That's probably not realistic and sustainable. We're going to get into that for bucket three, the sustainability and lifestyle choices. But for this one, the seasonal and annual fluctuations, we're going to look at, OK, honestly, expect some fluctuation. That's first things first, expect this to happen and plan for it. And what I mean by plan for it is know when the winter time comes up as the weather gets colder, you're going to have to have an adjustment, whether you're gonna make up for that movement, because you're not getting as many steps outside, being extra intentional with steps, being extra intentional on your nutrition. We're saying, hey, I'm going to be intentional on the days I'm not having these parties or I'm not going out to the holidays on what my food is going to be and what my actual awareness to that is going to look like. So being able to expect it and then have a plan in place. Now, when you say have a plan in place, what does that mean? We're going to get to that in a second. But the idea here is using a maintenance as well as far as a mindset to be able to have some predictability during these windows. So instead of saying, hey, I'm going to do a hard cutting phase. I mean, you can do that and you can even go into I've worked with people and myself even include, especially having fights around the holidays. Guess what? They don't care when you have a fight promotion, you have to take a fight. They don't care that it was Christmas. They don't care that it was Easter, whatever the holiday is. Like, guess what? You agreed to this weight. You got to make this weight. You have to do that. So you get to be intentional with that. Or you get to adjust your goal saying, I know for me personally, I will fluctuate about ten pounds over the wintertime. As someone that's two hundred pounds, that's five percent of my body composition. Most of that is going to be a split, about a fifty fifty split. Half of that is honestly going to be a little bit of body fat going on. So about three to maybe five pounds of body fat coming up, but the other three to five pounds, I'll break it down a little differently. So the three pounds of body fat, three pounds of it's gonna be glycogen and water related because I'm increasing my food intake. And then another one-ish pounds that related to that one to two pounds is gonna be lean body mass. I'm intentionally changing in my training. My maintenance season is where I lift more, doing less cardio. I'm intentionally putting on muscle. That's my perspective. And that's what I invite you guys go into this season knowing there's going to be some fluctuation and have goals and intentions aligning accordingly. Saying, okay, this isn't necessarily going to be the season that I'm going to get ultra shredded. You can if you want to, but what kind of experience do you want to have? That's the other part is having a plan and having the mindset for me is I want to have an enjoyable season in the winter time. So I shift my mindset into saying, Hey, I'm going to be putting on muscle. I'm going to also be looking to build consistency in these weight training areas and being able to experiment with different nutritional strategies around this time of year. I really like to speaking of chocolate for what you're saying, Mary, I like to experiment with different dessert recipes. that I will have and be able to say, oh, look, I just came up with a peanut butter cup action one that I absolutely love now. Oh, and then fasting during the holiday season. You can go into some intermittent fasting or prolonged fasting where I've seen it very helpful for our strategies and even our twenty eight day reset book and our hundred day programs built off of the idea. You can go through the season, but then having a little bit of a intentional reset. And that's what I've done many, many years over. It's like, okay, I'll go through the season then for about five to seven days. I'll do an intermittent fasting cycle. I'll remove a lot of processed things. I'll be very produce oriented, very protein oriented, very like, again, no processed, like very, very intentional. However, lately, and after talking with some doctors that I really appreciate and respect, and even our own medical director, I've played with finding, again, this idea of sustainability where you can do fasting, but I've done less of the fasting. I still like intermittent fasting to some degree, but I don't do as much prolonged fasting. Maybe once or twice a year, but I don't do it seasonally as much. But I do think after the wintertime, a prolonged fast can be beneficial. The caveat we want to be mindful when it comes to fasting is the stressors of our life, especially for my females out there. When you are stressed, And you're having your cycle, for example, that can delay your cycle. It can impact your period and how your body's responding to it. So you want to be very intentional with that. Also for just everybody, not just our females out there. If you're high stress, chronically stressed, fasting isn't probably the move for you. It's adding a stressor on top of a stressor, which doesn't usually yield a very sustainable outcome. So that's one part. The other actionable we can focus on, again, when it comes to the maintenance program is having some baseline non-negotiables. So yes, I'm in a maintenance phase, but I still have some non-negotiables that are at the foundation of what I'm doing. For example, a key one I've talked about in the past I'll bring up here is having a protein target, having a hydration target, and having a movement target. So for me, I am having at least one hundred and fifty grams of protein, especially in the summertime. I have a little bit of a lower protein goal because I'm being more active. So I adjust for my fats and my carbs. I honestly don't even track calories as much or fats and carbs. I look at my protein. I look at my fiber. Those are easy metrics for me to track. I enjoy doing that. Protein is an accessible one. If you are hitting your protein goal. You are going to be supporting your lean body mass. You're also going to be more than likely not getting as hungry with other things and not eating as much. Hydration is also going to be a massive cognitive booster. It's going to be a massive performance booster. It's also going to be a massive