The wake-up call

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/05/2022 (1252 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Today, we start at the beginning. Because, well, that’s usually where stories start. So here goes: I remember the moment I hit rock bottom. It was gym class in my senior year at Shaftesbury High School, and one of those hand-held body-fat measurement devices was making the rounds. I tried to avoid the test with an extended stay in the bathroom, but one of my classmates called me out.

The results told me everything I already knew: I was overweight. The reading came up at 36 per cent body fat — the worst score among the guys in the class that I saw.

I wanted to do better, but I dabbled for several years after that, and you know where dabbling gets us: a big, fat nowhere.

So, what did I finally do to lose 60-ish pounds and keep it off going on nearly two decades now? (I didn’t lose it right away, as I’m about to share.)

I stumbled upon a three-part formula I now use. I remember the day it all changed. I was still living with my parents, a year removed from high school. I was working as a line cook at Grapes on Kenaston (RIP!) and had no real direction in my life, other than a legitimate addiction to video games and junk food.

I stared at myself in the mirror and got real that morning. I didn’t say I needed to lose a couple pounds. No, I pointed at myself and said, “You’re fat and this ends now.”

Harsh, right? But I realized in that moment the pain of staying the same far outweighed the pain of change. That’s usually necessary to wake up and make a change.

I needed to stop sugarcoating my current situation. There was nothing healthy or fulfilling about the weight I carried. My life would’ve turned out very differently if I didn’t take control in that moment — I know it now, no question.

But awareness is not enough. The commitment and action must follow suit. Here are the three key ingredients to start with once you know you need a change.

In order to fully commit, I told myself if I didn’t lose 50 pounds, I’d quit playing video games for a year (a big deal to me at the time) and left a sticky note on my computer monitor to remind me.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this strategy is outlined in The Blackmail Diet, an obscure book by John Bear.

The author battles obesity and comes up with a plan: he signs a contract with a lawyer and puts US$5,000 in escrow. The contract states that if in a year’s time the author doesn’t lose 70 pounds, the lawyer must give all the money to the American Nazi Party.

As expected, a year later he had lost the 70 pounds.

If you’ve struggled to lose weight and keep it off, it’s probably because you treat it like that leaky sink in the downstairs bathroom. You’ll get to it when the mood strikes.

You say things like:

“It’s not the right time.”

“It’s just one glass (which turns into three).

“I’ll start next Monday.”

Most of the time, we don’t fail to achieve our goals because of lack of knowledge and how-to, it’s because we haven’t associated the right level of commitment to achieving the outcome.

Let’s start with a few real-world examples.

In one instance, a client of mine was recently engaged and knew she wanted to look amazing in her wedding dress. That gave her the spark to take action. She now has the urgency and inspiration to commit to a plan.

For another client, he was over 300 pounds and had tried countless times to lose weight, with little success. It kept going the wrong direction. But one day, his wife unexpectedly gave him some big news: she was pregnant. That was his spark. His ‘why’ to change. He knew things would be different this time because he wasn’t taking no for an answer. He lost more than 100 pounds and became the fit dad he envisioned becoming.

Back to my trip down memory lane. The second step I eventually made was to enlist a fitness coach named Ken Hill (he was based in Colorado).

I wasn’t making a lot of headway on my own, despite a lot of effort. Sometimes you need to add an extra layer of accountability to ensure you don’t backslide into your old patterns, habits and ways of thinking along the way.

Whether it’s a workout buddy or professional coach, you need someone in your corner who will hold you to your commitments and guide you through the ups and downs — someone you don’t want to disappoint. A system with the support to see it through.

Which segues to the need for FOCUS — Follow One Course Until Successful. In a world with unlimited options, too many people are trying everything at once. And they’re not seeing results.

We all have that one friend who seems to start a new business every week. There are plenty who approach fitness the same way, dabbling in everything and anything.

Often, I’m in conversations with clients who come to me having tried it all, hopping from diet to diet or fitness program to fitness program and wondering why nothing has worked.

There’s no getting around the inevitable need to trudge through the “valley of despair” to get to the promised land. Stopping and starting is far more painful in the big picture. A program needs to be sustainable with the support to see it through.

Despite knowing that now, I was soon to learn a valuable lesson about that very thing…

My Big Wake-Up Call

It’s best shared with a quick story.

We’ve all been there. A night out, followed by the morning after waking up to notifications on your phone. “You’ve been tagged in a photo on Facebook.”

Gulp. I faced this dire situation on Nov. 1, 2008. It wasn’t the fact I was dressed up in a ridiculous genie costume that was so humiliating for Halloween.

But the fact I looked so bloated and red-faced. And this was several years after my 60-pound weight-loss transformation.

I was being paid to help people get in shape by this point as a side business. And I was not a living example of such. I can’t find the photo now, but I likely hired some hacker to make it disappear.

I vowed to never let myself get to that point again as my weight was trending the wrong way real fast.

And the big lesson learned? Fitness can’t be temporary. Sure, you may have to coast at times. We call it maintenance in coaching and it’s just as important as the initial ‘burn’ phase in the big picture.

But without good habits ingrained, it’s tough to make permanent changes with temporary behaviour change.

The process to lose is different from the process to maintain, but we’ve boiled it down to six areas that matter most. These become especially critical if your goal is fat loss, but some iteration of them must be maintained for the long game:

1) Eat fewer calories than you need to maintain your weight

2) Eat enough protein (.8 to one gram per pound of bodyweight) because you want to lose fat, not just weight

3) Take 8,000-10,000 steps each day

4) Strength-train two to five times per week for more than 30 minutes to tone and tighten

5) Get into bed eight hours out from wake-up time so you get about seven-ish hours of sleep most nights

6) Drink two to four litres of water daily

That’s it!

If you’re not doing those six things 80-90 per cent of the time, you can’t expect a ton of progress.

Mitch Calvert is a Winnipeg-based fitness coach who has helped more than 1,400 people transform their bodies and lives over the past decade. Visit mitchcalvert.com to grab a free copy of his metabolism jumpstart or to get direct coaching to drop pounds before summer arrives.