Kyu's 3 month guide into baby stepping into fitness:
If you don't know where to start at all, no matter what your lifestyle is and choices you make, here is a really simple guide to developing a relationship with your body and healthy lifestyle living.
There's two aspects to fitness, your food, and your exercise. This guide will mostly focus on nutrition.
Week 1: Be aware of what you eat. It seems easy, but this is the hardest part really! We're knocking it out early. Just take an app/tool like fitness pal or a simple piece of paper or a google note or something, and write down what you eat. It doesn't have to be fancy, don't bother with calorie counts, just write down what you ate, and if you felt hungry, good/fine, or overly full afterwards. It can be as vague as "went to the buffet, overly full" or "cereal and milk, not hungry but was 1 hour later". You're not going to be perfect, but we're just going to try to be mindful and take note. We'll be doing this for the whole month.
Week 2: Continue noting your food style and eating. Nothing has changed yet. But this week we are going to learn something simple to add to this note-taking process... and that's the portion-hand guide.
How to Measure Food Portions at ARNG Guard Your Health An easy guide... but now you can use this to vaguely measure what you're eating. If something is hard to measure, no worries, we can skip that thing and just say "a slice of pizza" or "a large bowl of soup from the restaurant". But this will give you some accurate data. Don't forget to track what you drink as well. We're halfway through this tracking thing.
Week 3: We're adding a couple more notes to the tracking. Not hard or lengthy (that's what she said)... Just an emoji, and a star. As you go through your meals, snacks, office party snacks, and starbucks', I just want you to write a smiley face, a "meh" face, and a frowny face.. next to each thing you write down. A frowny face is not meant to mean an 'unhealthy' item, but rather, if you ever felt yucky about something you ate. Maybe you're allergic to lactose, but ate it and felt bad about it after. Maybe you associate certain foods with comfort but don't really feel great about eating them. Maybe you're stuck in an awful guilt-trip cycle of feeling bad that you're eating ANY calories at all. Maybe you ate applesauce and thought "hell yes, why did I forget how much I loved this food?" or "omggggg starbucks fraps are my jam" or maybe you tell yourself "man this cookie dough is exactly what I needed right then" put smileys next to those. If you really did not care about the food one way or the other, like it was in the break room and there so you ate it, put a meh face there. Put stars next to foods you did not make yourself but rather had someone else make for you.. like a frozen dish, a restaurant, or a take out order.
Week 4: Last week of tracking! Probably in a pretty good groove of tracking things by now. Did you know that being aware of the foods you eat and how much, that alone with no other thing involved, can still influence your decision making? It's called the Hawthorne effect. The idea is, the very act of watching yourself eat food and being active in that process enough to pay attention to how you feel before and after and looking at how much you eat is going to influence your decision making. You may or may not have noticed this... Did you skip a donut at work being offered because you didn't want to write down another snack? Did you choose a healthier apple to make the notes look more healthy and balanced? Did you notice you didn't eat any salads and picked one up at the store? We have a lot of hang ups about health, and when we are not mindlessly eating our food, those hang ups tend to bubble to the surface. Just take note of them if you notice. No one is reading this but you.
Week 5: Let's analyze our data! We're not writing things down anymore, but we are going to look at what we wrote down. The simplest thing is to count how many meals and snacks you ate. What is more your style? 2 meals a day? 2 and a snack? Snacking all day with no meals? 4 meals? Is it all over the place with no rhyme and reason?
Write down based on your data how you seem to eat. For me, that was 3 meals a day and snacking when those meals were small or when others brought food.
Next, overall, how do you feel about your food? Overwhelmingly meh? Lots of frowny faces? Lots of smiles? This is not a judgment of what you ate and society's impression of healthy, but rather, just how it made you in particular feel, if anything at all.
Next, how many meals you made yourself. Are you shocked by the results? Does it make sense? If you're a college student on a meal plan, you probably did not make many meals yourself. Or if you're younger and someone makes food for you like your parents. But if you live on your own, how many meals were convenience items others made for you vs yourself? Did you notice any barriers for making meals like money issues, transportation, equipment issues (like lacking a pan to make a recipe you saw), etc?
And did you notice anything about yourself? Like maybe you thought you ate more junk food than you actually do? Or maybe you thought you hardly ever get a coffee to go but realized you do it 2-3x a week? Did you notice you typically don't sit down to eat a meal? If you noticed it, jot it down with the analysis.
Notice what we are not writing here and that's the portions. We're not here to tally up anything. I want you to be aware of how much you're eating, but there's no need to say "I ate 35 servings of veggies this month!" or "I eat an entire pie every week!" what good is that data? It doesn't do anything for us here. We're building a relationship with our food. While you don't have to write food down anymore, you should still make a mental note taking of what you're eating. Feel free to track more and longer, but this habit of just... taking note of how you feel before and after, and getting a loose guess of the calories you are eating should stick with you. So week 5 will be practice this, this mindfulness without relying on the notebook.
