The Key To Weight Loss Success (That Nobody Ever Mentions)

What makes the key difference between getting smashing your fitness goals and going round in circles getting more and more frustrated?

No matter what social media says, the answer isn’t counting your calories, perfectly executing your exercise technique or knowing the exact ratio of reps to sets you should be performing.

(Yes, all these things are important, so there’s no need to leave an angry comment just yet, but they’re not the big boss, the Don or the big cheese when it comes to results).

The big difference is mindset.

Or to be a little more specific, whether you’ve adopted a growth or a fixed mindset towards your goals.

Put it like this.

You can know that a calorie deficit is key to losing fat.

But where does the decision come from to be in a calorie deficit?

Why would you choose foods or perform actions that help you to be in a calorie deficit?

Why would you actively learn the skills required to maintain the right amount of calories for your goal?

Your thinky box is where all these decisions are made and the decisions you choose to make come down to what type of mindset you’ve adopted.

Before you go any further let’s quickly cover each mindset, what it is and how it affects your decision making.

Fixed Mindset.

This is when your brain has come to the conclusion that a set of circumstances are fixed and can never be changed.

It may be about a skill, such as dancing. 

You’ll tell people you have two left feet and no rhythm (something I’ve heard myself say many times).

It might be about your weight and feeling convinced that there is no way you could lose weight and that you were built to be overweight, or you’re too old to change.

You can usually spot when you have a fixed mindset about an area of your life as you’ll use words like “I’m not the type who…” or “I could never do…”.

Growth Mindset

A growth mindset on the other hand allows you to know that you can improve.

It may mean learning some new skills, you may not ever become the best in the world at it, but you can become better than you currently are.

At some point in your life you’ve demonstrated a growth mindset.

Whether it was at school, in a new job, at a sport or other hobby.

There’s something you’ve tried to do and come at it with the knowledge that if you’re given the right coaching and support you can get better at this.

A classic example is learning to drive.

The first time you get into the driver's seat you have no idea what you’re doing, but you know that after a couple of hours, a few dodgy gear changes and plenty of advice from your instructor, you’ll definitely improve.

You’re coming to the sessions with a growth mindset.

The challenge many people face when it comes to their health goals is that they find it hard to believe that they can change for the better.

If you’ve spent years struggling to get out of bed, losing and regaining the same 8lbs and generally feeling dissatisfied with how you look and feel, then it can feel like you’re stuck and this is just how life is.

Hopefully you can see that this is a fixed mindset.

But just knowing that isn’t massively helpful, the useful thing to know is how to switch that fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

And yes, before you worry, that can be done, in fact it’s one of the first things I help my online clients with.

It may help to realise that you already have a growth mindset.

It’s not a case that you either have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset for everything in your life.

The type of mindset we have is dependant on the situation.

If we take my 15 year old self as an example.

Show me a new sport and I’d be pretty confident that I could get at least ok at it with enough time, in this area I had a growth mindset.

However, when it came to talking to girls I had a fixed mindset. As far as I was concerned, I was terrible at it, I always would be and I would die a virgin and all alone.

So you already have the ability to have a  growth mindset.

Take a minute and scan across all the things you do in your life and see if you can spot some of the areas in which you already have a growth mindset.

Have a think as to what helps you to have a growth mindset in that area of your life.

Maybe it’s to do with being part of a social group, there’s a cool teacher/instructor, it’s something you learned growing up, you simply love it or it just makes your life easier.

Knowing what helps you to have a growth mindset in one area of your life could be helpful in finding ways to cultivate one in another part of your life.

Swap beating yourself up for becoming curious.

If you’re developing any kind of new skill, you have to expect to not be great straight away.

I mean, you wouldn’t just throw your child into the deep end of a swimming pool and expect them to beat Michael Phelps would you?

That would be a crazy expectation.

You take them to lessons and clap them as they go through the stages of looking less likely to drown.

Then when they can swim a length you can start pressuring them to be Olympic champion and let them know how disappointed you’ll be if they don’t deliver the goods. Live daddy’s dream for him kid.

Anyway, you get my point. There’s stages and there will be days when things go better than others and that’s cool.

Except when it comes to losing weight and getting fit we think we should be perfect all the time. 

If we have the tiniest slip up, we start to think “what’s the point”, the negative voices start bouncing around our head and we accept we’re a terrible person.

But where does all that negativity get us?

Nowhere except back to the same point we started from.

Here’s what you do instead.

Remind yourself it’s ok to make a mistake and then get really curious with yourself.

Literally ask yourself why you did what you did.

We don’t do things for no reason, even when the things we do make zero sense to us at first, there is always a reason.

Maybe you chose a massive a pizza because you had under eaten all day and your body was screaming for calories.

Maybe you overate because  your boss du you out for something that wasn’t your fault.

Or you skipped a gym session because you hadn’t packed your gym kit.

I’m making stuff up here.

The point is to see if you can spot the reason why you behaved as you did.

If you can, then you can make a plan to remedy the situation before it catches you out next time.

Find the bright spots.

Nothing sucks all the time.

Even if you feel like you have had the worse week ever there will have been something that you did well.

No matter how small.

I ask my clients at the end of each to list at least one thing that went well.

This is important as our brains naturally tend to focus on the negatives in life.

If you don’t believe me, just look at any newspaper headline.

The good things in life don’t pose an immediate risk to your safety, our brains still function like our cave dwelling ancestors, when it was the sabre tooth tiger in the shadows that could kill you.

Look for the negatives and stay alive.

The problem with this is that we miss our own progress.

When we start to focus on the bright spots we start  to realise that change is possible for us.

And if we can make one tiny change, then perhaps we can do one slightly bigger change and so the snowball starts to build in size.

The final thing I suggest you start with is getting super clear on what you actually need to do.

Everything we want to achieve is usually an amalgamation of a lot of skills and actions.

For example, losing weight.

That’s an outcome, what do you need to do to achieve that?

You could eat more whole foods, learn to understand your appetite, exercise more, get more sleep, drink more water…the list could go on for ages, but let’s just take one of those actions.

Eat more whole foods, how do you do that?

Make a list of foods you enjoy, find a recipe to turn those ingredients into a meal, turn those into a shopping list, block time to prepare the food…

You see, each action consists of another layer of skills.

The problem most of us face is that we’re either not aware of these skills and therefore never develop them.

Or we’re kind of aware but become overwhelmed.

The key is to find the simplest skill that will have the biggest affect on your life and simply focus on implementing that until it starts to feel a little normal.

Only then do you start to focus on learning the next skill or habit.

If you take nothing else from this blog, take this.

Change is uncomfortable for everyone.

That feeling of discomfort or being slightly out of your depth is probably a good thing, it means you’re growing.

Get very clear as to where you want to go, don’t give yourself a hard time for making mistakes and treat everything that happens as data.

Use the data to adapt your plan and find the next skill you need to learn.