The following is a list of some of the topics that we will be covering in our 15-week Lifestyle Reboot class. There are thousands of topics we could cover but we’ve made our very best effort to focus on providing you only the most relevant, practical, and applicable topics to help you lose weight and keep it off forever!
You can’t pay someone to fix your diet and make your problem go away. You have to do it. Personal chefs, meal plans, and personal trainers are all temporary solutions to a long-term problem. Nutrition is too intertwined into our personal lives, there are too many daily food decisions, and our lives are too complicated and nuanced for nutrition to be left to someone else to take care of. Some parts of nutrition can be outsourced but to create truly lasting change, you need to take control and accountability of your diet.
Most people will never reach their goal weight, but this doesn’t stop fad diet marketers from exaggerating results, highlighting best case scenarios, and in some cases flat out lying. At Lifestyle Reboot we strongly believe in truth, transparency, and humility. This means we will be honest and transparent with you about what real weight loss looks like and talk with you about the level of effort required to achieve different weight losses (number of pounds lost). We also guarantee you lose 10% of your body weight but have the humility to realize that despite our best efforts (client and practitioner) it might not happen. We’re not claiming that we’re “the best” and “the only” diet out there that can help you or promise you that you’ll effortlessly lose 100 pounds and will be the happiest person on earth. It could happen but it’s just not realistic. What we can promise you is that we’ll give you all we’ve got to be successful and let the chips fall where they may.
Conventional wisdom says that when it comes to dieting, slow and steady wins the race and that low calorie diets (i.e., crash diets) are bad for you. While everyone needs to do what is best for them, we couldn’t disagree with conventional wisdom more. Research shows that low calorie diets (800 – 1200 calories/day) lead to significantly more weight lost over months and even years compared to less aggressive diets. This is why we will ask you to commit to a low-calorie diet for the first five weeks of our program. We believe this gives you the best chance to lose weight and keep it off.
Most dietitians will tell you that you should lose weight and eat healthier. That by eating less calorie dense food (i.e., fatty meats, potato chips, baked goods) and more low-calorie/high nutrition foods (i.e., fruits and vegetables) that you will lose weight and be healthier. But what if you don’t like eating fruits and vegetables? Do you have to replace good tasting food with bland food? No. We believe that if you want to eat healthier, eat healthier, if you want to lose weight, focus on losing weight. You shouldn’t have to do two very difficult things at the same time. If you have more than 50 pounds to lose, you should focus on weight loss first, and then refine your diet to be healthier.
It is far easier to not eat a calorie than it is to burn it off with exercise. You can eat miles and miles worth of food (i.e., walking, biking running) in a matter of minutes that would take you hours and hours of exercise to burn off. This is why dietary control is so much more important than exercise to lose weight. With that being said, behind diet, exercise is the second most important thing you can do. You still have to exercise to lose a maximum amount of weight AND keep it off. Establishing good exercise habits and routines may be more important to keeping the weight off than losing it in the first place.
If you don’t eat enough calories to meet your body’s needs, you are going to be hungry. While alternate day fasting, high fat, high protein, ketogenic, low glycemic, and time restricted feeding all claim to reduce hunger, they are missing the point. The amount of hunger reduction provided by each of these diets does not reduce hunger enough to be helpful or give them an advantage in losing weight, are highly restrictive/prescriptive (not unique to tastes and preferences) and YOU WILL STILL BE HUNGRY. Instead of minorly reducing hunger let’s learn how to embrace it and deal with it through medications, controlling your food environment, mindset, distractions, and some dietary interventions.
You might know exactly what you are supposed to be eating but you just can’t get yourself to do it. We will help you figure out what’s holding you back (your obstacles) and help you identify and implement solutions to stay on track.
All diets have rules (i.e., don’t eat carbs, reduce fat, eat fruits and veggies) but their rules are coarse, blunt, binary, and do not account for specific situations. Are you never going to eat carbs again? Can you not eat fat? By creating your own nutrition rules to deal with specific situations, you can “pick your spots” and enjoy carbs and fat without overdoing it or feeling guilty. Having “rules” in place will also help you streamline your daily food decision making.
