PN Certification Program begins Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 — waiting list now open.

If you want to add nutrition to your arsenal and join the ranks of the elite fitness professionals, the Precision Nutrition Certification Program is perfect for you.

Based on over 10 years of research and statistical data from over 8,000 clients, the certification is a comprehensive nutrition coaching course designed specifically to teach professionals working in a personal training or strength coaching environment how to get clients in the best shape of their lives.

We’ve opened the waiting list for the March 2012 program. I strongly recommend you get your name on the list now, because spots are limited and typically sell out within hours each time we run the program.

Click here to join the waiting list.

Perhaps you played the role of the “typical trainer”: You provided nuggets of information, random statistics and boot-camp-style encouragement. The client played the role of “obedient follower”, with stock responses and hyper-active nods.

You both went through the “proper” motions, but had no chemistry and got no lasting results.

Time for a change.

Coaching clients to lasting success depends on saying the right things in the right ways at the right times — and really connecting. In this article, we’ll begin to show you how.

This isn’t a hocus-pocus way of “tricking” your clients into success. (If only it were that easy.) Instead, you collaborate with clients as a partner and a guide, helping them instead of directing or pushing them.

It’s all about change

Can we guarantee that our coaching strategies will always work for you? No. There’s no holy gospel of coaching.

But we’ve reviewed the research on what really works. We’ve consulted the experts who are really getting results. We’ve tried this stuff on ourselves. Most importantly, we’ve helped thousands of men and thousands of women make real, measurable, and lasting change.

We’ll share what we know and how you can benefit.

We’ll cover:

• coaching styles;
• powerful language;
• listening techniques; and
• practical solutions.

Then, we’ll invite you to follow up with our free, five-day video course for fitness professionals.

The payoff: healthier clients who lead healthier lives.

Let’s start by looking at what’s wrong with fitness coaching.

Awfulness Coaching vs. Awesomeness Coaching

Awfulness Coaching

The nutrition and exercise field is full of scary-looking, arms-crossed disciplinarian-type trainers: men and women who look like they’re more ready to punch you in the face than pick you up when you’re down. They’re not really meanies. They’re just mimicking what they see other trainers/coaches doing. They think it’s somehow required. Perhaps without realizing it, they’re doing Awfulness Coaching.

Awfulness Coaching says the client is broken and has to be fixed. It focuses on what’s wrong with the client — and how to purge it. It identifies “flaws” and obsesses over them.

It views good nutrition, movement, and health habits as something people have to be shamed into. It tells people to get into the gym and work off sins. It tells clients that they deserve to feel bad.

An awfulness coach is a drill sergeant and an unrelenting ass-kicker. With all the yelling-in-the-face and booting-in-the-butt, clients don’t know what direction to run in. They just know they need to get away.

Fear motivates us… but only briefly. Extreme approaches and drill-sergeant-style coaching can produce the most impressive results short-term, but almost never work over the long term.

Something deep inside human beings resists being pressured into new decisions. Coach Hardass may try to use coercion. But along the way, s/he’ll destroy the change process for clients. And no evidence shows that feeling bad creates lasting behaviour changes.

Awesomeness Coaching

Awesomeness Coaching, on the other hand, finds the awesomeness within the client.

We help the client find what’s fun and joyful in their life, and chase it. We view nutritious eating, movement, and health habits as a path to living life with purpose. We talk to clients about getting outside to play. About feeling good in their bodies, not ashamed or exhausted.

An awesomeness-based coach is a guide on the road to total wellness. While clients may be hesitant, we can grab their hand and offer to go in with them rather than shoving them forward alone.

Do you want your clients scared of you? Or do you want your clients to feel like working with you is a celebration of health and fitness while they love every minute of it?

Client-centred coaching

As a coach, you have considerable expertise. But your clients are the experts on their own bodies and lives. They live in their bodies and experiences 24-7. You don’t.

Clients have their own abilities and reasons for change. Your job is to find and develop these. When a client can identify their own limiting factors and then — more excitingly — propose their own solutions, we have a recipe for sustainable, long-term behaviour change.

Another bonus: we tend to believe what we hear ourselves say. If a client generates and describes a solution, they’ll likely embrace it. (More on language in a sec.)

Remember, it’s about making decisions based on what really works best for the client, not based on what you think should work best for them. This is client-centred, rather than coach-centred, coaching.

Language is powerful

You can help clients examine their behaviours and work towards their goals with the following kinds of questions.

Explore

Ask open-ended questions that explore options, values, and possible outcomes, without judgement.

• “What things are most important to you? How does your exercise and eating fit into this?”
• “What sorts of things would you like to accomplish in your life?”
• “What would you like to see change?”
• “If things were better with your eating/exercise, what would be different?”
• “What have you already tried? What worked/didn’t work?”

Imagine

Help clients visualize a new way of living by using their creative imaginations (just like in kindergarten).

