There is something to be said for simplicity.

Have you ever heard of Jared Fogle, ‘The Subway Guy’? He was a 425-lb man who decided to do something radical to lose fat.

He went to Subway twice a day and would eat a 6″ turkey sub for lunch with a packet of baked chips, and a 12″ vegetable sub for dinner. Additionally, he started walking from location to location instead of taking a bus, adding 1.5 miles of daily exercise to his regimen.

He did this every day for a year.

Super-simple, super-repetitive…and he lost 245 lbs during the process.

In a recent book called The Paradox of Choice, the author, Barry Schwartz, suggested that the staggering amount of choice we have in our lives is actually dragging us down to a large extent. When there is less choice, our minds are clearer, more focused.

Clearly Jared is a poster boy for this philosophy (as well as for Subway!) Even in a place with as much choice as Subway, he stuck to the same food every day. That removed the distraction of choice, and kept his results consistent.

Imagine if you could only eat the same calorie-controlled diet every single day. Imagine that there was no choice in the matter. Do you have any doubt whatsoever that you’d lose all the weight you wanted to over the course of time?

How you can simplify your dieting

Try giving yourself six meal choices – two for breakfast, two for lunch, two for dinner. Ensure that even if you had the most calorie-rich of each of the meal choices, you would still end the day in a calorie deficit.

For example, your breakfast choices could be between a bowl of cereal or perhaps a couple of pieces of fruit and a slice of toast. Here is an excellent article that both embraces the principle of simplicity I’m talking about, as well as providing ideas for meal plans: how to lose 20 lbs in a month.

Stock up on all the ingredients/foodstuffs that the six meal choices demand. Each day select one dish from your breakfast menu, lunch menu, and dinner menu. Mix them up once in a while for a little variety.

You may actually find this technique very liberating. Keep thing simple like Jared did, and you too can see exceptional results without a loss of focus.

He that can have Patience can have what he will
- Benjamin Franklin

You can immediately reduce the stress you feel about dieting if you decide to be patient about the weight loss process. I’ll bet that you are thinking in terms of one week goals, or perhaps two weeks, a month, six weeks tops.

I don’t blame you – we live in a quick fix culture. Come May we’ll be seeing magazine covers saying “get a beach-ready body in six weeks!”

But if you are prepared to think in terms of a one year plan, then your mind will instantly be at much greater peace. Suddenly all of your goals are viable. Even if you only lost 5 lbs a month, that would still be a loss of 60 lbs over the course of a year

Then imagine that you threw in a little exercise. Just, say, one set of push-ups a day. You start at one repetition, with the aim of increasing by one rep every two weeks and one set every month. After 12 months, as well as being at least 60 lbs lighter, you would also be doing 12 sets of 26 push-ups every day.

Think about the person you could be in a year’s time, because if you have that kind of patience, then that person will be there to stay.

Take it slowly. Design your destiny. Then execute it slowly, surely and progressively.

“By endurance we conquer.”
- Sir Ernest Shackleton

The difference between success and failure at dieting can be boiled down to one, essential point: how you view the process.

Most people fail at dieting. It can be reasonably assumed, then, that they see dieting as a hard, painful task. Or to put it more precisely, they have an entirely negative view of the experience.

Unfortunately, if you feel this way about dieting, then you are almost certainly doomed to fail. The key to success is to view the experience optimistically, regardless of the symptoms.

Look at the US Navy SEALs. They have an infamous selection process known as ‘Hell Week’ – a week in which prospective SEALs must do countless thousands of calisthenics, undergo surf torture, and be pushed to their mental and physical limit practically non-stop. They get barely any sleep during this process, they are always cold, and get meagre rations.

Now, those prospective candidates are hard men. They come from other branches of the military, and have already proved themselves to be outstanding soldiers and athletes by just qualifying for the selection process. And yet, only a small minority actually make it through.

What is the difference? Well, it could be many things, but my feeling is that it is all to do with mindset. Those who just see the suffering in a negative light are doomed to quit. I recommend reading Richard Machowicz’s book “Unleash the Warrior Within” for an insight into how he qualified as a SEAL using a positive mindset.

Another example…

I used to smoke pretty heavily. I tried quitting on many occasions, but always found myself reaching for a cigarette sooner or later.

Then I came across a book by a man called Allen Carr (a miracle book – get it if you’re a smoker!) He had a reputation for making even the most die-hard of smokers manage to quit their habit easily and effortlessly.

I read the book and did exactly that. Here are two examples of how he changed my negative mindset into a positive one:

1.  He said that it is not ‘giving up’, but rather stopping smoking. There was nothing to “give up”. That every time we extinguished a cigarette we had “stopped smoking” and become “non-smokers”. The only difference this time is to not light up again…to stay stopped.