satiety tool. It's a fancy of saying you're going to be full because if you're filling up with hydration, you are not going to be as empty as far as your stomach to fill with other things. And then for movement, being able to have a baseline movement goal, especially when the weather's not as conducive, saying, okay, my non-negotiable is thirty minutes of movement every single day. Wintertime or summertime, it's always thirty minutes, or it's most, I don't want to say always, it's frequently thirty minutes, and then sometimes I adjust that depending on what's going on. So again, to recap, the action was you can start tonight is shifting your mindset. When you're coming into that winter time, don't be shocked when you're like, all right, I'm probably going to put on a couple of pounds or my, I, I, what I found very, um, within reasons to stand was like a five percent fluctuation, three to five percent. Okay, not body fat, total body weight fluctuation. So that doesn't mean gain three to five percent body fat. No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying your total weight can fluctuate by three to five percent during this winter holiday season. And then being able to, because of that mindset shift, we're being a little bit more understanding and kind to ourselves. But we still have a non-negotiable. So tonight, start with a non-negotiable if you find yourself in that holiday season. And then, ooh, that's an interesting. So what's the best nut to eat? The healthiest. So that's the inner child of me wants to make a joke. But so it kind of varies. There's no one, for example, nut that's the best or legume. There are some handful of ones that I've seen other neuroscientists and specialists and dieticians talk about that I think becomes impactful here. See, I don't know if you guys can hear that. There's actually a paramedic going right now because someone's not taking care of this, right? They might have had some kind of extreme health condition because they're not staying on top of this. You got to listen. This is your wake-up call right here. So the point is when it comes to even like, let's say the healthiest of something, here's what I would say. I wouldn't put too much stock into the healthiest. Almonds can be impactful, cashews, whatever you're going to actually eat that you enjoy. That's what I would say. Peanuts are on the lower end, the technically legumes, but I would say almonds can always be a really good go-to. Walnuts, cashews, those are the ones I've seen be very effective time and time and time again. So when it comes to, again, the annual and yearly or seasonal fluctuations, shift your mindset around it. Expect a little bit of fluctuation. Be able to have a maintenance phase if you really want to have sustainability. Unless you really want to hardcore get into things, you can dial up the intensity and be able to have two to three non-negotiables. Pick a protein goal. The easiest one I found is for every pound of lean body mass, have one gram. So for example, I'm two hundred pounds. Let's just say I'm about twenty percent body fat. That means about one hundred and sixty pounds of lean body mass. I'm going to have about one hundred and sixty grams of protein in the wintertime. Then for the hydration target, I'm two hundred pounds. I say cut your weight in half. That's how many fluid ounces you want to shoot for as a baseline. So I would shoot for a hundred ounces for movement. Again, I'm shooting for about thirty minutes per day, whether that's walking, weight training, martial arts, stretching, playing with the kids. But thirty minutes of movement. That's just what I found effective, because if you do that every day, that's going to be roughly three and a half hours per week. And what we've seen from mass studies and analysis, if you can get even up to an hour of movement per day, but thirty minutes per day, your comorbidity rates go down, your quality of life goes up, overall health conditions go down. So that's where that number comes from. Okay. All right, that's an interesting one. Yeah, cashews are in the poison ivy plant family. I mean, they could be. That's not my specialty. That's why I would refer to one of my dieticians to pull that up. I'm not a hundred percent. And then yeah, every day as far as movement. So having an everyday non-negotiable. That's for this bucket number one, the annual and seasonal fluctuations. To recap the things that you can focus on, have a non-negotiable up to three non-negotiables, shift your mindset and expect some fluctuation. Another thing I will say is you can... Weigh or measure yourself consistently so you don't see the veering or drifting. Here's the one thing I would invite. Don't do it daily, but weekly, biweekly, monthly. Having a body composition check. Anyone that's been on our app knows that I send out a message that says, hey, I highly recommend a smart scale. Not perfect, but what it does is it doesn't just become obsessed about your weight. it will give you data onto your water levels, your lean body mass, your bigger picture. Again, it's not perfect. It will adjust, but it gives you an idea of like, okay, cool. Like my weight stayed the same, but my muscle went up and my fat went down. That's like body fat percentage went down. That's a win. That's something you want to double down on as much as possible, but being able to measure and bring awareness and track things. Cause again, the four step formula, no matter what time of year, no matter what bucket is have awareness and Have an intention, create action, and then schedule accountability. So even for this, our awareness is I'm going to be aware of what my body's doing by checking my body fat percentage. My intention is to have a maintenance season. So I'm not going to lose body fat, but I'm not going to be worried about putting on three percent overall body weight and being able to have action. I'm going to have these non-negotiables, accountability. That's what you got our coaching team for or your family or your friends or whatever network feels accessible from there. So that's basically the recap. Again, seasonally, if you're regaining, it's not necessarily a failure. Sometimes it's just an unplanned drift. So some aspect of that is gain insight, make adjustments, expect some fluctuation, but be able to have an intentional