Making the Choice to Live Lean

By Martica Heaner, M.A., M.Ed.

If you are overweight, you may be making a cascade of choices every day that conspire to make you fat. You might be able to recite a list of your bad habits: the daily giant frozen-coffee drink with whipped cream or your conspicuous absence at the gym.

But it’s not just about that one coffee drink or occasional fried-food slipups.  You may be making consistent choices throughout each day that, unless you consciously choose to be lean, will keep you overweight. Are you stuck in a lifestyle that guarantees that you are taking in as many calories as you can, while burning as few of them as possible?

Here are a few real-life scenarios. See which ones apply to you.

At the supermarket

The lean choice: A cart that contains veggies, fruit, and whole-grain items instead of white bread products. There may be a container of ice cream in the cart—but the majority of food is nutritious and low-cal.

The fat choice: A cart filled with packaged pastries, sodas, chips, lots of meat and processed foods. There is not a fresh vegetable or fruit in sight. This is not just a one-time indulgence, but a regular occurrence. 

Which one of these is you?

At the restaurant

The lean choice: Sensible portions enough for one meal. As a side, steamed vegetables.

The fat choice: Steaks big enough for several meals. Creamed spinach and cheesy mashed potatoes for vegetables. Five cocktails during dinner. This is not just a one-time splurge, but an overload of calories typical for eating out.

Who would you rather be?

At salad bars

The lean choice: A healthy vegetable-rich salad that’s less fattening than a typical meal.

The fat choice: A salad that has more calories than a Big Mac. It’s piled high with very few vegetables, but with all the meat toppings and pasta salads that can fit on the plate. The salad is slathered with blue cheese or ranch dressing.

What’s your choice?

A pattern of fattening choices

Do you eat a pastry or doughnut with you coffee—every single morning? Do you always order the fried chicken wings, the pizza with extra cheese and everything on it, or the triple-size Tex-Mex plate piled high with one of just about everything on the menu (and all smothered in cheese)?

It’s OK to have some fries or ice cream or a fattening dessert on occasion. But these splurges should be saved for sometimes, not part of every meal and snack.

Daily choices can dramatically impact your weight and health, not just when it comes to eating. The fat or lean mindset also applies to how active you are.

Are all your hobbies sedentary—watching movies, playing video games, surfing the Net, watching TV shows for hour after hour? Studies have shown that the more hours spent doing these sorts of activities, the more overweight a person is. So if you’re not active, you naturally will be heavier.

Breaking bad habits is hard to do

It can be tough revamping bad habits. You may know that you drink too many sodas, for example. And you may have opted for diet versions for a while and noticed that you lost weight. But then you fall back into a pattern of drinking mostly sweetened drinks.

A life of no limits dooms you to being overweight, while placing limits on what you eat can help you become lean.

The good news is, you can reach a point where you don’t feel deprived or like you’re denying yourself. You can reach a point where that giant creamy dish at your favorite restaurant makes you a little queasy. You can retrain yourself to stop eating for the wrong reasons and learn to love and even crave healthier foods.

Make the choice to live lean

You may be living the fat life, but you can choose differently if you want to.

I once had a personal training client who was morbidly obese. For every workout session we managed to fit in, she would have cancelled six or seven times. So she was lucky to fit in one workout every three weeks. Yet, she hired a hairdresser to come to her house three mornings per week. She claimed she was too busy to exercise, yet she could prioritize and fit in time for her hair.

You can choose to make exercise and healthful eating a way of life. But you must make it a priority and you must commit to sticking to it no matter what.

The point is, the Lose 10 Pounds in Five Weeks plan is not going to work if you do it for a few short weeks, then revert back to the habits that made you fat in the first place.

So, if you want 2008 to be the year that you finally change your life by dropping some weight, you’ve got to not only want to really make a change, but commit to making lasting changes to your lifestyle.

Retrain your brain

To be successful, you need to retrain your brain. Your body shape is not about following a diet for a few weeks. It’s about rethinking how you eat and why you eat and educating yourself to change your wants and needs. It’s about shifting your attitude so that you make the choices that generally involve less-fattening foods and more active pastimes.

Maybe you love blue cheese dressing. But do you have to smother it so that not one lettuce leaf is visible? Why not drip it on so that 25 percent of the veggies are covered? Or why not go for the low-cal version and still train yourself to get used to using less of it? You can learn to love foods in a whole new (healthier) way!

If you knew that every time you order a soda you are pretty much confirming that you’ll be fat for the rest of your life, would you pause and make another choice? If you’re so addicted to the flavor, is it not worth retraining your taste buds to crave something different? It can be done!

Plan ahead

Instead of stumbling into a new diet and exercise regimen, first take the time to strategize. Wrap your head around what you need to change about your mindset that will help shape your behaviors. Prepare now for potential obstacles to your success.

On the five-week plan, the idea is to be sensible and cut around 500 calories per day from what you already eat and to increase the amount of calories you burn about 500 per day. Depending on your fitness level and the eating changes you will make, you may shift both these numbers up or down. But if you can create a calorie deficit of 500 to 1,000 calories a day through a combination of diet and exercise, you can lose one to two pounds a week. By the end of the five weeks you can lose up to 10 pounds.

But, really, that’s only the beginning. You should use this plan as a launching pad into a healthier lifestyle that you can live forever. So don’t get too focused on how much you’re losing just yet. Besides, remember your prior failures? Does it really matter if you lose weight now, but by March all the heft is back? If you can wise up and choose to revamp a few key bad habits, you’ll keep shedding the pounds all year and for the rest of your life.

Although there are individual differences that make it harder or easier for different people to lose weight—and I’ve written a lot about this in my other columns—the fact is, a person who makes good food choices and who exercises every day is usually lean, or at least not unhealthily overweight.

In this five-week plan, I focus on walking since that form of exercise seems to be the simplest thing for most people to do. But you can use the routine with any cardio machines. For now, you don’t need to worry about doing weight exercises, stretching or any other exercise methods. It’s all about your moving more to burn more calories.

Workouts cushion your slipups. Everyone has an extra helping or sneaks a tempting snack. But that doesn’t mean you’ve failed your diet. As long as you make up for the extra calorie intake by burning extra calories through exercise, you can keep things in check.

Your weight loss is more likely to be permanent if you exercise. So consider these workouts to be a key ingredient in your daily diet.