2.  He said that the ‘itch’ that smokers feel is like a monster in the stomach. The more you deprive this monster of nicotine (ie by not smoking), the smaller it will get and will eventually die. Suddenly, that ‘itch’ was no longer so terrible to me – it became a very nice feeling.

Can you see how this applies to dieting?

If you have stuck to your diet for the day, but you feel that ‘itch’ to eat a chocolate bar, or to snack on some junk food, then choose instead to revel in the feeling. Tell yourself that the itch represents your weight burning off, that it is the feeling of progress in action.

This is endurance. And it doesn’t have to be hard – it can be enormous fun, and immensely liberating.

I love chocolate. I do. I seem to be one of those rare men that would prefer a big bar of milk chocolate to a rump steak. I pop a block in my mouth, and I melt along with it.

It is no exaggeration to say that chocolate has been a ‘gamechanger’ in my battles with weight loss over the years. Learning how to control my chocolate cravings has been my Everest – and one of my proudest achievements as far as self-control goes.

At my chocoholic peak, I would need chocolate every day.

And I obliged. I would get a huge bag of my favourites, usually M&Ms, and quietly munch on them throughout the day. Or I might buy a six pack of Snickers, which I could easily demolish in a day (I don’t know about you guys, but there was no way I could ration those things. They had to be eaten in that day. HAD TO.)

24,000 calories

One day, whilst moping about my great excess weight, I did some very rough math in my head. I figured that if I consumed around 800 calories a day in chocolate, which was very feasible at that time, I was taking in around 24,000 excess calories each month.

24,000!

If a pound of fat is worth 3500 calories, that meant that I was adding nearly 7 lbs to my weight each month for no good reason.

7 lbs doesn’t sound a lot to those of us used to working with big weight figures, but that really mounts up over the course of a year.

Continuing the masochism, I then calculated how much less I would weigh if I had not touched any chocolate over the previous three years. It was mind-boggling.

What’s your poison?

For you, it may not be chocolate. Perhaps it is chips, or maybe soda, or beer, or numerous caffe lattes with sugar each day.

Whatever it is, I am fairly certain that most people struggling with their waistlines have one food or drink vice that is doing the ‘gamechanging’ damage.

Just imagine the difference you could make to your weight if all you did was cut that vice out. Heck, imagine the difference if you just cut it down by 50%.

And this is where patience kicks in…

Cutting down on a vice will not make you thin overnight, but the physical change can be astonishing over the course of a year. Looking at weight loss in terms of a long-term gameplan is the first, crucial step in actually getting it done, once and for all.

It’s 2010, and plenty of you will have made a new year resolution to finally shed that excess lard that has been plaguing you for years.

And yet, it never ceases to amaze me how people abuse the principle of new year’s resolutions. The term has become associated with failure, the inherently-weak willpower of the many. Something that should be galvanizing has become a faint prayer.

But this is only because people don’t approach their resolutions correctly.

Thing is, if you really want to do something, then you’re going to stand a damn good chance of accomplishing it. If you are fairly ‘meh’ about a goal, then you have 0.01% chance of success.

Therefore, it’s a pretty safe bet that you stand a good chance of losing weight, if you put your mind to it (heck, who here wouldn’t feel 1000 x better about themselves if they were in true beach shape?)

Look…how many people say they want to learn a foreign language each year? Plenty.

Now, do you think that those people want to learn a foreign language because of an authentic, burning desire…or is it because they like the idea of being the person that can speak another language?

I love the idea of being a concert pianist, but do I love it enough to ditch all commitments in my life and commit to 10 hours of training every day for the next 25 years?

Do you see the fine line?

A lot of people’s resolutions are exactly that: fantasies rather than realities they can believe in. This is why losing weight is actually an excellent resolution – because most of us who want to do it really, really, really want to do it.

The reasons why we fail are a different issue altogether (and ones I shall address in later blog posts). But for now, it is enough to know that you stand the greatest chance of succeeding at any goal in life if:

a)  you have a genuine desire to achieve it
b)  you focus on that goal, and few others

Focus is like your bank balance – there is only so much of it you can spend. Again, this is another reason why a list of 10 resolutions is destined to fail; it is near impossible to focus on one thing without your mind being bogged down by the frustrating feeling that you are committed to so much else (again, a topic for another blog post)

So right now, the only thing to do is to say to yourself: “2010 will be the year where I get in great shape. Come Christmas, I will be feeling amazing. I am committed to that.”

Make that commitment now. Keep visiting this blog. And I promise I’ll do my best to help you get there – more easily and effortlessly than you could possibly have imagined.