action plan and you won't see as much compounding over the years. That's bucket one. Bucket two is a very kind of hopefully less often, but can be still impactful in our lives. You're going to face this probably at least once in your life, if not a handful of times. Hopefully it doesn't come up too much. It's the acute stressor, the one-off life events bucket. So you went through a divorce. I know that I went through a divorce years back. That can be impactful. Being able to lose a loved one. I've had that experience before. It can be very stressful. Financial stressors. We had a hurricane come through here in Asheville that devastated the economy and the area and obviously people's lives. There's massive impact and stress related to that. One of the things I had my buddy, I was scheduling to come on, we were going to talk about is sobriety, going through sobriety. Sometimes people turn to food and gain weight because of that. That can be a component. or being able to have, let's say, a caregiving responsibility because someone got sick or you lost a loved one, you lost the job, moving. These are high stress or one-off life events that can be very stressful and can impact our patterns and disruption. So this is another area to talk about action goals. And if this is you, I got you. If you're not certain, here's some assessment questions to think about. Number one, did the regain happen around a major life event? Did you notice all of a sudden after you lost a loved one or let's say a natural disaster or whatever, you gained weight back? That's a pretty clear indicator, right? Number two, did your sleep appetite or any kind of paraphernalia use alcohol or drug use or movement change during that time? For example, I'll be super transparent with you guys. I had gone about a year without consuming any THC, especially after going through my divorce. I was very intentional. Like, you know, I want to clear my mind a little bit. I want to recalibrate. I had been, after I retired from fighting in And once I was going through that divorce, I was like, I want to reevaluate where my brain's at, where my reactions are, my habits, all this fun stuff. So I went pretty much a year without any THC. Drinking has never been a thing for me. But once the hurricane happened, I noticed I started smoking again. I started consuming THC and it started shifting some of my behavior patterns. So I was like, oh, that's an interesting one. I would tie to a one-off stressor life event. So that's number two. Number three, were you in survival mode? A great way to know and understand if you're in survival mode is A, your resting heart rate and B, your overall anxiety levels. Were you in that survival state, fight or flight state where it's hard to be settled? Your resting heart rate's elevated on average constantly. Like for me, my resting heart rate on average is about forty seven beats per minute. Let's just call it fifty for easy math. If it's above fifty five or sixty, that's like where I know my stress levels, survival modes kicking in, which at different points during the time it was. Another aspect that we can look at that we want to consider is, did you stop caring for yourself because you were trying to manage something bigger? Or did you lose interest in the things you normally care about because of this event? Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that. So having a diagnosis of cancer, lost thirty pounds. didn't eat stress. Yeah. When I'm happy, I eat. Yeah. Yeah. So that, and that's like extremely stressful, right? Like I've had, unfortunately, family members. So it's sending positive vibes for you, Mary, um, with that. And I, you can share as much as little as you want. Yeah. Stress. Um, yeah. Is it okay to diet at six days a week and have a cheat day? So here's what I would offer. This is a great question, by the way. And we'll get to this in actually bucket three when it comes to sustainable practices. I'll circle back to that. But even when it comes to, again, like a diagnosis of cancer or a stress off event, or let's say my stepmom, I know she was diagnosed with cancer many times over in different ways, extremely stressful, having personal health events or these types of things. You may even be losing weight. You can go either direction. You gain or lose weight because of stressors and appetite. And that doesn't align with what you want. So what do we do with that? That's how you know that this is an acute one-off life event is if you said yes to those types of things. Now, what can we do with that? You don't use the same mindset first that you were going to like, oh, I want to get fat loss or I want to put on muscle first. First, we want to get into stabilization mindset mode, safety mode. So if you're in that fight or flight survival mode, we need to address that first. We need to shift some of our identity around that and where we're at from a cognitive perspective because they're constantly in that fight or flight state or fear or stress. None of these other things are going to really serve us. So the first thing we want to do is address our mindset and get into, I'm in a stabilization. I'm in a recalibration mindset. Similar to what we're talking about in bucket one, you want to be able to shift your mindset into a maintenance phase. This is a, I'm stabilizing recalibration phase being very, again, it goes back to that four-step formula. We have intention. The intention is recalibration. We have awareness around what's going on. We'll get into that. So first being able to shift your mindset. Number two, we're focusing on recovery before we're worried about restricting food or restricting behavior patterns or anything like that. We just wanna be able to focus on recovery, sleep and stress management and getting support where you need to as well. Not just trying to do this by yourself, but being able to focus on the recovery side. So stabilize, get recovery. If it's like from a cancer diagnosis, right? You wanna work with your medical team and recover where you're at from a health standpoint. Then number three, reduce the number of goals. So instead of saying, all right, I have my three non-negotiables, we're going to whittle it down to one, come back down to one. That's the one thing I can offer is when you're stressed out, when you're trying to