Don’t Make a Mountain Out Of a Molehill

You feel out of breath going up a flight of stairs. You strain and pull on your pants that are feeling just a tad bit too tight. You look in the mirror and pinch your rolls, and think to yourself, “It’s impossible. This is the body I have, and this is just the size it wants to be.”

The very FIRST STEP you need to take on your path towards health and wellness is to realize it won’t happen overnight. It’s going to take time and effort, and a lot of changes in habits. Probably one of the biggest things you can do for yourself first, is to learn to eat right. Some people like to start working out, but they don’t fix their bad eating habits, and oftentimes overeat their gains in the gym, not realizing they were already eating a surplus of calories and they probably don’t need to eat more.

When I first started my transformation, I only altered my eating habits. While I’ve got to credit the miles I’d walk while at work at my serving job that I had started again when I was starting my health changes for burning a lot of calories, changing my eating habits was the number one factor that helped in bringing my surplus of fat down to a healthier level. What led to my weight gain involved several factors. These included:

1. Sedentary job: I switched from waiting tables which is quite an active and physically demanding job to film production work, oftentimes working at my computer at a desk for 12-15 hours a day.
2. Unlimited access to “junk food”: Film jobs/production jobs like to feed their crew because they tend to keep them for ungodly amounts of hours. The cheapest and easiest way to feed them is to send a PA to Costco to buy large boxes of cookies, chips, peanut butter filled pretzels, fruit snacks, and so on and so forth. Fresh fruit and veggies go bad quickly, but you can buy enough snacks to stock the craft services table for weeks without throwing away food if you buy processed carb-based snacks such as those I listed.
3. Ordering out for lunch every day: This probably doesn’t apply to everyone but for me, ordering out was always such a treat because I grew up on home cooked food, always very light and healthy, and so any time I got to order out or eat out, I viewed it as a splurge. But when your office feeds you every day, you can’t always get the tastiest and fattiest meal every time! Especially when you’re stuck behind a desk only moving your fingers and you don’t need those calories. They’ll go unburned, and our efficient calorie-storing bodies will immediately convert those unused calories into fat! Make picking something healthy your “most of the time” habit, so that then when you treat yourself, you’re consciously making that decision instead of doing it all the time with no thought behind it.

So what kind of physical health goals do you have? Write them down. Really think about them and the steps that you need to take to achieve them. I promise you it’s doable. You just have to start by changing some habits, one at a time. Don’t worry about overhauling everything at once, because then it will seem impossible. Start by giving yourself some concrete goals like:

• Calculate your daily caloric needs using MyFitnessPal or some other caloric calculator
• Start taking the stairs instead of the elevator when possible
• Start thinking about the food you are eating and why you’re eating it, are you really hungry or are you just bored?
• What realistic size do you want to get to?
• What are some physical health goals you’d like to achieve? To be able to do 10 full pushups? To do a real pull-up?

Pick one of those goals and start working on it for a month. I started with nutritional changes. Losing a lot of my extra weight made it a little easier to get started on a fitness routine, but for some people it may work better the other way around. The key is to pick what will work for you.

Subscribe to my blog for more updates! I’m dishing it out in bite-sized portions so you have time to implement changes and so it’s less overwhelming! If you have specific questions, feel free to comment here or TWEET at me!