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.