• “Imagine you can…”
• “Imagine you are already…”
• “Imagine that you have the body and health you desire. What did it take for you to achieve it?”

Breed success

Be solution-focused and emphasize that often, clients have already succeeded. All you need to do is help them expand the awesome.

• “In the past, when were you successful with this, even just a little bit?”
• “How could we do more of that?”

Sense into problems

Share your observations and intuitions. This is non-confrontational, and helps to make sure you and the client are on the same page with the immediate issue.

• “I get the sense that…”
• “It seems to me like…”

Speculate

Open-ended, speculative statements can get clients thinking and responding to possible choices. These aren’t exactly questions, but act like them.

• “I wonder what it would be like if you…”
• “I wonder if we could try…”

Evoke change talk

Get the client talking about change on their own terms. Examples include:

• “In what ways does this concern you?”
• “If you decided to make a change, what makes you think you could do it?”
• “How would you like things to be different?”
• “How would things be better if you changed?”
• “What concerns you now about your current exercise and eating patterns?”

Assess readiness

Establish how confident and ready a client is to make a change. No readiness means no change — no matter how great a coach you are.

Once clients identify a behaviour they want to change, follow up with this kind of question:

“If you decided to change, on a scale of 1-10, how confident are you that you could change, when 1 represents not at all confident and 10 equals extremely confident?”

If they respond with a 9 or 10, great. If they respond with a lower number, ask them how they can make the selected behaviour less overwhelming.

We like to use the “Coach Roland Rule,” named for our Precision Nutrition colleague Roland Fisher:

“If you suck at something, cut it in half.”

In other words, keep dividing a large problem or challenge into small, manageable steps until you can handle it.

Plan next steps

Instead of directing a client forward, have them generate their own solutions. Examples:

• “So, given all this, what do you think you will do next?”
• “What’s next for you?”
• “If nothing changes, what do you see happening in five years? If you decide to change, what will it be like?”
• “How would you like things to be different?”

Give advice… carefully

Find out if clients want your advice. Some will, some won’t. If you do give advice, keep it general and experiential. For example:

• “In my work with clients like yourself, I’ve found that…”

Bringing it all together: Change scenarios

Now that you have some ideas for powerful coaching language to use, let’s apply them in some specific scenarios to move the change process forward.

Scenario 1: Change Talk Wedge

1. Validate and affirm the opposite of what they should be doing.

Yeah, we know it sounds weird. But you might say something like “Wow, it really sounds like you have a lot on your plate. I can see how it’s tough to schedule gym time.” Or: “I know it can be hard to resist those home-made brownies.”

(Be sincere here. Genuinely empathize, if you can. Sarcasm usually backfires and creates hostility.)

2. Wait.

After validating and affirming the opposite, be quiet. Don’t be afraid to open up the space and let them fall into it. No rush. Be patient, empathetic, and attentive.

3. Listen for “change talk”.

It won’t always come, but many times clients will argue for changing their behaviours. Client: “Yeah, I know I do have a lot going on. But I really should do XYZ. I know I would feel better.” Or: “Honestly, I don’t think I really need three brownies. I’d probably be happy with just one.”

4. Drive the wedge in to that “change talk” opening.

Using their language, reflect and imply (but don’t push) a next action. Focus on concrete to-dos. You: “It sounds like you think you’d feel better if you did XYZ?” Or: “It sounds like maybe 1 brownie would be enough for you?”

5. Wait again.

Listen for further change talk.

6. Repeat as needed.

Keep wiggling the “change wedge” in further and further, slowly. Go at their speed.

Scenario 2: Continuum

Use after listening for change talk. Be sure you understand the situation first.

Have clients imagine a spectrum or continuum of behaviours from worse to better. Then:

1. Help them move a “notch”.

Highlight the benefits of doing so. Coach: “OK, so it sounds like you want to do X but going all the way to Y feels like too much. The good news is that you don’t have to do that all right away! What a relief, eh? What could you do that would be X+1?”

1a. Scale back as needed.

Coach: “X+2 is awesome — we’ll get to that. But what about X+1 instead? That seems even more manageable.”

2. Follow up with strategy for immediate execution.

Coach: “X+1 sounds like a great idea! How are you going to make that happen today? And how can I help?”

3. Once action is assigned, book follow up.

Coach: “OK, mark this on your calendar — I’d like to hear from you tomorrow/by Friday, to tell me how you did with X+1.”

Scenario 3: Crazy Questions

You can also ask some questions that your clients might not expect.

1. Listen, validate, affirm.

Preface with “I know this is wacky but…” Coach: “It sounds like [reiterate what they just said about their understanding of the problem]. OK, I’m going to ask you two crazy questions, and I know this is going to sound really weird, but just humour me…”

2. Ask your questions.

• What is GOOD about X behaviour [where X behaviour is the problem behaviour we want to change]?
• What is BAD about changing? What would you lose or give up if you got rid of X?”