Now, writing all of this down only takes a few minutes of the week. What are we doing with the rest? Taking note of our fitness activities mentally, and our food mentally, to lead into week 6.
Week 6: Let's calculate our caloric needs.
Health-calc - Energy expenditure adv. This is important. We get a lot of misinformation about what we need.. People say 10x your bodyweight. This is somwhat what we use in the hospital to help calculate how to let comatose patients survive... We obvi need more calories than this in our lives. Plus, it's cool!
Print out the form, fill it out on both the busiest day of the week and the most chill one, and enter the data in and get your magic cool numbers. Average them for your magic number. For me, those basal numbers were actually pretty close to the bodyweightx10 thing, but it may not be for you. What's really important is my total energy expended: somewhere around 2,500 calories if I'm taking the average of a lazy day and a hard busy day with lots of exercise.
So what's the point of this? Basal rates are what you need to maintain what you're currently doing.. Like, the impotant stuff.. breathing, moving, and keeping up with your life in general. It is the MINIMUM you need. We don't go below this number. This is why calorie counting is somewhat important to know... Chances are if you're trying to lose weight you meet the minimums, but with dieting what so often happens is we suddenly don't even have enough to function. If you see anything trying to tell you to only eat 200 calories each meal, you'll know it's full of it. The total energy expended number is how many calories you use in your day. This is the number we will need to manipulate eventually. Not right now. Not soon. But eventually. So... Just be mindful of it. Particularly with so many restaurants and stuff having calories on display, you can see if you're getting enough to maintain your lifestyle truly, or way surpassing it, or whatever.
Now that we have all the data we want, we can move on. The rest of this week will be focusing on those frowny faces and stars. What made you feel the worst about your own food? Was it how expensive lunch is at work? Is it that you eat food that physically makes you feel unwell by mentally satisfies you? We're going to be picking on those frowny faces... just a few of them.
Week 7: Research what works for you. Everyone is going to be different here. We're going to be pick on major thing. I'll stick with examples, but everyone has their own aspects of living. You see that you only cook 1 meal a week, and the rest are all frozen dinners, take out, etc. And you realize you are frowny faced about frozen dinners. Let's think about this.. why don't you like to cook? Is it time? Money? Lack of an oven? Lack a kitchen? Can't cook for yourself? Hate leftovers? Do you just genuinely hate cooking or feel you are not good at it and thus do not make things as tasty as the take-out? All of these answers are just one possibility, or multiple ones, or a single potential data result. We're going to pick just this one. For example, I don't cook my own food for lunches at work because I don't have time.
This is where the research comes in. We're implying that if we had time to cook we'd cook for sure. So, let's research meals that are quick, delicious, and easy. Maybe something like slow cooker meals that only take 10 minutes of assembly and require no real monitoring. Or 10-20 minute meals. Childhood havorites like mac and cheese boxes with hot dogs sliced in. Yeah, pinterest that shit. See if anything is up your alley where you say, "You know what? I can make a meal in 10 damn minutes." Sandwiches? Yeah, only 5 minutes of prep and done, another 5 if you cook them. Soups? 10 minutes of prepping (even faster with a food processor) and a slow boil. Overnight oats are only a couple minutes. One pot meals that you bake in the oven? Done. Maybe the meal ITSELF is not 10 minutes total every time (like the slow cooker) but your active effort is only 10 minutes total still. The stove, or the cooker, will do the rest. So, let's try to double the cooking we do ourselves. If that's only once a week, let's cook twice a week. If we only cook one meal, let's try to cook 2 meals.
There is something online for everyone because everyone is obsessed with hacking their hang ups. Hate making grocery lists? People have them online and recipe links! ZERO thinking involved! Hate baking? Don't do it! Hate frying? You can make almost ANYTHING in the oven that you can fry, so don't fry it! You can still have that awesome chicken you love to eat. Like a certain food? There's copy cat recipes for lots of stuff online. Only have a tiny bit of money? Websites like budgetbytes have calculations pre-done for you! Whatever you think your hang up is, there is info about it on the internet that will turn a frowny face into a meh or even happy face!
Whatever your biggest hang up is that is stopping you from being closer to your food, find a way to tackle it. Just google something new and read through it each day and come up with a plan based on this research. This is not the end-all save-all to being healthier... and maybe this plan won't work! Maybe you think you don't have time, but actually, you find out you just hate leftovers really so your idea to meal-prep in advance failed miserably.
