Be Your Own Weight Loss Coach: 5 Steps On Setting 'Smart Goals'

Author

And Here’s How It All Started…

Who am I?

The Chinese philosopher Lau Tzu once said The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The fact that you have decided to buy this book shows that you are ready to take your first step towards achieving your fitness and health goals, so for that I say congratulations!I am a certified personal trainer, fitness instructor and life coach, with 17 years of experience, specializing in weight loss, strength training and life coaching.

I have a very unique style where I incorporate life coaching with motivation and goal-setting techniques to help my clients achieve their goals, regardless of where they are in life, their level of experience or their specific goals.

Why should you take my word for it? Why trust me? Who am I to say my way works? What makes this book different than the thousands of other weight loss books? Well, I’ve tried almost every program under the sun during my own weight loss journey, and I have made almost every mistake you can imagine, including some very poor dieting choices, useless supplements that do nothing to help but empty your pocket, lifted with poor form, and spent many useless hours in the gym. My goal here is to make sure that you do not make the mistakes that I made, and that other people continue to make.

I train each client to their own specific strengths and needs, whether it be weight loss, muscle gain, or overall health and wellbeing, or just goal-setting through life coaching.

My goal is to help as many people as I can to reach all of their goals while helping them with a positive mental attitude, which is why I decided to write this book.

I will help you find your own reasons for taking on this journey. I’ll help you find realistic and relevant goals. I will teach you motivational and coaching tools to keep you on your path. Basically, I will be giving you all the knowledge you need to do this without the help of a personal trainer or weight loss coach.

So many trainers and coaches have a single-minded attitude of It’s my way or the highway mentality about training, and it is my goal to help as many people as possible find their own way on this amazing path of fitness, weight loss and overall positive attitude and better quality of life.

I will be talking later in this book in chapter five on why you probably don’t need a personal trainer, and why most personal trainers are just a waste of your time and hard-earned money.

The purpose of this book is different than pretty much any other weight loss or fitness book – my aim is to give you a different outlook on physical fitness, while helping you be your own weight loss coach.

I am not going to bore you with pages upon pages of boring, useless material, while trying to convince you why my way is the best way of exercising.

No two individuals are the same, and not everyone is going to react to a specific exercise program or style the same way, and that is perfectly fine. Yes, I also am a strength training expert, but that doesn’t mean that strength training will be your goal.

By writing this book, I will be giving you the tools to not just lose weight, but to fix the problem internally and emotionally. This is where 95% of other weight loss and fitness books fail. They help you fix the problem externally, but spend very little time fixing the problem internally and emotionally. So I have combined life coaching techniques in my weight loss program, which I will be sharing throughout this book. You will note that certain principles will be repeated throughout this book. This was not done in error; this was done to emphasize crucial points that you need to be aware of to help you on your journey.

I will also be sharing a few stories in certain sections of this book of my own struggles, and how I overcame them (and still continue to do so).

If you don’t fix the issues internally, you are setting yourself up to fail, so I will be combining fitness with life coaching techniques to help you increase your chances of success.

I will also be including exercises throughout this book to help you along the way. All of the exercises in this book will also be available at: www.beyourownweightlosscoach.com as well as some other goodies that you will not find in this book.

My journey

I became a trainer because I initially lost 45-lbs, and wanted to help people to do the same.

I lost the weight because I wound up in the hospital with internal bleeding caused by poor eating and obesity. Ironically enough, I became a trainer and fitness instructor at the same hospital years later. (Funny how life works!)

When I wound up in the hospital, I told my wife that I needed to make a change; that I could not live like this anymore. I felt like a sickly senior citizen.

We wanted to have a child some day, and I knew in my heart that if I continued to go down the path I was on, I might not be around to see my child grow up. That was my first step.

I was happy with this weight loss for a long time, and then my wife got pregnant with our son, so I decided that I wanted to be in even better shape, and lost another 53.5-lbs. If you’re doing the math, yes, that is a 98.5-lb weight loss.

I have the energy now to keep up with my son, who’s a little tornado! We’ve nicknamed him Hurricane Brendan.Unless he’s eating or sleeping, he just never stops!

There is not a doubt in my mind that losing the weight has made me a better father, husband, and person.

I’m happy, healthy and am living a much better quality of life. I will be around to see my son grow up now, which is something I would not have been able to say if we had him while I was still obese.

My hope for you is that you will also be happier, healthier, and have a much better quality of life!

One more quick point that I would like to make here: there were many times that I met with temporary failures and nearly gave up in my weight loss journey.