3. Normalize and empathize.

You can begin by normalizing and empathizing with the unwanted behaviour first, using the seemingly weird technique of first arguing (slightly) in favour _of _ changing.

Coach: “Wow, yeah, it sounds like there’s lots going on there for you. I think we’d all want a few cookies in that situation!” Client: “Yeah, but I really should find a better way to deal with this…”

Hey lookee here! They proposed change, not the coach!

4. Allow space/time to grieve the loss of the status quo.

Coach: “Well, tell you what. There’s no rush to do this. When you’re ready, why don’t you try…”

• …moving one “notch” along the continuum?
• …doing the behaviour you proposed?
• …thinking about how you could more effectively live the values you describe?

5. But don’t let them off the hook.

Follow up in a few days as needed.

Scenario 4: Choose Your Own Adventure

1. Affirm, validate, “hear”, normalize.

Coach: “Yes, I hear you and understand what you’re thinking/feeling/experiencing, and it’s quite normal. Lots of people go through this.”

2. Ask leading, rhetorical questions.

This isn’t a dialogue invitation; it’s a “tell yourself what to do” question.

Coach: “It sounds like you already have a good sense of what some of the key issues are. Knowing this, if you were the coach, what would you recommend?”

In other words: How would you, the client, solve your own problem?

3. Rank confidence.

After they’ve proposed a solution, have the client rank their own confidence in doing the solution.

4. Affirm and book follow up.

Tell them you think they’ve come up with a good solution and then ask them to check back in a few days to share their success.

Next step: free, five-day video course

There’s a lot more to being a great fitness coach than counting reps, intervals, and weights. Without diet change, exercise coaching alone yields as little as half a pound of true fat loss per month.

That’s not good.

Adding nutrition coaching to your practice will triple your effectiveness — at least.

That’s why our coaching team created a free, five-day video course for fitness professionals. Click this link to sign up for the free course:

• http://www.precisionnutrition.com/course-for-fitness-professionals

The good news: if you can influence your client to change their nutrition while also coaching them at the gym, pool, or track, you’ll get exponentially better results.

That means that if — like 90% of all clients — your client is looking for fat loss, they can expect to lose 3-5 times more fat if you help them make changes to their diet, and support them in making these changes.

Yes! Three to five times more effective as a fitness professional, just by helping your clients to change their nutrition habits!

If you can spare 12 minutes a day for the next five days for our free video course the course will teach you:

• How to integrate nutrition coaching in a personal training or strength
 coaching environment
• How to assess a new client
• How to devise a nutrition plan based on that assessment
• What stats to measure and how
• How to optimize a nutrition plan based on those stats

And we don’t just talk about this stuff. We show you how to do it. In fact, we even give you all the forms and resources you need to go and do it right away.

This course will make you a better professional.  Budget about 12 minutes to watch each video and additional time to download and look through all the resources. Keep the emails, and you’ll be able to refer back to the course whenever you like.

Happy — and effective — coaching.

About us

Thanks for reading this far. You’re probably wondering who we are and how we know all this stuff.

Ryan Andrews, MS, RD, CSCS

Ryan is a world-leading educator in the fields of exercise science and nutrition.

He completed his education in exercise and nutrition at the University of Northern Colorado, Kent State University, and Johns Hopkins Medicine. Apart from having earned nearly every accreditation available (Registered Dietician, Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist, two Masters degrees, and more), Ryan was a nationally ranked competitive bodybuilder from 1996-2001.

Ryan is an expert coach who has trained and worked at the Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center, one of the most recognized and awarded research institutions in the world. He currently works as part of the Precision Nutrition team. He played a large role in helping develop the Precision Nutrition Lean Eating Coaching Program, and has personally coached five cohorts of Lean Eating clients.

Krista Scott-Dixon, PhD

A former university researcher and teacher in the field of gender, work, and public health, Dr. Scott-Dixon now serves as the research director for the Healthy Food Bank foundation and the editor-in-chief of Spezzatino magazine – the food magazine that really feeds people.

Passionate about women’s fitness since her own body transformation in the mid-1990s, Dr. Scott-Dixon has run the extremely popular women’s weight training and nutrition site Stumptuous.com since 1997.

Dr. Scott-Dixon is an expert coach and specialist in adult education. She currently works as part of the Precision Nutrition team. She’s the curriculum designer for both the men’s and women’s Lean Eating Coaching Program, and has personally coached three cohorts of Lean Eating Clients.

Both Ryan and Krista have collaborated with Dr. John Berardi to develop Precision Nutrition’s coaching and certification programs. And through these programs, Precision Nutrition coaches thousands of clients each year, helping them to change their deepest behaviour patterns and their bodies, using the very techniques discussed in this article.

More About Precision Nutrition

Precision Nutrition is life-changing, research-driven nutrition coaching for everyone. We translate science into real results for real people, and we collect more nutrition coaching data than anyone in the world.

