It still has to suck a little.

It still has to suck a little.

I have spoken with many people this week who are a little bit
frustrated with their lack of results over the past few weeks or some who may have even taken a step backwards. It is no coincidence that I am getting all of these comments at around the same
time of year, right between Thanksgiving and Christmas. This is a difficult time for year for everyone, no matter what workout program or nutrition plan you may follow. There is no nutrition or workout plan that I know of that includes pizza, wine, cake, cupcakes, candy, candied pecans, chips and dips, etc.

This can be a topic for an entire post in itself but I'll summarize by saying this time of year it's all about just getting through and not moving backwards. It's not the best time to expect to make great forward progress. Just survive and enjoy the holidays without doing too much damage. Don't completely bail on The PROGRAM and go back to bed habits but accept a little deviation from the plan. Your only alternative is to be completely miserable and not attend any holiday gatherings and that is obviously not cool.

Now moving on to more important things… As much as I have tried to design The PROGRAM  to be as painless as possible, at the end of the day to get in tremendous shape and to look the way many of us want to look is not easy.

It still has to suck a little bit.

 You don't need to workout CrossFit style or make yourself puke in your workouts to get
results. But at the same time, the workouts have to be hard and they have to be challenging. If they are not challenging or difficult, they are not going to get you where you want to be. The nutrition part is similar. While I don't want you guys to be starving and to be miserable all the time, you also can't expect to be completely satisfied and full and not restricted at all times and still get exceptional results.

As the expression goes, if it were easy everyone would do it. I believe that most people overdo it and suffer too much on traditional diet programs and that is why they have never been successful but again, even our PROGRAM  still has to suck a little bit.

 What I mean by that is even though we are allowed to enjoy many of the foods that
we like and were formerly considered taboo, it is easy to overeat many of these foods. Make no mistake about it, if you overeat these foods, or any foods, you will not get very lean and you may even gain weight.

You can continue to enjoy these great foods but we have to be cognizant of portions and total calories. While I don't like to recommend weighing and measuring foods as that can be extremely time consuming and can get ridiculous, it is important to be aware of how much we are eating and of portion sizes. It is safe to say that if your goal is to lose weight and get leaner, you will need to spend a good portion of the day being slightly hungry. The operative word here is slightly. I don't want you to be starving all day and fantasizing about food, but at the same time you can't be completely satisfied and eating to your heart’s content and expect to get ripped.

When your goal is to get leaner and lose fat, you should eat each meal until you are just shy of being satisfied. So if on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is full, you should stop at 8. I don't want you to be at a 5 and starving but if you are always at a 10 you will not lose weight. I've written this before but it bears repeating. If you eat until you are stuffed, you will likely be gaining weight. If you eat until you are satisfied, you will likely be maintaining weight. If you eat until you are just shy of satisfied, you will likely be losing weight.

 Below is a graphic that shows easy ways to gauge portion sizes for men and women and this is a
good place to start for many of you. But without getting too crazy about the portion sizes, just remember that in order to get leaner, it still has to suck a little bit.

Portion sizes- See below from Precision Nutrition for what they recommend as portion sizes. For our purposes, I’d suggest that most times we are looking at adding an additional portion of fat and vegetables and eliminating the carb dense food portion(s). Yes, they are likely smaller than you thought. ;-)

 Men's Portion Sizes

Women's Portion Sizes