I learned later that failures in life do not define you; it’s the lessons you learn and how you deal with them that does (more on this in chapter eight).

What does SMART mean?

SMART is an acronym used in the training and coaching industry which means:

Specific

Measurable

Attainable

Realistic

Time (or timely)

There are five sections in this book, all based on my own unique way of using the SMART training style.

Since in this book, I am aiming more towards you being your own coach, I have my own unique way of using SMART, which is broken down quickly here.

In the specific section, we will be covering stress and expectations.

In the measurable section, we will be covering desires and motivation, and your relevant goals and accountability.

In the attainable section, we will be covering negative habits, patterns and limiting beliefs, and rewards and creative consequences.

In the realistic section, we will be covering common myths and mistakes, and creating a program that works for you.

In the time section, we will be covering the myth of time management, and setting time limits that work for you.

Again, I want to congratulate you on taking your first step towards achieving your weight loss goals.

This is a big accomplishment, so be proud!

Gregory

Section One Specific

Chapter One

Be Aware of Your Stressors

We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday’s burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.

– John Newton

What is a stressor?

A stressor is anything that causes any type of stress to any organism, or causes a release of your stress hormones.

This can be both psychological and physical. Anything that causes worry or makes you anxious in any way is a stressor.

Common signs of stress are a tightening in your heart, elevated heart beat, an overwhelmed feeling, feeling of dread, anxiety, fight or flight. If you are experiencing any of these, then you probably are experiencing stress.

If you’re not experiencing any kind of stress in your life, let’s be honest, you’re not truly living!

Stress is human nature, so we need to be aware of it and learn how to deal with it because it’s always going to be a part of our lives. This is especially true in a weight loss journey, which is why I’ve chosen to deal with it in the very first section and chapter of this book.

How to be aware of your stressors

You need to be aware of what causes you stress before you can learn how to deal with it.

One big cause of stress is lack of sleep. This is huge with college and university students, who tend to stay up well past midnight to get that assignment done or finish studying for that big midterm.

This isn’t just limited to students though. How many times have you stayed up late to get a work project done? Or maybe you couldn’t sleep because you were worried about a big presentation or meeting the next morning? We have all dealt with lack of sleep at some point in our lives.

TV right before bed, as well as too much time on our computers, laptops, smart phones, tablets, etc. can all affect sleeping patterns. Another big stressor is too much caffeine. How many of us rely on our morning coffee or tea to get us through the day? I know this used to be an issue with me. Since I became aware of it, I limit my caffeine intake to one or two a day, and only in the morning.

Alcohol is another huge stressor. Alcohol can elevate a hormone in your body called cortisol, which is sometimes referred to the stress hormone. This in turn can interfere with sleep patterns. Even though this is a weight loss book, which means there will be a lot of talk about exercise in this book, exercise is still a top stressor for a lot of people.

Let me be clear: I am not saying that all forms of exercise will cause stress, because this simply isn’t true. Moderate exercise is very necessary for overall health.

The issue with stress in exercise comes from when we OVER do it, which is overtraining.

Too many people spend hours upon hours at the gym, grinding away, pushing themselves far past the point of what their bodies can safely handle. There is a point that overtraining will cause harm, so you need to be aware of this.

There are many other things in our lives that cause stress. The bottom line is: you need to be aware of what your stressors are, so you can in turn deal with them, or avoid them altogether.

What I like to do, and have clients do, is have a running tab of what causes stress.

You can use your smart phone notes app to track stressors, or even a voice recorder. You can use a pen and paper if this works best for you. Even record them in a pocket journal. Just be aware of them.

Be aware and careful of negative patterns

We all have patterns, and you need to be able to enjoy that you do. Why would I enjoy my patterns? Aren’t patterns by nature a bad thing? How could I possibly enjoy them? Because you should enjoy everything you do!

Also, when you finally understand and realize that you do have patterns (we all do), you have the ability to catch yourself doing them, and then you have the option to make a positive change.

Most of us will remember or associate something through our basic senses (touch, smell, taste, sound and sight). This is true with both positive and negative patterns.

Your brain then tries to associate where it fits, and then wants to try and fit it into whatever it was you’ve experienced in the past. This is basic human nature, and we have all experienced this in our lives.

Your brain then finds it, and wants to then know what to expect next because of this experience. When I have experienced something similar in the past, what has happened?

This is why certain things in our lives will trigger a response. For example: you may be trying a new exercise program, but already be experiencing a negative response to it, before you even begin. Why? Because your brain is associating it