Precision Nutrition also certifies fitness professionals and trainers worldwide through its Essentials of Sport and Exercise Nutrition textbook and online course so they can help their clients lose fat and live healthier, more satisfying lives.

Sources

Much of the content in this article has been gathered over years of reading, learning, discussing and practicing. Some of the books we drew on for this article include:

Ian Ayres, Carrots and Sticks: Unlock the Power of Incentives to Get Things Done.

Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

Martin Grunberg, The Habit Factor.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness.

William R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick, Motivational Interviewing: Preparing People for Change.

Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin, The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World’s Toughest Problems.

Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, and Ron McMillan, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything.

Kathryn Shultz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.

PN Certification Program begins Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 — waiting list now open.

If you want to add real nutrition coaching to your arsenal and join the ranks of the elite fitness professionals, the Precision Nutrition Certification Program is perfect for you.

Based on over 10 years of research and statistical data from over 8,000 clients, the certification is a comprehensive nutrition coaching course designed specifically to teach professionals working in a personal training or strength coaching environment how to get clients in the best shape of their lives.

We’ve opened the waiting list for the March 2012 program. I strongly recommend you get your name on the list now because spots are limited and typically sell out within hours each time we run the program.

Click here to join the waiting list.

Of course, each time we open the program to new clients, we get tons of questions about how it works, what we teach, what to expect, how to prepare — and especially this one:

“Is it right for me?”

We take great care in personally answering every question we get about the PN Cert program. So this time, we’ve done something really cool.

We’ve created a new forum where you can ask us ANY question about the program and get a detailed answer — and about 90% of them — I answer myself.

How to ask a question:

If you already have a precisionnutrition.com account, just go to the Interested in the PN Cert? Ask Questions Here forum and ask away.

If you don’t, you can create an account for free.

Or you can just browse around and see what questions other people are asking — that’s okay with us too.

We’re here to answer any questions you may have — just as we are for our clients in the PN Cert program. Drop in, post a note about yourself and what you’re looking for, and we’ll give you personal feedback about the program and whether it fits your specific needs.

See you on the forums.

Click here to join the waiting list.

To be a life-changing fitness pro, you need to take responsibility for both the advice you offer, and your client’s ability to follow that advice. Yes, even those “difficult clients.” The ones other fitness professionals tell you to fire.

Here at Precision Nutrition, we don’t fire our clients. We take a completely different approach.

In this 4 part video series – filmed live at the 2011 Perform Better Summit in Long Beach, California – we’ll share that approach with you. And, by the end of the series, you’ll be better equipped to get unbelievable results with every type of client you work with. Even the challenging ones.

For now, simply click the play button below to get started with Part 4 of The Compliance Solution. (Click here for part 1, part 2, and part 3).  The video is about 15 minutes in length.

Earlier in this video series we presented two lessons to help you better apply the principles of change psychology. Those lessons?

• #1: Coach to both sides of the brain.
• #2: Introduce only one new habit at a time.

In today’s lesson I’d like to extend the last idea by giving you an overview of the first 6 months of habits and practices we introduce in our Lean Eating Coaching Program.

(Each habit is introduced two weeks after the last).

You’ll notice that early in the program (the upper left column) we begin with one simple habit that always yields high compliance: take fish oil and a multivitamin (in specific doses).

Why this habit first? Well, not only is it fairly easy to follow – building up a positive momentum – it also helps correct common nutrient deficiencies, boosts motivation centers in the brain, and kick-starts the metabolism. Not bad for a first habit!

After that, we introduce eating slowly and stopping meals at satisfaction (80%) rather than fullness (100%). These simple – but not easy – practices help people better tune into hunger and appetite cues (“right brain” activity). And they eliminate the need for calorie counting and nutritional math (“left brain” activity).

In essence, they’re calorie control strategies that don’t involve calorie counting.  Awesome.

From there we work on food type, timing, and a host of other practices.   Each habit building on the last, a progression that’s designed to produce long-term, sustainable results for our coaching clients.

Of course, the example habits, as they’re presented above, are a little vague.  And that’s why each 2-week habit is accompanied by daily lessons and assignments that better clarify the habit, making each crystal clear and measurable.  This way it’s easy to know whether you followed it or not.

But remember, these habits are just suggestions.

We still have to assess client confidence by asking: “On a scale of 0-10, how confident are you that you can do this habit every day for the next 2 weeks?” If confidence is below 9 or 10 out of 10, we make the habit smaller until the client is positive they can do it.

Confidence is everything.

Lesson #3: Speak To Clients In A Way That Supports Change

Language is more powerful than most people realize. And, in the change process, the language you use with clients can either support, or stand in the way of, their ability to succeed.

One big insight I pulled from the book Motivational Interviewing (the books Crucial Conversations and Influence also touch upon this) is the fact that even with the best of intentions – even while deeply caring about client results – if you choose the wrong words, or argue too strongly for change, you could be making them less likely to do so.

