I’ve lost almost 50 pounds of fat while dropping 4 waist sizes and you can too.

I did it for myself and more importantly, my family.  The health issues of carrying around that amount of fat are far more concerning than just looking overweight.  If you want to be around to see your kids turn into adults, get married, meet your grandkids and actually be able to enjoy life’s activities, then trimming your waistline can increase the odds significantly.

So, if you are like me when I looked in the mirror and saw an image I didn’t relate to and a person I wasn’t proud of, you’d be chomping at the bit to find out how this major transformation can take place.  Well, it has to do with the Fall harvest and I have good news and bad news to share.

What’s that?  You want the bad news first?  Typical.

The News On Fat Loss

The bad news is it’s not going to happen overnight.

The good news is it’s actual quite simple to do it.

The bad news is calories, what you eat and how you exercise is not as important as you think.

The good news is calories, what you eat and how you exercise can get you some quick results.

The bad news is you need to learn things about yourself you might not have wanted to pay attention to.

The good news is if you learn these things, you will not only have great success with weight loss but also the strength and skills to have great success in many different challenges.

The Myth of Overnight Success

You see, Hollywood has confused our sense of what it takes to win and even what it looks like.  We expect a single heroic act to bring in victory and our prize, yet rarely in life does this ever happen.  It’s the small steps, perseverance and consistency that bring great change.

Often the daily grind and less exciting repetitive tasks are ignored or not even seen.  Then one day we think something magic has happened to cause such a huge change.  It is this perspective that keeps us from learning the secrets for greatness.

If you watch a master guitarist, it is mind blowing the fluid precision and speed with which they play.  We often think they are a genius, and have incredible natural talent.  While that may be, the actual level of accomplishment occurs by devotion to a consistent effort and sustained motivation for the goal.

The Truth About Reaching Your Goals

The same is true with health achievements as it is for guitar skills or athletic success.

• There’s the devotion to a consistent effort, or in other words, what do you do on a daily basis again and again to keep improving.
• And then there’s the sustained motivation for the goal, that is, what end do you desire that will keep you devoted to consistent effort until you reach it.

You will struggle with daily consistent effort, if your reason for doing it isn’t big enough to push you through boredom, exhaustion, temptation and distraction.  If your goal is to have a flat stomach so you look good at the beach that might be enough to get you started.  It might even be enough to get you to your goal but will it be enough to sustain your goal?… for 6 months?… a year?… more?

Real, Deep Motivation

I’ll admit the idea of looking good in a bathing suit is motivating for me, but it wasn’t enough to keep me motivated to wake up early while it’s still dark and get my workout in, day in, day out, for months and then years going forward.  My commitment to proper food choices and healthy lifestyle adjustments was maintained by the goal of reaching a level of health that would enrich my family and my time together.  Thinking about being able to actively play with my daughters, lift them, run with them and be there for them for years to come is far more compelling.

With this in mind, what is it that will drive you to keep up your efforts even when the going is tough?  Think about it…hard.  When you come up with the reason, ask yourself WHY is this my reason?  Maybe there is something more compelling behind that reason.  Dive down as many levels as you can to come up with a WHY that leaves you with a fire in your belly.

This is the same thing you should do whenever you undertake something that you want great success in.  No matter if it is weight loss, learning a new skill or achieving a level of success in your career, by identifying your burning WHY, you give yourself the reserves to push past the inevitable obstacles they will come up.

I’ll assume you have your WHY, or will have it soon, and we can move on to the details. This is where the concept of harvest comes in.

Harvest Your Results

Yes, it’s the Fall season and that means it is harvest time.  No, my fat loss plan is not to send you to work at a farm, even though you’d probably get good exercise and healthy food there.

The harvest is an analogy that works.  If you plant your WHY seed and then move forward each day, caring for this seed and ensuring its growth and survival, then it’s just a matter of time until you can reap what you sowed.  Caring for this seed is your action plan for success.

Keep in mind that just like farming, it is the small, regular efforts that yield a large crop of awesome harvest.

To bring this idea to the specifics of fat loss, there will be individual customizations which I won’t address here but I will get into some examples.

If you are 50 lbs overweight then dropping the first few pounds can be done relatively easy by picking one aspect you need to change and focusing on that.  For instance, soft drinks, juice or even most liquids other than water, are regularly miscalculated as to their effect on body composition.  Whatever your intake of non-water drinks are, if you want to lose weight, reduce them.

The Drink Plan

It could go like this…

Current Intake is between 10 to 15 drinks a week from pop to juice to alcohol to “sports drinks”.  Let’s call it 15 and then commit to cutting it in half for the first week.  Don’t have 8 drinks on the first day of the week.  In fact, see if you can start the week by only drinking water and know it’s okay to have that other drink when you really want to.

On the second week, cut it in half again.  Now you are down to 4 drinks a week and that means there are days you are not having anything else to drink other than water. At this point, depending on how overweight you were, without any exercise or fancy health food substitutions all things being the same, you will have already lost some weight.  Maybe even 3 or 4 pounds.

Make It A Treat

Third week, drop it to 2 and now you have put these drinks into the treat category.  The treat category is a magic place.  Uphold its boundaries and you get to have your cake and eat it too.  By allowing yourself a treat, you avoid deprivation, hold onto some joy and take control over foods that are best enjoyed once in awhile.

If you’ve made it past week 3, you’ll probably be able to eliminate these drinks all together from regular weekly ingestion which means you can feel fine about having 2 on a special occasion, a party or at a nice dinner out.

Apply It To Food

This is a simple way to taper off and regain control of what is affecting your success in achieving your goals.  Take this example and introduce it to deep-fried food, pizza, candy, fast food, etc.  As you continue to have success, you might reduce your bread consumption, your pasta intake, carbs in general.  You now can pick an area you probably know is controlling you more than you control it and reduce its impact.

I introduced major reduction from pop to fast food to juice to snacks in a span of 2 months, so that I was virtually having none of it.  I had lost 12 pounds and hadn’t really introduced exercise or healthier versions of my main meals yet.  It was fairly easy and painless.  The more you do it, the easier it is to continue.

The Exercise Plan

You can use the same system with exercise but in reverse.  Say currently you don’t exercise.  Without getting into what the best type, amount and variety of exercises you should do.  Let’s just get started.

On week 1, at least, get out once.  On week 2, double that.  On week 3, double it again or just add a third workout and so on. You can end up being active every day without having an intense workout all the time.  In fact, alternating good workouts with low intensity activities, or active rest days, is generally regarded as a great level of fitness participation.

Simplicity Prevails

I’m going to keep it simple here and not get into all the nutritional and fitness strategies that can be implemented.  They are great but you don’t need them to get some good results and inspire you to continue caring for your seed.  If you just do the drink plan, the food plan and the exercise plan with a well defined and inspiring WHY, then you will be cruising it to within 90% of your goal.

Tending to your daily tasks, however small, will get you to harvest time, where you reap what you sowed.

What are you waiting for? Plant that seed!

Accountability is a powerful motivation to staying on track.  I challenge you to go onto my Facebook page and comment with “I planted the seed”.  You can add more details if you wish or not.  Then show support for anyone else who has been brave enough to comment with “I planted the seed”.  Each day you take a step forward, comment with “caring for the seed”.  I greatly look forward to the comment you put up that states “it’s harvest time!”.