55. My Highlights from You Can't Screw This Up (Weight Loss)
Here are my personal highlights from Adam Bornstein's book, You Can't Screw This Up: Why Eating Takeout, Enjoying Dessert, and Taking the Stress out of Dieting Leads to Weight Loss That Lasts
Hello, and welcome back. In the previous issue I shared the Billion Dollar Question to Uncover Your True Values, and in this edition I give you my personal highlights from Adam Bornstein's book, You Can't Screw This Up: Why Eating Takeout, Enjoying Dessert, and Taking the Stress out of Dieting Leads to Weight Loss That Lasts.
By the way, I’m Kevin Kruse, founder and CEO of LEADx and NY Times bestselling author of 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management and the forthcoming 11 Secrets Successful People Know About Goal Setting. Welcome to Success & Significance - my take on health, wealth, and relationships (my “3 to Thrive”, read more here). Hit the Subscribe button below to join over 20,000 members who get weekly practical advice and wisdom from the world’s most successful people.
If you care about your health, you might like my highlights from Adam Bornstein’s new book. He’s the former editor of Men’s Health magazine and personal nutrition advisor to people like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lebron James, and Lindsey Vonn.
The Unbreakable Foundation
The research suggests that if you want to develop a new behavior—such as eating healthier—the best way is to make it so easy that it's hard to fail.
The key is always keeping it easy relative to where you are, not where you want to be.
That means eating foods that fill you up so you don't have cravings, and enjoying some of your favorite foods so you don't feel completely restricted.
If you care about your health and are willing to prioritize it, then you need to start to believe that you are a healthy person.
Step 1: Decide who you want to be.
Step 2: Prove it to yourself with small wins.
If you could speak to the top researchers who don't make money pushing a particular agenda (and yes, some scientists are tied to a belief rather than the truth), they would tell you success depends on your consistency with a plan, not the plan itself.
Foods were secondary to fit. The researchers concluded: Regardless of assigned diet groups, 12-month weight change was greater in the most adherent compared to the least adherent tertiles. These results suggest that strategies to increase adherence may deserve more emphasis than the specific macronutrient composition of the weight loss diet itself in supporting successful weight loss.
When you remove carbs, you eat fewer calories and eat less. When you fast, you eat fewer calories and eat less. When you restrict gluten or dairy, you eat fewer calories and eat less. When you go Paleo, you cut out other food groups and eat less.
Everything is a manipulation of energy balance.
In Control
Here was Cindy Crawford, the supermodel of all supermodels, now in her fifties, talking about her love of baking pies with her children, eating them, and enjoying every bit of each bite. When I asked her about her approach, her philosophy surpassed that of many brilliant dietitians. "I try to be 80 percent good, 80 percent of the time."
Diets are built on a strict set of rules. Healthy eating is about embracing all foods and making good decisions often—but not always.
One day, I told her I wanted her to get comfortable with falling off the wagon—as long as she never abandoned the wagon. Donna thought I was insane (even I wasn't sure if I made sense), but six months later—and twenty pounds down—she would tell me it was the moment that changed everything.
Embrace an "80 percent good, 80 percent of the time" mentality to reduce stress, enjoy treats, and stay on track. Avoid zero percent weeks. The only "mistake" in dieting is quitting completely on healthy habits. Changing your perception of healthy and unhealthy foods can help you feel fuller after every meal. Your past experiences are the secret to building grit, if you see them as part of the learning process and not that your body is broken. If you reframe your past, then you are in the perfect position to become healthier than ever.
In an interview for Newsweek, Nestle—not one to sensationalize—made a big claim: We have now the accumulated evidence, particularly in the last five years, that people who eat more ultra-processed foods have a higher risk of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, depression, cancer, renal, and liver diseases. The studies have been overwhelming. There've been hundreds and hundreds of them. There's no doubt that this is not a good thing. It is a problem.
Although your BMR makes up the majority of your daily calorie burn, there's still another 20 to 40 percent you can control. The additional calories you burn from your metabolism come from the foods you eat and the exercise you perform. Your diet influences your metabolism by about 10 to 30 percent, and then exercise—everything from walking to strenuous exercise—makes up the remainder.
If you want to burn more calories from your diet, it's important to know that all calories are not created equal. Protein, carbs, and fat are all metabolized differently. Eating 100 calories of protein is different than eating 100 calories of carbs because protein has a higher thermic effect of food (TEF). This is a measurement of how foods are metabolized.
When you eat protein, up to 30 percent of the calories can be burned in the process. In the example above, if you ate 100 calories of protein, roughly 70 calories would hit your body because 30 calories would be burned as a result of the protein's high TEF. Comparatively, carbs have a TEF of just 5 to 10 percent, and fat is usually around 3 to 5 percent. This is one reason higher-protein diets tend to be associated with weight loss and maintenance, and why it'll be a key tool that makes your life easier (and more satisfying).
The best metabolism booster is muscle. The more muscle you have—and the less fat you carry—the higher your metabolic rate. The reason is that muscle requires more energy.
You Can't Screw Up This Eating Plan
By creating an "eating window," it helps limit the type of unintentional overeating that is common for so many people.
Even better, the more protein you eat, the fewer total calories you tend to consume. One study looked at what happens when you go from a low-protein to a moderate-protein diet. When people doubled their protein intake (from 15 to 30 percent of their diet), they lost 11 pounds... without making any other changes. Simply eating more protein increased fullness, so people naturally ate almost 450 fewer calories per day.
Researcher Pierre Chandon found that if you want people to eat healthier, it's not about how you describe food or whether you put it on a smaller plate. It's whether you make that food more or less accessible. By his estimates, moving certain foods farther away can easily save you more than 200 calories per day.
Slower weight loss can be effective when you want to avoid regaining the weight because it doesn't require extreme behaviors that are hard to maintain.
If you want to lose more than ten pounds, a safe weight loss, on average, is one to two pounds per week—max! It might be hard because of what you've been taught, but I want you to try not to worry about weekly weight loss. Instead, focus more on monthly weight loss. That means, on average, the goal would be about four to five pounds per month.
Until the next issue, remember…
Impact > Income,
Kevin 🙏
If you liked this post, you’d love my books. Consider grabbing 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management or 11 Secrets Successful People Know About Goal Setting or Great Leaders Have No Rules.
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Kevin’s Recommendation Zone
Some of my favorite HEALTH related things: Nutribullet Blender (use it 2x a day!), Vega Sport Protein Powder, No Cow Protein Bars, Neuriva Brain Health, G Hughes sauces, chiller bowl to put fruit and vegetables on counter all day to snack.