That’s right, your coaching could be doing the opposite of what you think. You could be throwing up walls rather than breaking them down.

Here’s an example: when telling clients that their lifestyle choices (nutrition, exercise, etc) are wrong – no matter how nicely you do it – your clients will feel threatened. The primal, pre-rational consequence of that? They end up defending their habits to explain why they made the choices they did.

This sets up a situation where you (as the coach) are arguing for change; while your client is arguing against change. How do you think that’ll turn out?

When going down this path, most times you’ll end up getting stonewalled.  And the client will be less likely to make any changes at all. Not good.

Another example: most experts and fitness professionals speak to clients like authoritarian dictators: “I want you to do this!” “Don’t do that!” “If you want results, you have to do more, work harder, make sacrifices.”

This is a problem because humans – again, on the pre-rational level – don’t respond well to real or even perceived threats to their freedom.  So, the more you press forward and demand, the less likely they are to respond positively.

In the end, here’s a quick takeaway strategy.  From now on, instead of telling clients what to do, try asking.  See if they feel confident that they can do what you’re asking.  And then find out if they even want to do it in the first place.

Again, the books Motivational Interviewing, Crucial Conversations, and Influence are all great resources for further reading on this subject.  I highly encourage checking them out if you want to understand more about change talk.

Lesson #4: Take 100% Responsibility for Compliance and Results

When I look around the fitness industry I see a lot of really talented trainers spending countless hours learning the latest exercise and nutrition strategies.  And I love it.  These are the professionals that do everything in their power to give top notch advice.

However, these folks are missing a tremendous coaching opportunity if they assume that it’s the trainer’s role to give good advice.  And the client’s role to follow that advice.

For my part, I’d argue that fitness professionals are responsible for both.  For giving good advice and for helping clients follow that advice.

No more assuming that if clients aren’t complying it’s their fault. Instead, it’s important to realize that if clients are struggling with compliance, there may be something that you, their coach, can do about it.

Sure, we need to be experts in nutrition, exercise, and the other “left-brained” aspects of physique transformation. But it’s just as important to take ownership of their compliance as well.

Now, this isn’t easy at first. You’ll start seeing a host of new problems that you’re not used to having to solve. And you won’t know what to do.  However, with practice, you’ll get better.  And your love of coaching will skyrocket. Every new client struggle becomes a new challenge for you as a coach.

In addition, your cynicism will diminish.  You’ll see opportunities for success everywhere you look. Instead of condescending attitudes like “some clients do the work, and others just don’t” you’ll have a more positive view of each client’s struggle and their ability to succeed.

Of course, this last lesson isn’t really a strategy or tactic. It’s a choice; one you can make right now. You can choose to continue taking responsibility only for client results, leaving the compliance up to them. Or you can choose to start taking 100% responsibility for both.

What’s Next?

That’s it for Part 4 of The Compliance Solution. We hope you got a lot out of the video series and are walking away with a host of new strategies for becoming a life-changing, research-driven fitness professional.

But here’s the big question: what to do with all this new info?

After all, the thought of shifting the focus away from an exclusive nutrition and exercise focus towards a change psychology focus can be intimidating for fitness pros, especially given the popular industry trend that we should all “fire” our difficult or non-compliant clients.

Yet that intimidation is just your own “elephant” talking: changing how we coach is scary, especially if we’ve been at this a while and consider ourselves “set in our ways.”

So the first step is to take an objective look at your practice and the results you’re achieving with all your clients, especially the “tough ones.” You’ll likely find a huge opportunity for you to get better as a coach, and for all your clients to get awesome results.

And if you’d like to explore this subject a little deeper, I strongly recommend taking the Precision Nutrition Certification course.

The first half is largely nutrition biochemistry and exercise physiology (everything you’d expect from a nutrition certification), which will satisfy your left-brained “rider.”

The second half, however, is dedicated to change psychology and “shaping the path” as it’s full of practical tips and habits for putting that knowledge into practice.

Remember, change doesn’t have to scary, and getting awesome results with your toughest clients doesn’t have to be an impossibility. It can be simple and fun, as long as you account for the elephant, the rider, and the path.

PN Certification Program begins Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 — waiting list now open.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to deliver life-changing, research-driven nutrition coaching – so that you can help each and every type of client that comes to you for advice – the PN Certification program is perfect for you.

Based on over 10 years of research and statistical data from over 8,000 clients, the certification is a comprehensive nutrition coaching course designed specifically to teach professionals working in a personal training or strength coaching environment how to get clients in the best shape of their lives.

We’ve opened the waiting list for the March 2012 program. I strongly recommend you get your name on the list now because spots are limited and typically sell out within hours each time we run the program.

Click here to join the waiting list.

To be a life-changing fitness pro, you need to take responsibility for both the advice you offer, and your client’s ability to follow that advice. Yes, even those “difficult clients.” The ones other fitness professionals tell you to fire.

