The No More Excuses Diet (55 page)

Congratulations! You found ways to S.T.R.I.V.E. to get ahead, even when distractions were thrown in your way. You stayed focused with S.P.E.E.D., and you’ve worked hard to achieve your goal. It’s time to celebrate winning this battle to create your best body! The next chapter will help you do that, and take you even further.

At the same time, however, let’s make sure you keep that best body by developing a manageable
maintenance plan. It is often said that losing weight is the easy part, but that keeping it off is the hard part. So let’s create a plan to keep it off.

It’s amazing that you are in such a great place right now, but that doesn’t mean you will be next week, or next month, or next year. Things will constantly challenge you to maintain your good state of health. There will be stress, children, age, holidays, injuries, and
depression; you’ll test your ability to eat clean, exercise, and stay focused on fitness. As management guru Dan Rockwell has said, “If you think you’ve arrived, you aren’t where you think you are.”

For you to keep growing, you need to keep improving and remain on top of your physical condition. That means you need to continuously challenge yourself. You may be saying, “I’m fine with the way I look.” And you should love the way you look, but you have to remember what it took to get you there.
Complacency challenges not just your fitness, but also your relationships, your work, and your overall life. You must do what so many have a hard time doing, which is to appreciate what you have, daily. You must cherish, change, and challenge yourself regularly to maintain and increase the things you appreciate in your life.

The number one reason I stay motivated is that I walk a fine line between being satisfied and wanting a little more. In the beginning of my fitness journey, I wanted to lose 15 pounds. After I lost that weight, I wanted to see definition in my abs. Then I wanted to have stronger shoulders, then rounder glutes, and a cleft in my arms. After a while, I wanted to perform 10 pull-ups, run a half-marathon, and dead-lift 150 pounds. Years later, I wanted to lose weight after having children, look great at a holiday event, or be prepared to wear a bikini when I took my sons swimming. I always worked on my goals in twelve-week stages, I always kept a calendar for recording my accountability, and I always centered my life as a mentor, a supporter, and a follower.

A maintenance plan does not necessarily mean that you will continue to “diet” as you have. It also doesn’t mean that you will go straight back into eating out, drinking alcohol, and oversplurging on sweet treats.
You can never go back to the way you were.
I repeat: you
cannot
go back to the lifestyle you once had.

You must create a
new normal. This new normal will require you to eat healthfully and will allow you to indulge mindfully. This
new normal also means you will eat the number of calories you need to sustain the new person you have created.

You must eat like the person you have become. If your caloric intake is 1,600 calories a day at the weight you exist at now, you need to stay near that caloric number to maintain your body. You should continue to follow the 30/30/30/10 macronutrient guide and eat a balanced diet with lean protein, complex carbohydrates, and unsaturated fats; but you can feel free to take that 10 percent and splurge a little or alter a macronutrient depending on your activity levels. In essence, you don’t have to be as strict as you were when you were dieting, but you must stay at your new body’s caloric target.

This means you can add some carbohydrates after 4
PM
, drink some wine, or have a fancy coffee once in a while. And you can enjoy two or three small treat meals during the week, again as long as you stay at your caloric target and continue your exercise regimen. You realize that you are an adult and you choose what you put in your body. Choose the wrong things and you will suffer the consequences of how it will make you feel. When you have cleansed your system, for instance, your body will negatively react to too much sugar, saturated fats, and alcohol. The best diet is a healthy diet, with occasional splurges.

If you’ve been training three to five days a week and want to cut back, you can certainly cut back a little, but don’t cut back a lot. The best way for your body to maintain its current physique is for you to get continuous oxygen from cardiovascular exercise and muscle from strength exercises. To keep your interest, you can try various classes, run at different intensities, and play with your rep ranges and sets. You don’t have to work harder; you just have to continuously challenge your body and try different things.

If you don’t monitor your food intake or your fitness activity, you can easily go south without knowing it! I recommend continuing your fitness calendar and writing down your food intake until you feel comfortable with your new normal. For the last fifteen years, I’ve kept a fitness calendar taped to my wall, even after I hit my fitness goals. Keeping the calendar reminded me to stay consistent and to work toward the next goal.

Let’s talk about why people sometimes fail in this department and how you can avoid making that mistake yourself.

1. THEY ARE BURNED OUT.

When you change your lifestyle drastically in a twelve-week period, it can really take a toll on your body and mind. Imagine climbing an endless, steep mountain and wanting to rest afterward. If you climbed very fast, without properly fueling or pausing, then your body is literally burned out and you’ll be trying to rebuild after all that “torture.” For many people, the physical and mental impact of an exercise plan is so great that it halts continued progress and kills any desire to make it up the next summit. This is why making small adjustments to your lifestyle is the best route. You change your habits slowly and acquire the small yet significant strength needed to take on this journey, one step at a time.