If the food isn’t there to tempt you, you can’t eat it. Set yourself up for success by reducing/eliminating food temptations, make healthy foods readily available, and highly processed/highly palatable foods inconvenient to access and eat. If it takes extra work to eat high calorie food, you are less likely to eat it.
Go cold turkey, leave an ingredient out, substitute it, reduce portion size, reduce frequency, cut the fat, and look for added sugars are the seven primary ways to cut your calorie intake. Learn how to utilize these methods to reduce your calorie intake while still enjoying the foods you like.
Meal planning is probably the most important factor in losing weight. The problem with meal planning is that it is a real burden/pain in the ass to do well. It just takes a lot of time and effort. We will help you streamline and systemize meal planning to make it less burdensome. It is always going to be work but why do more work than you have to?
Snacks are foods that contain less than 150 calories per sitting (not serving, sitting) and indulgences are foods containing more than 150 calories per sitting. We will help you identify the snacks and indulgences you like and help you learn when and how many are appropriate to match your weight loss/weight maintenance goals.
There are “good foods” and “bad foods”. Wrong. Good and bad are value judgements, not nutritional statements. Bad foods can still fit into a good diet. The problem with bad foods is that we tend to eat too much of them too often. When your meal plan unexpectedly breaks down it is important to limit the calorie damage and exert control. There are good options at McDonalds and other fast food/fast casual restaurants. People usually think of these restaurants as being “bad” or “off limits” during a diet but not if you know exactly what you’re getting before going there. We’ll help you put a plan in place to stay on track when life goes sideways.
Learn from history, live in the present, look to the future. As an adult, your weight has fluctuated up and down over the years. By creating a narrative history of your weight and the coinciding major milestones (i.e., new job, moving, loss of a loved one) you can gain a sense of why your weight changed in the past and (hopefully) be more fully prepared to handle situations that come up in the future (because they will).
Most people think there is a start and a stop to a diet. You “go on” a diet and then get off of it. This just isn’t the way to look at it. Dieting needs to be broken down into, at minimum, two phases, but probably more: weight loss and weight maintenance. During weight loss you are actively trying to lose weight and during weight maintenance you are trying to prevent weight regain. Weight loss and weight maintenance share many similarities, but weight maintenance should require less effort and allow for more dietary freedom. You may be done dieting but you’re not done watching what you eat. Doing so will erase any weight loss and put you right back at square one.
Exercise
If you are new to the gym, doing anything other than walking on the treadmill can be intimidating. But it doesn’t have to be. At Lifestyle Reboot we’ll help you figure out everything you need before even setting foot in the gym including what gym to go to, workout clothes, water bottles, journals, workout time of day, sets, reps, and weights. We’ll show you step by step how to get the most out of your workout and help you design a program that is specific to your needs and the equipment you’re comfortable with.
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When it comes to knowing how hard you need to push yourself, your rating of perceived exertion (RPE) is a great scale to use. On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 is very little exertion and 10 is an all-out effort where you can’t do anything more nor could you keep up this level for more than 30 seconds.
Exercising as hard as you can for as long as you can, will burn the most calories (i.e., 7 or 8; Orange Theory Fitness) but if that’s not enjoyable to you, you’re not going to do it. At Lifestyle Reboot we will work with you to find the intensity of exercise you enjoy and match it with the amount of time you have to exercise, your weight loss goals, and the phase of our program.
The vision many people have of muscle mass is the big bulky guy at the gym but it’s really not that. As a matter of fact, the big bulky gym rat is the expectation not the rule.
Muscle mass (and building it) is extremely important to everyone. It makes you feel stronger, can help reduce pain in troublesome joints, increases your metabolism, reduces the level of effort for everyday tasks, helps you move easier, and feel more confident. At Lifestyle Reboot, we will design exercise programs for you that not only burns calories but helps you build muscle as well.
When it comes to working out two things stand out as the “go-to” activities: cardio and strength training. Yet those are only half of what you should be working on, balance and flexibility are the unfortunately lost children. Yet without them you will be limited in what you can do in your workouts and everyday activities.