Here at Precision Nutrition, we don’t fire our clients. We take a completely different approach.

In this 4 part video series – filmed live at the 2011 Perform Better Summit in Long Beach, California – we’ll share that approach with you. And, by the end of the series, you’ll be better equipped to get unbelievable results with every type of client you work with. Even the challenging ones.

For now, simply click the play button below to get started with Part 3 of The Compliance Solution.  (Click here for part 1 and part 2).  The video is about 15 minutes in length.

In part 2 of this video series we presented the first of four lessons to help you better apply the principles of change psychology. That lesson? Coach to both sides of the brain.

Today we’ll discuss the next lesson…

Lesson #2: Only One New Habit At A Time

Arguably the most important principle of change psychology is this one: only give clients one new habit at a time.

One of my favorite books, The Power of Less is based on the philosophy of accomplishing more by doing less. And, in the book, author Leo Babauta shares with us these interesting data:

• Adopting one new habit at a time – 85% chance of success
• Adopting two new habits at once – 35% chance of success
• Adopting three or more new habits at once – less than 10% chance of success

Now think of how many habits are required when we tell clients to “eat right and exercise regularly?” Grocery shopping, cooking, joining a gym, learning new exercises, drinking more water, getting to bed earlier…it’s literally hundreds of new habits!

Sure, the type-A clients – the ones fitness professionals often pray for – can handle all those new habits, at least for a little while. But here’s the thing: those driven, type-A people are rare. Plus, let’s face it, they’ll get in shape anyway – with or without our help.

So let’s quit praying for the type-A clients who rarely need our help anyway. And let’s start learning how to help everyone else. These are the clients that need us the most. These are the clients whose transformations are the most meaningful and hard-won.

And the way to help these clients is to focus on one habit at a time.

However, just limiting your advice to one habit isn’t enough. The habits you recommend must be small and manageable.

Here’s an example from my life. When I decided to learn to play the guitar, I told myself that I had to play just five minutes a day, when I was putting my daughter down for the night (she loves music).

Five minutes isn’t a lot of time, yet by making it easy on myself, I found that there were nights when I’d play for an hour, even two. But had I promised to play an hour a day every day, I never would’ve even started.

Our clients do the same thing with all the information we give them. They get overwhelmed and think “well, I can’t go to the gym, so I might as well do nothing” when 50 air-squats and some stretching would’ve been acceptable.

In addition to small and manageable, habits should be clearly defined and easy to measure. Again, when I was learning guitar, my goal wasn’t to play a little bit every day but to “play five minutes every day.”

So while “eat more veggies” is good advice, “eat two servings of veggies a day” is far better. While “exercise daily” is good advice, “do 15 minutes of exercise a day” is a superior approach.

Another important key is to assess confidence. Rather than just giving your client a habit to do, what if you asked them whether they felt like they could actually follow your advice?

If the goal is to eat more veggies, you might ask, “On a scale of 0-10, how confident are you that you can eat two servings of veggies a day?”

If the answer is 9, we know we’re on the right track. If it’s 2 or 3, then we scale our recommendations back until the client is more comfortable and can answer 9 or 10 out of 10.

Sure, sometimes you’ll have to scale it back until the habit seems ridiculously small – to you. However, this isn’t about you. It’s about your client and what they can manage in their life at the present time.

Even if the small habit won’t change everything starting today, at the very minimum, it builds momentum and gives us something to build on in our coaching relationship.

After all, we teach complicated exercises like the squat or snatch by breaking them up into smaller chunks, right? It’s called a progression. Well, it’s important to do the same with nutrition.

Wrap-Up and Today’s Takeaways

That’s it for Part 3 of The Compliance Solution. In just a few days we’ll be back with Part 4, the final video of the series.

[Note: Part 4 is the one video you won't want to miss.  In it I outline the first 6 months of habits and practices we teach in the Lean Eating Coaching Program].

In the meantime, here are three important takeaway messages for you to think about.

• Giving clients one new habit a time is far more successful than trying to give them complicated systems to apply and multiple habits to perform.

• However, limiting your advice to one new habit isn’t enough. Each habit should be small enough to be done everyday. And clear enough that your client knows whether he or she was successful.

• In addition, each habit should be small and elicit high confidence from a client. If they can’t answer 9 or 10 out of 10 on the confidence scale, start smaller and build as confidence grows.

PN Certification Program begins Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 — waiting list now open.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to deliver life-changing, research-driven nutrition coaching – so that you can help each and every type of client that comes to you for advice – the PN Certification program is perfect for you.

Based on over 10 years of research and statistical data from over 8,000 clients, the certification is a comprehensive nutrition coaching course designed specifically to teach professionals working in a personal training or strength coaching environment how to get clients in the best shape of their lives.

We’ve opened the waiting list for the March 2012 program. I strongly recommend you get your name on the list now because spots are limited and typically sell out within hours each time we run the program.

