What follows is the most effective strategy for healthy and sustained weight loss. Notice I said “strategy,” not “tactic,” the difference of which could not be more glaring.
A Lifestyle is a combination of strategies around all the essential aspects of living that enable you to flourish, prosper and thrive and can be seen as a broader “strategy.”
Developed right, a whole lifestyle that’s working for you is the most effective strategy for healthy and sustained weight loss.
A Strategy is a combination of tactics all working towards a desired end.
A Tactic may be a component of a strategy but is not a whole strategy by itself and usually does not end up in a completely desired result, even though it may show “signs” of working. It’s more of a mechanism responsible for a certain change.
In this article, I’m not talking much about an overall lifestyle strategy; I’m talking about a couple of aspects of the lifestyle I refer to below, which are core to living at or near your ideal weight sustainably when you have the right strategy based on sound tactics.
That means not all tactics are bad. I will point out unhealthy and healthy tactics below, but either way, they are not the whole answer; they need to be part of (in this case) an eating strategy that is then part of an entire lifestyle strategy that supports you and what you are up to in the world.
A good example of an unhealthy eating strategy is a diet based on a high-protein, low-carb diet, where you manipulate weight loss due largely to a few tactics. The harmful tactic is eating a highly concentrated calorie source, rich in some nutrients like protein, but as a whole is “micronutrient poor.”
Animal protein is missing the entire category of phytonutrients that protect your cells and keep you healthy. It also contains substances your body does not need from food, like cholesterol and saturated fat.
Sure, that eating strategy is not all bad; it’s great to get rid of garbage carbs called “carbage,” which is a good tactic, but outside of the fact that you stopped eating junk, it is still not optimal nutrition or even close to an optimal eating strategy.
It’s a tactic that many build their eating strategy around, only to learn later that it still leads to poor health, even if they’ve improved over eating the standard American diet (SAD) or modern American diet (MAD).
The prevalence of eating strategies based on unhealthy tactics that sell you short in the market is breathtaking, only to keep you chasing a solution that never quite shows up or delivers the complete result you seek. And nowhere are these tactics more prevalent than in energy and nutrition.
So what is the most successful strategy for healthy and sustained weight loss?
Not surprisingly, it is not about nutrition alone; it’s about having an optimal living strategy or what we would call a performance lifestyle.
It, of course, starts with making sure you are not energy depleted– sleep deprived or run down because nothing will cause your lifestyle to go awry and you to gain weight more than that.
1. Energy depletion leads to inflammation.
2. Energy depletion leads to overconsumption (no matter how healthy you eat)
3. Energy depletion leads to inactivity.
… and so much more that works against you.
As Performance Lifestyle Coaches, we opened up a REGENUS CENTER because rule #1 is don’t get run down. You can lose more weight by getting the right quantity, quality, and consistency of sleep, rest, recovery, etc… than acting on dietary improvement alone.
But for the sake of brevity, once rejuvenation and recovery are being attended to in all the important ways regularly in your life (and you know what you’re doing), you want to have an eating strategy that checks the boxes on energy, health, performance, and longevity, not weight loss alone.
Living at or near your ideal weight results from optimal living, and eating is one part of that, albeit a big factor. Eating healthy is a strategy that rolls up into a broader lifestyle strategy.
But the healthy tactic is this: Eat Whole Food, “Nutrient Rich.” Everything changes when you have a strategy for eating when you are hungry.
When you meet all your nutrient needs in foods, meals, and menus you enjoy and then eat again when you are hungry, you can live at or near your ideal weight.
But to do that successfully, you need the rest of your lifestyle to work for you too.
Oh, how simple; that tactic is not the whole eating strategy because other tactics like intermittent fasting, which can come naturally from eating this way, are required when eating whole food nutrient-rich 90% of the time or more, but it is the operative tactic.
Missing that tactical insight is like a baby never learning gravity while trying to walk. That gives rise to all kinds of problems.
We will be doing a course on eating whole food nutrient-rich in the coming weeks, and we look forward to helping you implement the most effective eating strategy for healthy and sustained weight loss.