Flexibility gives you a larger range of motion (ROM) (joint movement). The increase in your range of motion in turn improves your ability to move better both in your workouts and in your daily life (for example, think of reaching down to pick something up off the ground). It also makes your workouts more effective as you are able to perform them correctly to minimize the risk of injury and maximize the stress on the desired muscle(s) necessary for adaptation.
Balance is way overlooked, yet it’s one of the most important parts of your overall health. There is lots of research that shows that as we age, we lose the ability to balance and with this loss of ability there is an increase in health-related issues. Taking 5 or 10 minutes a day to practice balancing will decrease your chances of falls and increase your confidence with movement.
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The rule with exercise is the workout breaks down the muscle, the rest rebuilds it stronger. Too much exercise can be just as detrimental to your health as too much rest. You need to find the right balance between the two in order to get the most from your workouts.
With strength training having one or two days a week of light to no exercise is what your body needs to heal and grow. With cardio resting one day/week or training with light movement that day is needed to allow your body to adapt.
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Cookie cutter workouts can be a great place to start if you’re not sure how to exercise. They are inexpensive or free, easy to access, and have varied offerings. However, these workouts are usually not customizable and offer very little accountability.
At Lifestyle Reboot we build custom workouts for you with exercise that works around the equipment you have access to (no guessing on substitutions), movement and form are coached to your individual needs, and we’ll help hold you accountable.
Mindset
You know you should change but you can’t get yourself to do it. There’s just too much inertia. The motivation you had yesterday is gone today. And besides, even if you wanted to change, where do you even start? There’s a reason you’re stuck in your rut. It’s the path of least resistance. There are hundreds of fad diets and weight loss programs that will allow you to continue on a path of least resistance but won’t produce the results you are looking for. If you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired, have hit your proverbial rock bottom, and are ready to truly make a lasting change, then Lifestyle Reboot is for you.
Lifestyle Reboot isn’t just a weight loss program, it is a way of living! Lifestyle Reboot will help you redefine your relationship with food and exercise and develop a resilient mindset to withstand the pressures of life. We are going to ask you to blow up your existing diet and help you rebuild your diet and exercise from scratch into something that you can do forever, not just tolerate for a few weeks or months. No foods are off limits, and you’ll do exercise/physical activity that you enjoy, not that you have to do. Food is a fuel that you should enjoy in selective moderation, exercise is for making you strong enough to do the activities you enjoy, and mindset is to keep things in perspective and keep you on track when things inevitably get hard.
As the Serenity Prayer states: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. There is so much misinformation in the weight loss world that it is nearly impossible to differentiate between things that matter to weight loss and those that do not. At Lifestyle Reboot we will help you identify the things you do have control of and hold you accountable to changing/controlling those factors. It is only human to blame outside factors for our failures (especially when “experts” are telling you so) but we believe that it is more important to develop the mindset of “I am going to lose weight, come hell or high water, even if the odds are stacked against me”. Having any other attitude will doom you from the start so you might as well go “all in”!!
Who you think you are and what you think of yourself has a strong effect on your behavior. Take the following two statements: “I’m fat anyway, what difference does it make if I eat more ice cream” versus “I am a weightlifter and even though I’m really busy, I can’t miss a session”. Now, you can lie to yourself and repeat self-affirmations that you don’t believe in. However, if you practice what you preach, in time your confidence will grow and your self-identity will help drive positive behaviors rather than negative behaviors. Who you are (or think you are) drives your behavior/determines what you do.
At Lifestyle Reboot, we prefer to focus on the day-to-day processes of losing weight by coming up with a great plan and relentlessly executing that plan. By focusing on the here and now and getting “a win” every day, weight loss will, in a sense, take care of itself. With that being said it is important to know what your ultimate goal weight is and what your other motivators for change are. Because when things get hard, we need to be able to remember why we are making these changes in the first place. Setting goals and expectations also allows us to know how long our race is (mile versus marathon) and how aggressively we need to pursue that weight loss (6 months or 6 years). There will be times when you’ll throw your hands up in the air and say, this just isn’t worth it! Remembering WHY you are making the change is important to hanging in there and staying on track.