Click here to join the waiting list.

To be a life-changing fitness pro, you need to take responsibility for both the advice you offer, and your client’s ability to follow that advice. Yes, even those “difficult clients.” The ones other fitness professionals tell you to fire.

Here at Precision Nutrition, we don’t fire our clients. We take a completely different approach.

In this 4 part video series – filmed live at the 2011 Perform Better Summit in Long Beach, California – we’ll share that approach with you. And, by the end of the series, you’ll be better equipped to get unbelievable results with every type of client you work with. Even the challenging ones.

For now, simply click the play button below to get started with Part 2 of The Compliance Solution.  (Click here for part 1).  The video is about 15 minutes in length.

For the past four years now, Precision Nutrition has coached over 8,000 clients to lose over 150,000 pounds of fat. Weight is lost, behaviors are slowly modified, and lives are changed for the better.

The really cool thing is, our coaches rarely meet clients in person — all coaching is done online.

Now these results wouldn’t have been possible without understanding the power of change psychology, specifically helping clients modify their daily practices and get past common stumbling blocks.  Indeed, it’s only when we switched from an exercise and nutrition focus to a change focus that we saw a huge leap forward in our success rate.

Of course, our data support this approach.  Compared to our earlier example – where only 55% of patients are compliant with their life-saving medications – our coaching system yields, on average, over 70% compliance.

In other words, for every 10 workouts or nutrition habits prescribed, our clients do about 7 of them.

That’s a pretty awesome accomplishment considering that people take their prescription medications only 5 out of 10 times. Plus, we’re asking a lot more of them than to swallow some magic pill.

The question, however, is this: how do we get these kinds of results? Well, there are four key lessons I’d like to share with you over the course of the next few videos.

First up…

Lesson #1: Coach To Both Sides of the Brain

You may have heard that the brain can be split up into two sides: a left side (or hemisphere) and a right side (or hemisphere). You may have also learned that everyone is dominant in one side or the other. While things are a bit more complicated than that, we can use this as an interesting model for coaching change.

According to the hemispheric model…the left brain is the logical side and it’s responsible for:

• Logic and analytical thinking
• Rationality and reason
• Forming strategies and creating structure

On the other side is the right brain, and it’s responsible for:

• Intuition and emotion
• Holistic thinking and pattern recognition
• Creating art, beauty, and using imagination

Unfortunately, most of us spend all our time appealing to the left side. We talk sets and reps, calorie expenditure, disease risk rates, macronutrients, target heart rate, and nutrient timing.

It’s a lot like math. And when clients fail to understand and appreciate a subject we think is especially important, we give them an equally left-brained handout or website to read.

The problem? Most of our decision making (whether we like it or not) is more right-brained than left. So, by appealing to reason alone, we get the classic situation where clients think they know exactly what to do. But they simply feel like they can’t do it.

The solution? Start speaking to their right brain.

In the great book Switch, authors Chip and Dan Heath use the metaphor of a rider with a whip, steering an elephant.

• The elephant is the emotional brain.
• The rider with the whip is the logical brain.
• The path they’re walking is the environment.

As with any new change scenario, the elephant (emotional brain) may be scared, especially when it perceives the change to be difficult or uncomfortable. And fear brings resistance.

Of course, the rider (logical brain) has the reigns and a whip. So he can steer, prod, and lash that frightened elephant. However, that never lasts long. The rider always gets tired and, after that, the elephant goes where it wants.

Here’s the point: the rational brain can only control the emotional brain for so long, and that’s exhausting to do. As a coach, it’s far more effective to get the elephant and the rider on the same page by minimizing fear.

In addition, the Heath brothers introduce another concept called “shaping the path.” In essence, it means helping clear away of temptations and roadblocks before they become an issue. It means helping make daily practices automatic so that they’re habitual and don’t use up our precious willpower reserves.

Here are just a few examples of strategies for shaping the path:

• To stay committed to a morning workout, lay out your workout clothes the night before.
• To avoid food temptations, get rid of the cookie jar and candy bowls around the office.
• To avoid skipping workouts, pay for training sessions in advance.

There are hundreds of other examples we could use here but the point is this: most fitness professionals have spent their careers focusing exclusively on their own left-brained learning.  And while their heads are full of interesting physiology, biochemistry, and mathematics, they’re poorly equipped when it comes to helping real people make meaningful change.

To overcome this problem, it’s essential to spend some time doing some right-brained work.  As a professional, this time spent will mean a huge leap forward in client results.

Wrap-Up and Today’s Takeaways

That’s it for Part 2 of The Compliance Solution. In just a few days we’ll be back with Part 3 of the video series, and a few additional lessons.

In the meantime, here are four important takeaway messages for you to think about.

• Switching from a focus on exercise physiology alone to a balanced focus on physiology and change psychology is an important first step to getting remarkable client results.