do multiple things in general, doing multiple things is not the move, but especially when you're stressed, you want to cut it down to one clear path, one clear intention, one clear action, and one clear metric you're bringing your awareness towards, and then having accountability around that. So again, we have shifting our mindset to a stability oriented mindset. That's our intention. We're also focused on recovery before we're restricting anything. So that's what we bring our awareness towards. Where's my state at? Am I in a recovered state? Where's my resting heart rate? That's like a metric I would invite in this stage to look at. You can look at your body composition, look at your resting heart rate, maybe your blood pressure, look at some metrics that are related to stress and then be able to work from there. The action then becomes reduce the number of goals. Pick one goal you're taking action on. And when it comes to that, we're going to use the minimum effective dose or the minimum effective standards kind of approach. So instead of trying to do all I used to do three to five times a week, we're starting with what's the minimum effective dose. All right. I don't have to go to the gym. I'm going to do it at home and I'm going to do it for I'm going to do one protein forward meal on a daily basis. I'm going to take one walk. I'm going to have one sleep target for this night. I'm going to just have one accountability touchpoint scheduled on a weekly basis. If stress is still active after all these things, we don't want to build a plan for your best week. And in an optimal state, we want to refine it down for your hardest weeks, for your hardest moments, while also having support in a professional setting as best you can. Thank you. And then Ari, I'm going to pause here because you got some good questions here, Mary. And then I'll recap this and then go over the mindset. So should you write a diet journal when you're doing this? So here's the thing. I think writing down your food's always impactful. Again, I don't want to speak into absolutes, but can be very impactful. My biggest habit I've found very effective in working with others is instead of writing things down, which you can do, and I think that's very effective, but that can be still very subjective. Take a picture of everything. Pictures are objective, right? You have a picture, you slow down, take a picture because then you can go back. You're like, oh, I didn't eat that much. But if you take a picture and you can see the portions, it's very objectively driven. And then you can, nowadays with technology, like we have our own, in our own coaching program, we have AI recognition that can recognize the food that you're eating, tell you how many calories are in it, a guesstimate, it's not perfect. And then give you an idea of how much protein, fats, carbs, calories, all that good stuff. So instead of journaling, I think journaling is great. And we have, I have journals actually in my carousel on Amazon related to this. I think taking pictures is really the move because it's a lower barrier of entry. It's way more accessible. You don't have to countermeasure anything. A lot of times when people journal with their diet, they're counting things and they're measuring things, which can be great and can bring a lot of awareness. It can also add a lot of stress. And the last thing you want to do when you're in bucket two is add more stress to your life. So to kind of recap again, this bucket is the one-off life stressors, not chronic. That's what we're going to get to in the third bucket, this lifestyle stuff. This is the one-offs, like you got a cancer diagnosis, you lost a loved one, you got fired from your job, you're moving, you're going through a divorce, you had a natural disaster. These really one-off events that are high stress in a very short window of time, you want to be able to stabilize first. Focus on stabilizing. Don't focus on fat loss or massive muscle gain. Focus on stabilizing. You want to be able to shift that mindset. You want to get to recovery first, get into a safe nervous system state, have support around that. You want to reduce the number of things and goals you're focusing on, ideally to one. And then we're going to use the minimum effective dose. So being able to say, hey, what's the least amount I can put into this to still see a result and build off of that? I usually invite people, start with the first three to five minutes. That's a good place to start. Okay, what's the first three to five minutes of being active and going to the gym would look like? All right, I just got to get outside or I got to pack my gym bag or I got to, you know, just put my workout clothes on. That's what we start with. Then being able to build from there. Again, so sometimes the goal is not just like losing weight right now. Sometimes the goal is to just stop the spiral, stop the chaos, stabilize, slow down. This is a great Marine quote I've gotten for a lot of my Marine veteran friends is slow is smooth, smooth is fast. I'm going to substitute the fast part for fast is effective. So slow down, allow us to be smooth. That's going to allow us to be effective and that's going to create results. Now let's talk about the last category. And this is what you're kind of like talking about. I was not a Marine. I just have Marine friends and other veteran friends and even clients that have been in the Marines. I actually have one right now overseas. But no, I'm not a military veteran, but thanks to all my military peeps. Appreciate y'all. So this is bucket three. This is where this is the sustainable part. We don't have sustainability. We're doing crash diets. We haven't addressed the lifestyle. We have chronic stress potentially. And there's just behavior patterns that don't serve us. So how do you know you're in this bucket? We're going to get over that. But first, this is honestly the biggest one. This is the most common one that I see. This is the one that has the most impact over the longest period of time. People lose weight with intensity a lot of times and then regain it because nothing about their actual life was transformed. They just had a short window and then they want to go back to all the same things. We want to review and systemize our approach to make it sustainable. So let's look