People gain weight for thousands of reasons and the causes of obesity are super complex. However, one thing that people with obesity have in common is a lack of clear boundaries governing their overall lives as well as their diet and exercise. If you do have a plan it is vague, unnuanced, and lacks guardrails. The Lifestyle Reboot program will help you be able to say “no” to certain food/drinks or consume them in selective moderation, say “no” or delegate some of life’s other obligations, say “no” to missing a workout, put yourself first, establish nutrition rules to govern your eating, help you determine the appropriate level of effort for a task versus its reward, and plan for everything that we possibly can. Setting boundaries may seem restrictive at first but can actually be quite liberating when you can reduce the number of decisions you have to make each and every day and as Nike likes to say “just do it”.
Do you eat because you are hungry or do you eat for pleasure, stress relief or out of boredom? The idea that hunger drives eating is out of touch with reality in the 21st century. If you stop and ask yourself, on average, how many times a day am I hungry? If you’re like most people, you don’t feel true hunger on a daily basis. But what about dieting? Now that’s hunger. During the Lifestyle Reboot program, we will help you differentiate between hunger and non-hunger eating and help you develop strategies to deal with it.
We eat (x) because we are doing (y). I eat potato chips during (lunch, football games, my favorite Netflix series). I eat cake (at birthday parties, work gatherings). These are examples of behavioral cues. We have learned to couple certain foods with certain activities. In some cases this coupling can be benign or even helpful (eating a banana for breakfast or a Greek yogurt for your 10:00am snack) while in other cases it can be incredibly harmful (drinking a 6-pack and eating a bag of potato chips every time your favorite basketball team is on). At Lifestyle Reboot we will help you identify the indulgences you crave and come up with strategies for uncoupling these foods from their activities by setting boundaries, establishing nutrition rules or going cold turkey if we have to.
The “Once you pop you can’t stop” and “Bet you can’t eat just one” marketing slogans illustrate just how difficult it can be to stop eating once you start and one of the biggest causes of overeating. At Lifestyle Reboot we will help you come up with strategies for limiting binge eating such as chewing gum, brushing your teeth, eating small portions, not having problematic foods around, inserting low calorie healthy foods into your binge, and walking away.
Six months or a year from now, what does your life look like? We know that it can be difficult to plan for tomorrow, let alone the next year or six months. Yet, doing so provides you with a north star for where you want to go and what you want to accomplish. Thinking about the future can be daunting and even a little scary. Things haven’t changed for you in the past, why are they going to be any different this time? Because you’re going to make them different, dammit! Life is too short to negatively slug through, by making the change today, we can look forward to what tomorrow brings.
When you’re tired everything is just a little harder. Even routine things that should take minimal to no effort are struggles. All you want to do is to make your day a little easier, to have some pleasure. One of the easiest ways to (seemingly) make your day better is to eat. While there’s no simple solution to sleep hygiene (and some life stress just isn’t going away), we can help you set up an environment to get the best sleep possible.
Sometimes life is just too much and we just can’t take it any longer. When this happens, the smallest of problems can set off an avalanche of emotions. We are defeated and can no longer cope, fight back or take action to solve the problem. We’re paralyzed and just want so badly to get out of this headspace and change the situation. At Lifestyle Reboot we will help you identify some of the causes of your catastrophic thinking, help prevent them from happening in the first place, and mitigate their effects before becoming a full-blown paralyzing death spiral.
When you look in the mirror you don’t like what you see. This is one of your primary drivers for change. One school of thought thinks that you should accept your body for what it is (body acceptance) while the other classifies you as obese and encourages you to lose weight (medical profession). The fitness community tends to believe that through enough dieting and hard work you can become a chiseled, low body fat, muscular specimen. But there has to be somewhere in-between. You’re probably never going to be that chiseled specimen and body acceptance ignores medical facts and is a bit of a psychological Band-Aid. Deep down, are you really happy with your body? At Lifestyle Reboot, we acknowledge that body image is an extremely complex, emotional issue. But we believe that the best strategy is to put a great plan in place, do your best, and try to live with the results. Hopefully, this way we can lose weight and accept our bodies for what they are.