But we're going to try this plan, and see how it works for us. No pressure and no feeling failed allowed. Just try, and assess. The key is to make this measurable.. You don't know if you're 'doing well' by saying "the food I eat will be healthier".. but maybe, you can say, "I will cook my own food for lunch at work at LEAST 3 days a week instead of eating out. I will do this by prepping my lunches with food I like the leftovers of the day before the work week starts because my biggest hang up is time that day." Don't go overboard.. if you eat out DAILY for lunch, switching to eating your own lunch all the time without fail is going to feel like you suck every single time you go out to eat... but saying "Mondays and Fridays I will eat out still, but the rest of the week I can eat food I like from home" is doable. It's sustainable. And that's what we're making here. Maybe eventually it will feel like eating lunch from home all the time is sustainable (and I hope you do!) but we're making baby steps here.
Week 8: Implement the plan!
This is the easiest week of all, we're going to try our measureable goal, and see how it goes. We're going to reach for this plan for another couple of weeks. How you track your progress is up to you.. If the goal is to eat lunch from home 3x a week, having the same 3 tupperwares of food prepped and seeing if they all get eaten appropriately is good enough! If it is to cook at home once a week, maybe update your FB status with your cooking or post on google calendar when you cooked.
Week 9: Still doing the thing.
Baby steps are about being so easy it is difficult to find excuses to NOT do it. It is a world of difference in making long term sustainable goals. Weeks 9, 10, 11, and 12 are all about seeing all of this analysis and planning put into slow, methodical, and measurable action. And maybe you get to week 12 and realize this was stupid easy. Congrats! It should be for you! A tiny bit of active effort sustained over a long period of time. If the plan massive flops (like you realize you hate eating the same dish 3x in a row and thus meal prepping is not for you) see if you can adjust and change this idea (like instead of meal prepping, you pick easier foods to make/eat and make them each day vs all at once). If this practice becomes more sustainable than implement it instead! No sense in continuing something that isn't going to impact those frowns.
... But hopefully, week 12 lights a fire in you and you realize that when you look at those frowny face spots, you will see some smiles instead. You might feel really good eating food you like and doing it with goal achievement in mind as well. And you can go back to researching another small, active effort goal you can measure along side it. Maybe that goal is as simple as "I will cook my own lunches 4 days a week" or "I will start trying a copy-cat recipe of my favorite coffee shop 2x a week and put that $5-10 in savings towards another goal of mine" or whatever it is you want to get done. I would not go any after than 3-4 months at a time though. Let your goal be sustainable for 3-4 months before adding another day of prepping, or before switching that cookie dough at the store for a 'healthy' copy cat recipe at home. Feel free to experiment for a day/week to see what you want to try before implementing a new idea.
This is not about eating the most healthiest of healthy food in 3 months. This is a life changing transformation about building a relationship with your food. And Rome as not built in a day. If my goal was to cook my own lunches for work 3 days a week or to cook my own meals 2x a week, in 3 months I have figured out what I eat, why I eat like I do a little more, a hole in my logic (like that I don't have time, or that it's expensive, or that it isn't as convenient), and a simple, profitable intervention that I am able to sustain for an entire month (the idea being that status post this 3 month mark I will just simply have had a month long habit and turn it into a year long habit, whether I do anything else with this or not.). Something I never did before, I am doing now. And that's the point. I grew closer to my relationship with my food. Maybe I am just cooking macaroni and cheese, or eating 1 homemade copy cat cookie instead of grabbing that cookie downstairs at the shop, but I did it and I was not doing it before.
If you're stuck on how to start. This is how to start. If I were going to project what a year would look like with a plan like this, I'd say that I eventually discover the foods I like and what I'm willing to do and end up eating lunch from home 4 out of 5 days a week without feeling like it is work, effort, or boring at all. It will just feel like something I do, like washing my face in the morning or looking at reddit in the store line. Maybe I have discovered a healthy recipe I really like (like adding cauliflower rice to my regular rice to give it some veggies) and implemented that too, but this is just a bonus small thing on top of my goal to be closer to my food. Maybe this would inspire me to try the fitness side of things.. Or try to figure out how to incorporate more healthy recipes into my life.. but a major key to healthy eating is making your food yourself. And that's where we are trying to get at here. Is making your own food and having a relationship with that food.
Now.. If you want to get fitness in your life.. Creating time and space for fitness is the biggest thing. Start slow and low, lots of 5 minute stretching videos are out there and free on youtube to follow along with.. if those sound boring for you, try something as simple as parking in the back of a grocery store, or taking stairs instead of an elevator at work in the morning... but I'll go with the stretching example. Try to stretch every 2 days/week for a month. Then 3 days/week for 2 months. Try to bump it up to a warm-up video that's 6-10 minutes long 3 days a week for a month. Try a 10 minute work out video here and there that shows easy modifications. By the time you reach the end of a year's time, you could be doing 10-15 minutes of actual work outs 3 days a week sustainably. Find you forgot a day? Didn't find time that day, or have less of it? Dropping back down to that 5 minute stretch is always okay.
Health is a journey. Like. Of LotR sized proportions. A long, long walk. So, don't be in a rush to run it.