at how we can do this in a simple, effective manner. Simple doesn't always mean easy, but it makes it effective and doable. So first things first, here's what I want you to look at. We're using our over aggressive calorie cut to manipulate our weight. Maybe it's even fasting. And again, there's nothing against fasting. I like fasting. I think that's a really impactful piece. However, if we're just fasting, it can become a slippery slope of like eating disorders. There's an interesting dynamic there. So if you're overly aggressive with your calorie cuts, that's not going to be sustainable. It just adds more stress to your life. If you have unsustainable movement, volume and expectations that means if you're trying to do three hours worth of cardio or you're going crazy with the volume that's not going to be very sustainable as well and nutritionally it's not going to align either if you also have what we would call temporary discipline, right? So you're like, cool, I can sprint for the next month, but then I'm just gonna go crazy for the three months thereafter. That's also not gonna be super sustainable. And that's not what we wanna create, right? The whole category and goal of this bucket is sustainability in this arena. Another aspect that you might fall in this category is if you have no sleep structure. If your sleep is all over the place, you're up till three in the morning playing video games, eating, whatever. This is again, a lifestyle component that we can just really hone almost. I would put most of my weight on this category. No pun intended with the weight, but focus as far as on the sleep component to it, because guess what? If you don't have structured sleep or if you don't have consistent quality sleep, seven to nine hours, you're going to be more stressed. You're also going to have more cravings around food. You're not going to have the same kind of energy. And there's so many comorbidities tied to quality of sleep than anything else. Another aspect is you don't have a support system. You haven't created a support system. You're not communicating around support. So you don't have that added accountability or a team around you. And then lastly, there's no transition plan after you've, let's say, hit your goal. So a lot of times we do this crash diet. What happens afterwards? There's no actual transition plan. It's just, I'm going to cut a lot of calories. I'm going to do a crazy amount of cardio. I'm going to lose a bunch of weight. I'm going to hit my goal, but then I'm going to just like stuff my face again. There's no transition. So this is the sustainability component, the lifestyle component. This is where we focus pretty much ninety percent of our coaching on. We work with people through the life events. I've worked with people through even seasonal fluctuations. But ninety percent of the people we serve and what we focus on is in this bucket three category. And I would say most of you, if not all of you watching this, are going to be in this category probably. And even if you're in one of the other buckets, most of you are also gonna fall in bucket three because one and two can lead to bucket three. If you have a one-off life event, that tends to be a pattern disruption that makes an unsustainable lifestyle shift. Or if you have seasonal fluctuations, that usually means there's some behavior oriented things we haven't optimized yet. And again, even as someone that does this for a living, I have optimization improvements I can always work on my own health. So it's not judging. It's just stating that we're going to fall in potentially multiple buckets. Most of us are falling in bucket three. so with that being said let's talk about what you can actually do right i talked about what you can do in bucket one what you do a bucket two this is bucket three this is the actionable stuff you start today right now that will make a difference and last you a lifetime so number one stop asking how fast can i lose the weight how fast can i do this it's not about speed here that's the inverse dynamic that we want to think about this as What I mean by that is slow down. Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. Fast is effective and result. So it's kind of counterintuitive, right? But we want to slow down. So I think about how fast I can do it. And honestly, to give you a goal, this comes up a lot. What's a realistic goal for most of us is one to three pounds of weight and body fat loss on a weekly basis. When it comes to adding muscle, it could be anywhere from a tenth of a pound up to a quarter of a pound, half pound, maybe half a pound of muscle gain on a weekly basis. But really, it's like a tenth of a pound to a quarter of a pound per week on average for most of us. If you're a newbie and you haven't lifted before and you're young and you have all your hormones in line and you have good sleep, maybe you could do like half a pound to a pound. You can gain more even on a weekly. That would be kind of crazy. That's still very crazy. I have a great example of that. I have a teenage client that works with our coaching team, very high performer, great athlete, family's very supportive, pretty low stress life, very focused on school and sports. He's put on about fifteen pounds over the last four months. Now, not all of that is muscle, but he was a very lean kid and is still relatively lean, but put on a lot of muscle while also putting on some body fat. putting on some water and glycogen, but has put on probably eight to ten pounds of muscle in a was that force like sixteen week window, twenty week window. So that can fall into line about a half a pound per week, which is a lot. That's pretty crazy. That's all things in your favor. So again, going back to the actionables, don't think about how fast you can do it. Think about how you can keep this in real life in a sustainable approach. So how can you play the infinite game? If you had to go the rest of your life for this, how could we do that? That's how we want to shift our mindset. So if you notice for each of these buckets, the first thing we're going to do is have a mindset shift. We can still have the intention to lose body fat. We still have the intention to put on muscle. We can have those intentions, but we want to shift our mindset. In bucket one, it's shifting our mindset to