Balance Baselines and Master Your Maintenance
Setting up a Sustainable System for Successful Healthy Eating
When I have conversations with people about losing weight, I’m sometimes amazed at the lengths they are willing to go to achieve their goals.
· Get up at 5:00 am and walk to the gym in the winter? You got it.
· Prolonged fasts? No problem.
· Eliminate all the carbs from my diet? Easy peasy.
As Imagine Dragons sings it:
Whatever it takes. ‘Cause I love the adrenaline in my veins.
As I would add:
‘Cause that’s what I think it takes.
It changes the flavor of the song a bit, but I’m pretty sure it’d still be a hit.
In the pursuit of any goal, when our fires of passion are stoked and ablaze like a bonfire, nothing seems extreme in the moment. There is no such thing as a sacrifice. It’s part of the game, a small price to pay towards enlightenment. It’s temporary, anyway, so if we feel a bit uncomfortable, who cares? No big deal. Surely, we can manage for a finite period.
Probably like you, I’ve done all sorts of extremes and done so for substantial periods, chasing ghosts, an abstract, undefined goal, doing whatever we think is necessary to get there. In reality, it’s akin to doing barbell back squats while balancing on a bosu ball—objectively stupid.1 It’s not until we’ve fallen and gotten crushed that we look back and think, “Hmmm… that was kind of dumb.”
Being on the other side of it all, I forget about that willingness to be extreme because it’s not at all necessary.
What people often find extreme is the very prospect that maybe something is off with their diets, what I refer to as baseline eating patterns and habits—their maintenance. Even when they know something’s off or less than ideal, what they also may feel is that they lack the requisite extreme willpower to address how they eat. What this really comes down to is facing the possibility that they may need to adjust something in their lifestyle that’s unsettling. As unhealthy as parts of that lifestyle may be, it’s comfortable, and the real prospect of making a change, however slight, is uncomfortable and silently terrifies them. Cue the FOMO.
If you want to change your body and your health, my view, thesis, and entire operational logic is that Job One is to fix your baseline eating. It’s not extreme and doesn’t require anomalous levels of willpower. It’s easier than you might think, but there are some things to consider.
If you make some radical changes to how you eat and live—like excessively working out and almost completely altering your food intake, maybe even eliminating an entire macronutrient—that becomes your new baseline, your new maintenance. If you’re not prepared to live like that forever, then as soon as you stop, what do you revert back to? That’s right, your old baseline, your real maintenance, which means that you’ll slowly return to where you started and where you don’t want to be. And if you’ve felt restricted for a long time, that reversion might not be so slow. You might lean in that direction a little too hard and fast and end up beyond where you even started.
Don’t be preoccupied with losing weight if you haven’t fixed your maintenance. If you do embark on a weight loss plan and have success, if you don’t maintain that lifestyle, whatever it looks like, you’ll return to the starting point, making the entire process all for naught. If you do it again, then you’ll be an official, certified yo-yoer.
We’re not just talking about weight loss here, either. This works both ways. Some folks have twisted their baseline so much that they literally restrict food intake and live below what would be a natural and healthy body weight (done that too). When fixing your baseline, if you’re underweight and intuitively know that something’s off with how you eat, you’re going to have to be accepting of the idea that you may gain a bit of weight.
Okay, fine, Flex-a-Whatever Guy, you say, so how do you start to fix your baseline?
The great thing is that you already know where and how to start, but first, let’s set up some tenents.
Be patient. We’re all in such a hurry to have everything yesterday. You’re asking yourself to change inside and out, cognitively as much as physiologically. You’re gonna want a hot minute to make the transition. We’ve all made trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night. How do you feel in the winter when you suddenly wake up from a nice slumber, stumble out of your warm, comfy bed and step on to the frigid bathroom floor, just to flip that switch and have the light hit your brain? Not too peppy. The greater the change, the more your body and brain will resist it. Give yourself time to adapt and be patient.
Start with small changes. Another way to say this is to go slowly. Don’t try to overhaul your baseline from one hour to the next or from today to tomorrow. Choose one or two areas that you need to improve and focus on them. Once those new patterns are fully incorporated into your baseline, you’re ready to move on to something else.
Maybe you know that you should drink more water, so you might make it a rule that you’ll have a cup at the start of each meal; that’s one of mine and is an easy one to incorporate. Maybe you know that you’ve been indulging in that bowl of candy on the desk at work or in the kitchen. Instead of grabbing three pieces with each drive-by, make it a rule that you’ll only have one—not at each pass but one a day.
Eventually, this might evolve into ignoring it at work and removing it from the kitchen. If, on occasion, you want a piece or two, go for it, but that’s the exception and not the norm.2 If you’ve trained yourself to grab a couple of pieces of candy every time you see some available, that’s exactly what you’ll do in that context, regardless of the setting. If your baseline is such that you ignore the candy more times than not, that’s what you’ll tend to do when you come across some, anytime, anywhere.
Start with small changes and stick to them until they become a part of your process, your routine, your maintenance; wherever you are, these run on autopilot without much effort and almost zero cognition, so set up your system slowly and with small changes that lead into the direction you want to head in. Don’t go cold turkey with anything. It works fine for a few people, but most of us can’t teleport to a new destination and need to cross a bridge to go from one point to another.
No extremes. Extremes are, by their nature, out of balance. They are not meant to be maintained. Nothing should be off your metaphorical or literal menu or off the proverbial table. You do not need to include things you don’t want to, and you do not need to exclude things you want. You do not need to eliminate an entire macronutrient (been there); you do not need to jog for an hour every day (done that). You do not need to do a CrossFit workout outside in the middle of a southwest summer afternoon because you’re getting after it (been there too) and because you’ll not be found with the plebs and their technological comforts of the indoors, like, you know, shade. You can, of course, do any of these if that’s what you want, but you do not need to. On the contrary, doing many such things can interfere with the very results you’re trying to achieve. No extremes, unless it’s deliberate, targeted, finite, and, seriously, for fun, like training for an extreme physical event.
Case study in point: I ate plenty of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches growing up, and then, as an adult, I spent years excluding them—something extreme—because of the holy terrors of bread and sugar, not to mention the indiscriminate bloody violence that peanut butter’s fat content perpetuates.
Ironically, though I was avoiding these god-forsaken-devils, foods I truly enjoyed, I was hitting lifetime PRs on the body weight scale. When I started fixing my own eating baseline, I came to understand the energy content of foods, and the more energy-dense something is, the more attentive we must be to the amount that we eat. Throughout my entire weight loss, I was eating PB&Js every single day. When I was at my lowest, I was still eating them—again, Every. Single. Day. Even now, I have some kind of peanut butter sandwich every day—From my cold, dead hands!—because I enjoy it.
Is a single PB&J unhealthy? Not at all. Am I slathering as much PB and as much J onto the bread as it can hold? Yup—j/k; the answer’s Nope. Could I perhaps eat something a bit more nutritious in its place? Of course. Does it keep me happy and satisfied? You bet.
Fix your baseline eating, your maintenance, first and foremost. This is your home base. This is where you’ll revert to after you have your outliers: single meals out with friends, a couple of days like a string of birthdays or other special events, or the end-of-year holiday period.
I love the song, but as a philosophy, especially regarding weight loss and weight maintenance, drop that Whatever It Takes mindset because it’s not necessary or helpful.
Remember, when starting, be patient, make small changes, and avoid extremes.
Yup. That’s a thing. There are internet vids of people doing it. (Please don’t try it.)
There’s another tenant I’ve slid in here, which we’ll discuss in another post.