SECRET #1
Create a lifestyle change with systems.
The 1st secret to permanent fat loss and fitness is: create a lifestyle change with systems. Now, what am I talking about here…well, for starters, if you’re not thinking in terms of a lifestyle change, you’re in trouble. If you’re idea of fitness is going on a diet for a little while and taking a few aerobics classes, you’re not going to succeed. Period. If you want to live your life in your own lean, healthy, and strong body, you need to take the steps necessary to literally change your lifestyle.Now, a lot of people have heard this before, but it’s not the fact that you have to make it a lifestyle that’s the secret…the secret part of it is how to do this effectively. And that starts with something most people completely miss: identifying what your lifestyle is today.
The first step is to think about your eating and exercise habits as they are now and WRITE THEM DOWN on a piece of paper. What do you eat on a typical day and throughout the week? How much are you eating? How often are you working out? What kind of workouts are you doing? You also need to examine your stress level and what are primary forces behind your stress. You also should take a look at your rest and sleep schedule. And lastly take a look at your mindset and your thoughts on how you see yourself and your lifestyle. These questions and topics will give you a snapshot of your current lifestyle…all on 1 sheet of paper for you to see and review.
After spending a few minutes jotting this data down and reviewing it once or twice, you can probably start to see just how big this whole fat loss and fitness thing really is, and why making a small temporary change here or there (as most diets or exercise plans give you) might win a battle or two, but not the WAR you’re fighting.
There are just too many variables to try and control by using the bandage approach. And what I mean by that is, most people try to fix their health and fitness problem like someone would fix a cut or scrape with a band-aid. Your health and fitness is not a simple cut or a scrape, and it needs more than a temporary fix. So a lifestyle change is what is needed for a long term solution to fat loss and fitness. That is essential. Now, once you’ve established a snapshot of your current lifestyle, you need to move on to the second step…changing your lifestyle through systems. Here’s what I mean by that:
Ask any successful business person what is at the heart of his or her success and most of them will mention a system of some type. If you have a proven and successful system, you will be successful at whatever you’re trying to accomplish. If you don’t, you’ll be lost. I spent years of my own life searching the fitness wasteland for methods that I could use to burn fat, build muscle, and get healthy with little time commitment. At some point I realized that I was creating my own system for fitness success.
Once I realized that, I was able to recommend this same system to my friends and family members interested in lifelong health and fitness. And guess what, it worked for those who applied. It was a proven and successful system. All I did was apply it to another person. Just like in business, if you have a successful and proven system, you can essentially apply the system over and over again to create new businesses. They’re all based on the same successful and proven model or system.
Again, without a system, you may get to find what you’re looking for, but it could take years or more, and a lot of frustration to be sure…I’m sure if you think back to a time in your life when you were investigating a particular topic or discipline, you’ll realize you spent a lot of time and effort in doing so. If you had a system on how to find those answers, it would have been a lot easier and more successful. You would have made far fewer errors and saved yourself a load of time.
As I said earlier, I didn’t have a system early on in my fat loss struggles, and as a result I was trying to plug the holes in my lifestyle with diets, miracle pills, and exercise gizmos.
So analyze your current lifestyle (be brutally honest), decide what needs to change and then get to work on getting a proven and successful system that will create a new lifestyle for you. ..one that you can lead for the rest of your lean and healthy life.
