So many people send me messages, emails and ask me in person, “what’s the secret”? Here it is: nutrition comes first!
“I can’t seem to shift this weight around my belly, it just doesn’t want to move”. I ask them how they train and what their diet is like.
After some back and forth of them trying to explain how healthy they eat, but they have a cheat meal once every few days and then don’t track their food on the weekend, or that they skipped the gym this week because “life was busy”. I always tell them that’s the reason they’re not getting results.
Accepting the truth
When I first started trying to lose weight, all I used to do was go to the gym 7 days a week and do ab exercises, train my arms and chest and just did what most guys do.
I thought because I was training hard I could eat whatever I want, so I used to eat huge meals from Mcdonalds and other crappy food because I thought that as long as I worked hard at the gym I was turning what I ate into muscle.
It took me months of not making any progress to realise that there was something wrong. I kept telling myself that it must have been the workouts I was doing and that I needed to “trick my body” so it would grow.
Secretely I knew in the back of my head that I had to change the way that I ate, but I just wasn’t willing to accept the truth at first.
After about 1 year of wasted time in the gym, I was over not seeing any results. Something inside me finally clicked and I admitted that I needed to change my diet.
Once I started changing my diet, all of a sudden I started seeing real results, I started to lose that stubborn belly fat. I wish it didn’t take me that long, but I wasn’t willing to accept the truth for what it is: nutrition comes first!
If you’re not getting the results you want there are a few reasons for it. You might not be aware of these reasons or you might be and just aren’t willing to accept the truth.
You’re not eating the right food
Most people think they are eating “healthy” but they aren’t.
If you are eating “pretty” good for a few days of the week, but then you have pizza and beers on a Friday night, Saturday morning you go out for a big breakfast, Saturday night is Mcdonald’s and a few more drinks and then Sunday is a greasy breakfast to kick you out of hangover mode then you’ve got a massive problem.
The biggest reason I didn’t see results and most people don’t get results is because of their diet! You can’t be eating like crap all weekend and then expect to eat ‘relatively’ healthy during the week. You don’t have to completely cut out everything either, you need to just reduce the amount of crap you’re eating.
I always recommend that 80 – 90% of the food you eat come from whole nutritious food. That means most of the food you eat shouldn’t come with packaging except for a few things like greek yoghurt, milk etc.
If you eat 3 meals a day 7 days a week that’s 21 meals if you have a few snacks here and there that’s about 30 times you eat a week. Out of those 30 meals 3 of them should be your “unhealthy” meals. No that doesn’t mean that you binge on a whole pizza either. That means you would have half a pizza instead of a full pizza and swap the coke for a diet coke.
To get a good idea of what and how much you’re eating I suggest keeping a food diary.
If you start taking care of your nutrition first I promise you that you will start to see results a lot faster.
Nutrition Comes First – Action Steps
- Cut Back on the crappy food
- Start eating good quality whole food
- Track your food for a week to see what you really eat
- You’re not training hard enough