2. THEY DON’T SET A NEW GOAL.

Life is endless goal seeking. It’s hard to think of life in these infinite terms because we constantly focus on happiness as a destination and not the journey. Why focus on an end result if you know that it will not make you happy, right? The truth is, it
will
make you happy but for only a limited amount of time. Think about a moment you received the newest technology or finished a long-awaited vacation.
It’s fun for a bit, but that happiness fades. To constantly progress (and stay happy), you always need a destination ahead, one that will keep your mind in flow by physically and mentally challenging you.

3. THEY DON’T HAVE A SUCCESSFUL
ENVIRONMENT.

Your environment is not just about the gym you train at, the foods in your cabinet, or the new running shoes in your closet. The most important aspect of your environment is the people inside it. In the previous chapter, I talked about your
mentor, your supporter, and your follower. These three people are who will keep you on track also when you’re in maintenance mode. Your mentor will note your complacency. Your supporter will encourage you to stay focused. And your follower will look to you for inspiration. There is an invisible pressure to not fail these people. If you are the only person who trekked uphill, then it’s only harder to continue going it alone.

4. THEY DON’T HAVE THE RIGHT
MENTALITY.

Every day you have to wake up with feelings of gratitude. It’s hard to be grateful for your now-fit physique because you have it, of course. It seems we always want what we don’t have, but we forget to appreciate what we do have. But the right mentality means appreciating your health each day. It also means being cognizant of when your mind turns “lazy” about making healthy choices. For instance, it can seem that twelve weeks can pass pretty slowly when you’re on the journey, but when it ends you think, “Wow, I’m pretty proud of myself! If I gain a couple pounds, I now know what to do to lose the weight!” So you indulge in some cupcakes, happy hours, and missed workout sessions. Two extra pounds becomes 5 pounds, 5 pounds becomes 10—you get the picture. Before you know it, you are right back where you were because you thought, “I can lose weight whenever I want.” Don’t ever forget how hard the battle was fought.

5. THEY ARE BIOLOGICALLY CHALLENGED.

Fat cells can shrink but they won’t go away. According to a 2008 Swedish study published in the journal
Nature
, the number of fat cells stays constant throughout a person’s life. This explains why it’s so hard to lose weight and maintain your physique. There are 25 to 30 billion fat cells in a normal person’s body (triple in those who are obese), and when you gain weight, the cells just get bigger. If your cells grow extensively, they will split and create more fat cells! When you lose weight, alas, you don’t burn fat cells, you just shrink them.

I repeat: You don’t burn fat cells, you just shrink them. This means that your body will be fighting to get back to what is “normal” for it (imagine a deflated balloon). Your body is going to want to refill its fat cells and return to its set point weight. Set point weight is a theory that your body, regardless of weight gained or lost, will desire to return to a set point range. As you lose weight, your metabolism slows down because it begins conserving the minimal calories you are now feeding it. Your slower metabolism, coupled with hormonal changes, creates additional challenges in maintaining your new weight loss.

Does this mean you are out of luck? Absolutely not. My set point weight has changed several times throughout the years. In my late teens, my 5-foot-4-inch frame was 115 to 120 pounds. In my mid-twenties, I was 145 to 155 pounds. While pregnant, I was 175 to 180 pounds, and now I’ve settled at 125 to 130 pounds. I have stayed several years at each of these weight stages. My set point was consistent during those times, and the number of fat cells didn’t change. The only things that changed were my eating habits, hormonal challenges, activity expenditure, and, of course, pregnancy.

When I finally reached my current weight, it was a battle to keep it off. After I reached my fitness goal of running a half-marathon,
completing a photo shoot, or taking a beach vacation, I regressed a little when I took a full exercise and diet break. I started not watching what I ate, not training as intensely, and not sleeping enough. As soon as I saw my weight climb back up, though, I refocused, lost the weight, and developed a
maintenance plan to keep my weight off.

Creating a successful maintenance plan requires you to continue striving to reach long-term goals. You do this by utilizing the No More Excuses accountability tools, but at this point you can be more flexible in your dieting and exercise. So let’s review the steps for developing a maintenance program.

Keep a continuous fitness calendar hanging on your wall. Create it every three months. Write down your new goals and reflect on the months passed. Strive for consistency and see the calendar as a visual reminder to get moving.

Return to
Chapter 7
and the discussion of caloric needs in weight-loss mode. After your transformation, you will need to recalculate how many calories your body needs for your current weight and activity level. Based on the 30/30/30/10 formula, alter your macronutrients in accordance with your daily activities, and perhaps utilize that last flexible 10 percent to enjoy small splurges. For instance, enjoy a handful of M&M’s or a bite of dessert. But stay within your caloric range and maintain your balanced meals throughout the day. Make sure you are inputting the right number of calories for your new caloric output.

As you age—and we are all aging—your muscles begin to deteriorate. These small changes start occurring around age 30. You get injured easier, you become less flexible, and you don’t heal as quickly. In your forties, people lose an average of 1 to 2 percent of muscle mass per year! If you think maintenance means decreasing your exercise output, though, think again. If you want to keep what you have, you will have to work at it.