maintenance. In bucket two, it's first just stabilizing and recovering. Bucket three, it's really about how do I slow this down yet still see results? So it's not that we don't care about body fat loss. It's about how do we slow down how quickly we're sprinting through this or not even sprinting. And then again, what are we gonna build this from? This is the actual about the lifestyle variables we can build this around. Here's some key anchors I want you guys to look at, and this is what we're gonna build things off of. Number one is gonna be sleep. Sleep is at the foundation of all of this. Food comes back to it, movement comes back to it, energy, all those are gonna come back to sleep. If you are not getting seven to nine hours of sleep on average, you are going to be in a really rough place. This is not going to be sustainable. I don't care who you are. There's a very small percentage. I think it's less than five percent, less than one percent of the population can get away with like five to six hours of sleep. If you think that's you, maybe. What I'm willing to bet is you are operating in a suboptimal level. That's more than likely what's happening. So number one is sleep. Number two is looking at our schedule. Again, these are lifestyle variables we want to look at. Sleep's number one. Schedule's the next thing that we can potentially look at. What's our routine and schedule? Meaning, yes, it's great to go to the gym for an hour and a half, but if my schedule only lasts for forty five minutes, I'm probably going to look at a twenty to thirty minute workout that also affords me fifteen minutes of like shower changing and eating. That's what we want to be mindful of. Looking at number three, what's our food environment? Not just our food, not just our environment, our food environment. Are you in a food desert? Meaning, do you have access to the food that we would want to have that's non-processed, that's quality? Can you get there? Do you have means of transportation? Do you have accessibility to the food? Because I could send the perfect plan on paper, but if you can't even get that food, that's not going to be sustainable. It doesn't make sense, no matter how good of a plan it is. And that's not fair to you, the person implementing the plan, because I'm not setting you up for success. The next thing is what does travel look like? That ties into, again, our routine, but be mindful of travel. Like if you have a long commute every day, that changes things. If you work from home, that changes things. If you're traveling monthly, weekly, quarterly, seasonally for work, that changes things. If you're retired, that changes things. All of these aspects are going to change the variables. Next is what's our family dynamic look like? Are you a parent like I am in my fiance? Or do we have four daughters under the age of eight? That changes things. We have a German shepherd who's three years old that just broke her leg a couple of months ago. That changes things. That's a very acute stressor. What is, Misha, I'll be talking about it. She just made a noise. What does your overall stress look like? What's your stress threshold? And what's your stress exposure look like? So it's one thing to have like Misha breaking her leg. That's our dog's name. She broke her leg. That's a one-off acute stressor. It's another thing to every day. feel like I'm hitting the ground running and I'm constantly overwhelmed by all the stuff I have to do. I can't keep up. I have financial stressors on a daily basis. I have, um, you know, family, like all these things, that type of stress is something we want to address. So just because I listened to sort of, that's not the order of necessarily weight and operation. I just want to give you guys examples, but these are things that we can build our lifestyle around factoring for these things. And then ultimately we're going to use replicable meals, workouts, and structure. What does that mean? So Carrie can speak to this. She can attest to that. I've literally eaten the same thing. It's been, I feel like as long as I've known you, I carry just walk out of it. That's why I'm playing over here. I mean, like you change it every once in a while, but yeah, you could eat. for like maybe at least eight months, right? Like for the last eight months, I feel like it's more or less like, yeah, we'll go on vacation or we'll go to see family and I'll have different things. But I would say eighty five to ninety percent of the dinners I've had have been a turkey bowl, like ground turkey meat, peppers and onions or some type of produce, a some type of carb, whether it's like rice, cauliflower, rice, something like that. Yeah, you can do chicken and rice. Yeah, that's a good point, Mary. And yeah, definitely life change. Being able to be mindful of that and having beans for fiber and then having like a high fiber either wrap or bread that I mix it in. And then I like to have quinoa chips or some types. So I've literally had the same dinner. The point is having replicable meals because then on average, a data point has shown from another study when I was doing a continuing education that people will make about two hundred nutrition choices a day. So if we can cut that even in half, we're going to save a lot of stress and bandwidth. So if you can outsource your meal prep, if you have the budget, hire a meal prep company. If you have the budget, get a chef. But most of us don't have that budget. Let's be real. And even if we do, you want to be able to have a sense of control of what's going into your food. So have, and this is a resource we have. So if you guys want this resource, Go to our website, go to lifestyleoffitness.com, fill out our intake form. I'll send you this. And we also have it with our AI. It's a breakdown into four columns, protein, smart carbs, fat, and vegetable. These are the four ingredients that constitute pretty much every single meal that I eat on a daily basis or every feeding opportunity. I usually hit those four checkpoints. I use olive oil for the most part, sometimes coconut oil, sometimes butter. Usually from a protein, it's like egg, chicken, turkey, or fish. Sometimes it's like a whey shake or whey protein shake, something like that. Yeah, you can do lean pork. Again, I have nothing against that. You could do pork. That's