Simple, Easy Weight Loss?

We all want a simple and easy weight loss plan.  But is there such a thing?

Yes!  But is it an effective plan?  And how does an easy and simple diet compare to one that’s more complex?  And which combination of easy/hard/simple/complex weight loss programs gives the best bang for your buck?

Let’s take a look, based on this by-no-means-comprehensive but fairly accurate series of exercise and diet comparisons:

Plan A – Easy & Simple  Hire a personal weight-loss chef to provide and cook all your meals.  Eat nothing else.  Exercise if you feel like it.

Plan B – Easy and Complex  Compile from the internet a list of 100 “Simple ways to trick your body into burning fat!” and follow each one as often as is convenient for you.

Plan C – Hard and Simple  Eat a LOT less than you’re now eating, replace almost ALL junk food, fast food, desserts, soft drinks, and alcohol with lean proteins and greens, while getting plenty of exercise, water, and rest.

Plan D – Hard and Complex  There are too many to list, but let’s look at a few:  (1) Buy a diet book and follow it and its recipes religiously.  (2) Subscribe to 4 or 5 health magazines, read each cover to cover, and implement as much of their advice into your life as possible.  When they mention a new exercise or “superfood” each month, try it.  (3) Hire a personal trainer to meet you at the gym 3 to 5 times a week and tell you exactly how many repetitions of each exercise to do.

Costs

Plan A  $1000 per month or more.  Some celebrities hire personal chefs for over $75,000 per year.

Plan B  Free, assuming the tricks don’t cost money.  Otherwise, budget for expensive tricks (there’s always some miracle drink on the market that will make you lose weight and live forever, for at least $5 per serving).

Plan C  Less than nothing!  That’s right, you will SAVE money by spending less on food (because you’re eating less), and by eating fewer restaurant meals (and NO fast food meals or 4-dollar 400-calorie “coffee” monstrosities), which are far more expensive than providing your own small meals is.  The only expenses might be some workout gear and, if you can’t exercise outdoors year round, a gym membership.  These will be absorbed by the food savings if you do it right.

Plan D  (1)  About $20 per book, plus more than you would usually spend on groceries, so you can make the recipes.  (2) $5 to $10 per month, plus whatever stuff they have you buy (whether certain types of foods, supplements, equipment, clothing, electronic gadgets, etc)–plus they WILL command you to have a gym or yoga studio membership, so add another $30 (for a gross gym) to $80 (fairly nice gym unless you live in a pricey urban area) to $200 per month (hottest new gym for the “beautiful people”).  (3) about $500 to $1000 per month, depending on the trainer and gym.  At trendy gyms, up that to as much as $2000.

Likely Results

There is such a method: take all of the good advice from above, throw out everything that requires you to spend money, and supplement it with education, motivation, and support.  This requires ALL of the following steps:

• Easy: Become a participant in a weight loss community that embraces you for who you are, empathizes with your struggles and setbacks, cheers you in your successes, and provides meaningful feedback to your questions.
• Easy: Educate yourself in the things successful people have in common and how they lost the weight (and kept it off).
• Easy: Educate yourself in basic weight-loss nutrition and, optional but highly recommended, exercise.
• Hard: Decide that you are going to make it happen this time, and you’re going to make it last.
• Hard (at first): Using your freshly-updated knowledge, do Plan C from above (eat a LOT less than you’re now eating, replace almost ALL junk food, fast food, desserts, soft drinks, and alcohol with lean proteins and greens, while getting plenty of exercise, water, and rest) until it becomes natural.  Chances are, this step will never become 100% easy, but if you keep up ALL of these steps, it will become MUCH easier.
• Hard: Stay positive about this at all times, no matter how uncooperative your bathroom scale is being.  This is the simplest but also the most important step.  There is no other way to achieve lasting success and contentment.

Costs:

Virtually nothing but the price of new jeans once your old jeans start falling off.  Your only expenditures will be those purchases that you want to make, whether workout clothing, gym or other athletic membership, a book or two (our book review section is coming soon), personalized weight-loss and nutrition consulting (also coming soon), or, as many of us can attest, an entire new wardrobe.

Likely Results:

• 

  It’ll be hard hard hard, really frickin’ hard, at first.  But you WILL lose a noticeable amount of weight, even in the first week.  Since you decided that you are going to make this happen, you’ll keep up the hard work–only now you’ll have the happiness of your weight loss results taking the edge off of your hunger.

• After a week or two, maybe three, of constantly fighting your desire to eat more, you’ll realize, “Hey, I’m not really hungry after all!  In fact, I never needed to be eating as much every day as I was before starting this!”  But, because of all the years of bad habits, it will still be hard to resist.  You won’t be hungry; rather, your appetite will be.  However, knowing this, you will know how to persevere and triumph.
• Keep this up a little longer, and you will no longer have to struggle to eat properly, and you will find exercise significantly easier.  Sure, you’ll have difficulty making the right choices sometimes, but it won’t be a major crisis like it was at first.  That’s because it’s starting to feel, and become, natural to [the real] you.
• By this time, everybody will have noticed how much better you’re looking, and how much happier you seem.  And you will know that, this time, you really can do this!  And you will.  Because the real you is skinny.

What’s the Catch?

There’s no catch, only a condition you need to be aware of.

This method works, reliably, only when you are willing to embrace what is probably a somewhat NEW understanding of weight loss.  This method works when your understanding of nutrition, exercise, motivation, and weight loss success are in line with what we teach on TRYIS.  You must be willing to cast aside at least some of the advice and “science” that you already think you know about weight loss, or by what you’ve “heard” or by what the mainstream media is saying.  If that advice was sufficient, would you be reading this page?

Conclusion (the actual one)

Above are some pretty bold claims. How can I (this is Alyssa talking here) be so sure about this?

1. It’s exactly what happened to me–except I did NOT have proper knowledge in nutrition and weight-loss science (like you will as a reader of this site).
2. It’s also what happened to countless others who followed my old website or read my book (feel free to check out some of the reviews yourself).
3. After achieving success, I still became certified as an advanced clinical weight loss practitioner.

I’ve proven that my advice works. And now, thanks to my extra training, it works better.

Still, I’ve caught a lot of flak and negative press because, according to the naysayers, “everybody knows”  I give “unhealthy” advice.  Thing is, in my clinical training I learned that 95% of my old advice was correct, including 100% of my book’s “unhealthy” advice.

I’m not here to try to vindicate myself.  I have thick skin.  And a day job.

Rather, I’m here, and this site is here, because I used to be a lifelong, miserable, fat, failure, but then I found freedom from fat, and freedom to enjoy an area of life that had forever been closed to me.  This site is here to provide a free yet rich resource to help everyone else who wants to find those freedoms.

You’re warmly invited to join us.