Recently two of our baseball athletes got in touch with me about wanting to lose some weight during quarantine. Both of these athletes train their butts off in the weight room. We knew this wasn’t going to be an “exercise solution” to a “nutrition problem”. If you have been reading our previous newsletters you already know that exercise has very little to do with weight management in most cases. We chatted about the “why” of what they wanted to do, set up some guidelines/metrics and have been tracking their progress.
Here is what we did.
1) We set up a habit.
2) We picked a metric to track
3) We decided what would happen if compliance was too low
Lets unpack each step.
1) We picked something super simple. Eat the same breakfast each day. Take a picture of it and send with their weight for that morning. That’s it. We decided what would be the easiest meal for them to have consistently each day. Both opted for some type of egg and veggie/fruit option.
2) We picked body weight as our metric. This is super easy to track and send each day.
3) If they didn’t reach a compliance of 5/7 days we would stop the experiment and pick something else. That is 71% compliance. In most cases we won’t see much change unless compliance is 75% or above. Both of them were 100% in sending pictures and their habit the first week. Week 3 is getting to be a little harder.
Here are their results in 2.5 weeks.
M1- start weight 232 – lowest weight- 222
G1- start weight 228.2- lowest weight – 218.6
Week 2 We added in taking a picture of their dinner and sticking to 1 serving.
Week 3 For M1 decreasing 1 egg at breakfast and for G1 using a smaller bowl for chips at lunch.
We have a video call check in once a week. These guys are pretty much flying solo all week otherwise. Nutrition doesn’t have to be overly complicated but you do have to set yourself up for success.
There have been 2 big “Ah-Ha” moments.
- Both are realizing that they don’t have to eat until stuffed.
“ Here’s lunch and dinner I didn’t finish that full plate of dinner I was satisfied and didn’t want to eat until i was full” -M1 - It isn’t a straight line to success. You can see in their data that things fluctuate. They both made changes based off their data. We acknowledged that something was hard that day and then made the adjustment to get back on track. Consistency drives success. They are recognizing what can cause changes in either direction and then able to react quickly to move in the right direction.
If you think this type of coaching is for you I would consider our Precision Nutrition coaching program.
Huge thanks to two of my favorite athletes for always putting in the work!
TS Training Systems 