The first half of my book The Thinking Person’s Guide to Fitness is aimed at people who are just beginning to get in shape. Below are the seven most important take-aways from this portion of the book.
Getting in shape is actually quite simple. It’s not easy, but it’s simple. Ignore all the distracting nonsense out there, and instead just focus on a few fundamentals.
1. It’s Mostly a Mental Game
Most of what it takes to become fit is simply getting yourself to do what you already know you should be doing. Recognize that the process is going to take a long time (depending on where you are starting from, maybe a couple years) and that you need to do things now for the good of your future self. Learn how to minimize your need for willpower and thus make your life easier and happier, by (1) creating new good habits and breaking existing bad ones, and (2) controlling your environment so as to minimize temptation.
2. You Want to Lose Fat, Not Weight
It might sound like I am nitpicking words, but there is an important lesson here. You only want to lose fat: you don’t care about water weight (that fluctuates all the time), and you do not want to lose muscle. If anything, you probably need to build muscle. There’s an important corollary to this idea: diet is for fat loss; exercise is for muscle gain. Exercising to increase fat loss is a losing proposition, for reasons I detail in my book. You should indeed exercise (see key #6 below), just don’t do it to “burn calories.” Instead, do it to make your body stronger, healthier, and more capable.
3. Learn to Embrace Hunger
Instead of exercising to lose fat, it’s much easier and psychologically healthy to simply train yourself to accept hunger. Many of us have been trained to think that as soon as we get the slightest bit hungry we need to eat, and that if we don’t eat every three hours we’ll go into a hypoglycemic coma. This is absurdly untrue, and deeply unnatural. You can train yourself over the course of a month or so to not only accept long periods of hunger, but to enjoy them. This gives you a superpower that lets you skip unhealthy meals, only eat when you truly need to, and lose fat much more easily.
4. Avoid Processed Food
Processed food is abundant and cheap and insanely tempting. It needs to be avoided, as if it were a dangerous drug. There’s nothing inherently unhealthy with the making of processed food, but rather that these foods are engineered to be “hyperpalatable.” These foods have been carefully designed to trick your brain into accepting junk as nutritious and to override your body’s natural cues to stop eating. Learning how to appropriately handle pre-prepared food requires first mastering it by minimizing it. Instead, prepare your own healthy food, following this principle:
5. Focus on Produce & Protein
If you want to minimize your caloric intake, make all your meals consist mostly of produce, especially non-starchy vegetables. It’s virtually impossible to eat too many of these, and if you are also moderate with starchy vegetables and fruit, you can also eat several cups of those a day. For reasons of both health and satiety, you should also include some protein (meats, cheeses, or eggs, for example) in each meal. If you can make each of your meals be mostly produce, with a fistful of good protein, and no more than a couple teaspoons of oil or butter and very small sides of starchy food, then you are virtually certain to lose fat and achieve a healthy weight.
6. Exercise Every Day
Leisurely walking, while a great activity, doesn’t count as “exercise.” When I say exercise, I mean something that pushes your capabilities, even if only for five minutes. My book provides advice on exactly what kinds of exercises you should do and how to rotate them over the course of a week, but the most important thing for people who don’t yet exercise on a regular basis is to do it every day. I don’t care if it’s only for five minutes: it is critical to build the habit. After a couple weeks of five minutes a day, you can make it eight minutes, and then ten or twelve. If you can eventually get to just twenty minutes a day of serious exercise, you can become more fit than the vast majority of the population.
7. Gamify Things
Since — as I mentioned in the first key — the process of becoming fit is a long process, sometimes you need a short-term motivation to get you to actually get of your butt and do those sprints or to say no to the cupcake calling your name. There are several ways to make a game out of the process of getting fit, from giving yourself a score every day (and making an associated reward system) to having a few physical fitness tests you do every month or two (so that you can see your progress). Making things into a little contest, even just with yourself, can go a long way toward aligning your short-term actions with your long-term goals.
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I detail several ideas for gamifying things in my book, and also go into much more explanation and detail about each of the principles above, so that you can put these ideas into practice.