another great option. It just depends, A, on your spiritual preferences. I know a lot of people like, will you halal? I've also noticed I'm horrible apparently at pronouncing. It's halal or halal. I'm horrible at the pronunciation, but If you don't eat pork for whatever reason, or even if you're like for whatever religious reasons you don't eat it, that's fine. I will still eat it, especially being in the Carolinas. Pork is a big one. I think it's a great option for sure. Lean steaks. I like a good filet. It's just, again, cost effectiveness and your protein intake. But again, we have our protein column. We have our smart carb column. We have a vegetable column and a fat column. That's what I consistently build all my meals off of and makes it replicable. From a workout perspective, same thing. We want to find, you don't do the same workout always because you do want to have some change to your workouts to have adaptability. But believe it or not, you can actually build a quite consistent routine and literally just changing the tempo, the reps and the rest period. You can do the same workout. So I'm going to take a total body workout. I'm going to start with a deadlift variation. I'm going to start, or I'm going to, then I'm gonna have a squat variation, like a Bulgarian split squat. I'm going to do a lateral lunge variation. I'm going to do a press variation. I'm going to do a pull variation. And then I'm going to do an accessory variation for my shoulders and a core workout. So I got seven movements, maybe eight. If I want to get, uh, Some extra conditioning in there. I've got eight movements. I can take all same of these eight movements and I just change the reps, how many sets I'm doing and the rest period and the tempo. And I can get a new workout and I can do that all year long. You can make variations after three weeks, after even three months, adjust the tempo, adjust the reps, adjust the sets, and you'll get a new workout response. Is it the most efficient? No, but it's being able to make it sustainable is what is impactful here. And that's what we teach in our coaching programs is, Hey, how can you learn how your body responds and what tools can you leverage here? So that's a big piece in the actionable side is how do you make it replicable? So it's consistent and again, sustainable over time. So we got the replication. We've got the variables we want to consider for a lifestyle. We want to slow things down. We got that. We want to make it apply for real life. Also, we want to be able to have an exit strategy, especially when we're coming off of fat loss. That means once I've hit my body composition goal, like for me, I'll fluctuate up to two hundred, maybe two hundred five pounds. I like to be around one ninety in my leanest, maybe one eighty five if I'm going into a jujitsu competition or something. That technically can fluctuate twenty pounds, but I find ten pounds is my sweet spot. I'll usually go between like one ninety five and two oh five. That's my personal fluctuation. So my exit strategy is all right. I'm going to maybe go from eating a little bit more mindful and intentional, closer to twenty five hundred calories up to three thousand calories. If I were to count calories, I personally don't. I pay attention to more of my digestion, how it's feeling. Also, my overall health. fast or slow i'm eating my food am i chewing my food those types of things but having an exit strategy so that as we get into a leaner body composition we can sustain it and we're not like gaining that twenty pounds back immediately and just going through that same cycle which is not green for our hormonal system our endocrine system all these other just physiological components and byproducts And then lastly, having accountability after your first win to build momentum. So get an early win, build early momentum, and then have accountability and continuously build that accountability. So that's a little bit, again, just to bring it home. I'm going to pause to see if we have questions on that. I appreciate all the questions you got here. Oh, what's up, Nina? Nina says, hey, by the way, Carrie, yeah, Hope is asleep right now. She's doing well. And I'm going to check in with you and see what you got here, Mary. So yeah, we got, again, the protein shakes. What about starches like baked potatoes, sweet potatoes? Yeah, so I think you can totally leverage those things. Potatoes are, I think of it as produce, protein, and pleasure when it comes to nutrition. So I want to get protein in. I want to get produce and I want to have some sense of pleasure, like enjoyable things. Cause if everything I eat is disgusting and I don't enjoy it, it's not super sustainable. So even in those four columns, right? A smart carb, we could look at potatoes. I like sweet potatoes. It's also how we cook them. And also with all those being said, everyone can respond differently to the same food. So what I mean by that is Carrie and I can both eat potatoes or both eat ice cream and our blood sugar responses can be different because So I don't want to say, hey, baked potatoes are bad or good. It's just everyone's going to respond differently. That goes back to awareness. If you can get a consistent blood glucose monitor, great. Not everyone's going to have access to that nor want to do that. That could be an accessible tool. But also just being mindful of how do you feel? Being aware and noticing, oh, how's my... That's why I love using in-body scans or smart scales. Even on Amazon, I have brands I've worked with. Renpho is one I've worked with in the past. Fit Index is another one. I like Renpho. Lately, they've hooked me up with stuff. They're not paying me to say any of this. Just to be honest with you guys, I like their stuff. The point is we can measure, oh, look, my muscle's going up, my body fat's going down, or I'm stabilizing. Whatever the response is, if you're Your measurements, your alignment, if your clothes are fitting the way you want, if you feel good, eat those foods, do those patterns. But if it's not serving you, it's not aligning with what you want, there's something to change there. And that goes back, I guess, to the last thing in the sustainable sense. Don't change everything all at once. Go with one variable at a time because otherwise you're not going to really know what