10 lessons of sustainable weight loss from a man who lost 49lbs in 51 weeks (and 64 lbs total!)

​This post covers the weight loss journey of my client and friend Lawrence. We began training together in the spring of 2018. He initially lost 15 pounds by simply changing up his diet and eating healthier, while performing two weekly training sessions. In July of 2018 he approached me about getting a little bit more guidance and accountability for his eating. The goal was to build upon the 15lb weight loss and have a plan to follow.

Given the fact that Lawrence is a financial planner by trade, one of the options that I suggested to him really appealed. The option was to use an app to track his daily food intake. We set up some initial guidelines and he began to track his daily caloric intake including his daily consumption of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. While this might seem like an arduous task, technology can be a wonderful thing, and the app that he used for tracking (MyFitness Pal) made this a smooth and fairly pain-free process; from a logistical standpoint at least.

My suggestion was that he track his intake for a period of about 12 weeks. Each week he would send me his weekly nutrition chart, which included his daily morning bodyweight. We would discuss how the week went, and whether or not he needed to make any changes. We’d also discuss external factors that could have affected his weight gain or loss in specific weeks. Lawrence is quite a self-motivated individual, so I was mostly just a sounding board :) 

After blazing through the first 12 weeks of food tracking, he got into such a good rhythm that he ended up tracking for an entire year. The end result was an additional 49 lbs lost in 51 weeks!

While I would never suggest that anybody track their food intake for an entire year, I'm very glad that Lawrence did. By combing through his years’ worth of data and checking-in with him on his progress each and every week, we were able to gain some massive insight into his weight loss process.

I thought it would be useful to share his journey with you as he has provided some invaluable data and experience that lend truth to some "universal laws of weight loss".

While I will mention a few data points, a large part of what this post covers are social and emotional strategies that can help you with long-term weight loss.

Below you will see a list of 10 lessons of sustainable weight loss and how Lawrence's journey upheld these lessons. My hope is that you might have some “aha” moments that make you think back to a time(s) when you tried to lose weight. While these lessons learned are in reference to Lawrence’s journey, I believe them to be true for anyone looking to lose weight. If you have tried to lose weight, perhaps even several times over, and haven’t managed to pull it off just yet, then I think that you could gain some valuable insight through reading the lessons that follow. You might even approach your next weight loss journey with a fresh perspective; that's my goal, at least!
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Enough "jibber-jabber", here are the 10 lessons: 

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