worked for So I'm going to pause there. It doesn't look like we have any other questions. If you guys have questions, feel free to go through it. I'm going to pause. I'm going to kind of just, again, recap all of this and to give you guys a little bit of a bucket one, bucket two, bucket three, actionable recap. And just something I think you can do no matter what bucket you fall under, go to our website, lifestyleoffitness.com. We have free resources. I share with you, you'll schedule, you fill out a form, schedule a call if you want to. And if not, we'll send you out some cool stuff. Regardless, when you show up to the call, I'll have an idea and we'll walk through if coaching is a good fit for you. If it's not, that's okay. We'll send you in a direction with some free resources that will serve you with at least a plan of attack. If coaching is a good fit for you. And if it's with us, we'll line that up. If it's with another organization, I'll send you in that direction too. I literally just had a call earlier today that, Hey, I like to have backup plans in case my company is not going to be able to serve you. I will refer out. And that's something we even had before. And I think they're a great option that can be cost effective. We now have insurance that we can leverage. I was just talking to our team about if you have Aetna, United Healthcare and Blue Cross Blue Shield, how we can leverage that. We'll call your insurance company up for you. See if the coaching services and what we have and if there's a diagnosis we can use all those pieces of where it makes sense. But ultimately, We're here to support and going to the website's the best place to see the direction and what we can do for that. And then lastly, let's go over again, the highlights of everything. So bucket one is seasonal and annual fluctuations. This is if you gain weight after Christmas every year, this is to be expected, to be honest with you, this is the one that we don't necessarily have to do that much about. The key caveat to this is if it's year over year, you're gaining and gaining and gaining, and you're not necessarily readjusting, that's where it can be a little bit of a challenge. We want to adjust our mindset around maintenance. So maybe we'll fluctuate three percent, five percent. So I'll put on six to ten pounds because I'm two hundred pounds. But at the end of the season, I'm back to the idea of maintenance is like I'm not letting it go to like two hundred and twenty pounds. I'm like recalibrating. So I'm at like two oh five now. Maybe I'll get down to under two hundred come the end of April and into May, get down to maybe one ninety by the end of the summer. And then that like there's some fluctuation that's to be expected that we can anticipate. But we also want to shift our mindset around that. and then being able to have a clear action plan and being able to just get back to our routine and finding routine that sticks bucket two is again stressors the one-offs the your dog broke their leg like ours they had to get surgery and it was very expensive or you had a cancer diagnosis or you had a loss of a loved one or a financial situation or a hurricane happened or a natural disaster this is where it's about going from fight or flight survival mode into safety and recovery And being able to stabilize and then being able to implement our plans from there. And then lastly, the bucket of sustainability. This is where most of us are going to fall. It's finding what actually works for you. What do you enjoy? Like, I don't want to be ten percent body fat anymore. That doesn't align with the quality of life I want to live. I like to be between fifteen and eighteen percent body fat. Sometimes in the wintertime, I'll get up to twenty percent. That's how I know I've gotten a little bit too far out of the maintenance mode. Recalibrate. I like to be between fifteen and eighteen percent. I mean, that's usually about one hundred and ninety ish. Ninety five pounds. Two hundred pounds. That's why I feel good. That's where I get maybe a hundred and even eighty five if I'm getting closer to fifteen percent. The point is being able to have sustainability and knowing what that looks like and being able to factor for all your lifestyle variables in a long term sense. And then the action oriented things factor for all your lifestyles, make it replicable, make it low friction. And when you do hit the goal that you want to have, have an exit strategy, have a transition. And that's ultimately again, where coaching comes into play in my humble opinion. We have a great coaching team. We have a great medical team. We have all the things that really you can need to support you with that. But I'm going to pause. That's all the fun stuff. That's even the actionables. And for those of you watching this, when you jump on a call, mention that you're watching this and you caught the replay. And I'll also, the fun fact, I'll give you a additional, not only a two-week program you can trial out, but also send you a set of our resistance bands as well, just on me as a thanks for checking it out. I'll just ask for an honest feedback and review from you guys. i'm gonna go to the questions now so we're gonna kind of bring it home that's the wrap up for this i'm gonna actually end it on uh facebook linkedin youtube twitch and kick if you guys want to hang around for questions jump on either amazon live or on tick tock i want to hang out here to go over the questions but i appreciate you guys nina thanks for hanging out it's always good seeing you homie um i saw phil was getting in some work with deuce the other day i love seeing that it brought me a lot of joy to be able to see him the like team kind of come together and uh yeah all right i'll give you guys a minute to hop on over i'm gonna end up the the live stream on again facebook and linkedin youtube and twitch and kick hop on over to amazon live uh hop on over to tick tock if you don't have it let me actually i'll pull the link up for you guys because you know what i'm looking out boom i'll put the link right over here there you go come check it out live I'll pin that in the comments. Give you an extra minute if you guys want to hop over and we'll go into your questions. Mary, I got you. I see your questions. All right, y'all. Cheers. Bring that one home.