• As a coach, you must focus on both sides of the brain. Taking a strictly rational/logical approach to behavior change will create clients who think they know what to do. But feel like they can’t do it.

• By working with deep motivation and recognizing the role of the emotional brain in decision-making we can prevent rider fatigue and better facilitate change.

• We can also go one step further by helping clients shape the path to health and fitness.

PN Certification Program begins Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 — waiting list now open.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to deliver life-changing, research-driven nutrition coaching – so that you can help each and every type of client that comes to you for advice – the PN Certification program is perfect for you.

Based on over 10 years of research and statistical data from over 8,000 clients, the certification is a comprehensive nutrition coaching course designed specifically to teach professionals working in a personal training or strength coaching environment how to get clients in the best shape of their lives.

We’ve opened the waiting list for the March 2012 program. I strongly recommend you get your name on the list now because spots are limited and typically sell out within hours each time we run the program.

Click here to join the waiting list.

To be a life-changing fitness pro, you need to take responsibility for both the advice you offer, and your client’s ability to follow that advice.  Yes, even those “difficult clients.” The ones other fitness professionals tell you to fire.

Here at Precision Nutrition, we don’t fire our clients.  We take a completely different approach.

In this 4 part video series – filmed live at the 2011 Perform Better Summit in Long Beach, California – we’ll share that approach with you.  And, by the end of the series, you’ll be better equipped to get unbelievable results with every type of client you work with.  Even the challenging ones.

For now, simply click the play button below to get started with Part 1 of The Compliance Solution.  The video is about 15 minutes in length.

Problem clients…it’s okay to admit it, we all have them.

Some appear to be “great clients” at first. They show up for all their training appointments. They listen attentively when we talk about nutrition and lifestyle. Some even memorize shopping lists, calorie counts, and meal plans.

Despite all this, they sometimes get poor results.

So we push them harder during the workouts, give them less food, add more cardio, and cycle their calories. But, as the weeks turn into months, nothing changes.

The client is frustrated, we’re frustrated, and left with only one logical explanation: they’re lying. They can’t possibly be doing what we recommend.

Other clients never even get that far.

While they’re present for all training appointments, they won’t even pretend to care about nutrition and lifestyle change. Indeed, when it’s time to talk their diet and their daily practices: They. Just. Never. Listen.

We’re Not Just Educators; We’re Coaches

When faced with difficult clients, many of us throw up our hands. “It’s not our fault!” we exclaim. We can only provide the education. It’s our client’s job to do the rest. Right?

Well, not exactly.

Over the past 10 years, the Precision Nutrition team has coached thousands of people in what many people consider to be the World’s Largest Body Transformation Program. We’ve helped them lose fat, get healthy, and change their lives.  The results have been incredible. To date, over 150,000 pounds have been lost and thousands of lives changed.

We’ve also spent a tremendous amount of time learning subjects that traditionally go beyond the boundaries of exercise and nutrition; including coaching theory, change psychology, and neuroscience.

And, after working with all these people, charting their progress and behavior changes, and applying the latest exercise, nutrition, and coaching strategies — only one conclusion can be drawn. Helping clients change, using the best practices of change psychology, is the only way to have long-term success in this field.

In other words, helping clients take the next positive step in their lives — and knowing what steps are right for them — is the key to becoming a life-changing fitness professional.

Compliance and The Medical Field

Make no mistake, coaching people through their struggles with compliance isn’t always easy. However, it’s not a challenge reserved for fitness pros.

I was shocked when I first learned that doctors report embarrassingly low compliance rates when prescribing life-saving heart disease, diabetes, and cancer medications. In fact, the latest data suggest that patients take these medications only half the time.

Scary, for sure.  Also a little intimidating since, as fitness pros, we’re asking our clients to do much more than swallow a magic pill. Exercise, nutrition, and lifestyle changes; they’re a bit more involved.

What’s Your Success Rate?

Keeping compliance issues in mind, typically, if a trainer has 20 clients in their roster, their client breakdown looks something like this:

• 1 client experiences jaw-dropping results
• 9 clients experience decent results, but could be better
• 6 clients experience poor results
• 5 clients drop out

It’s a little disturbing.  And I should know, I’ve been there.

I began my career as a trainer and I can tell you that I struggled through the same challenges.  I wondered: why are more than half my clients getting poor results or dropping out?  And why are so few of my clients achieving jaw-dropping transformations?

At the time, my solution was to learn more.  So off to grad school I went.

What I Didn’t Learn In Grad School

After a few years in the field, I decided to go back to graduate school.  I figured I needed to learn more about exercise and nutrition so I could help my clients achieve those jaw-dropping transformations they were all after.

Five years later, after spending a ridiculous amount of time and money earning a PhD in exercise and nutritional science, I was a little disappointed. While I wouldn’t trade my grad school experiences for the world, when I got back out into the field I wasn’t much further along.

I learned that it wasn’t the high level physiology stuff that was tripping my clients up.  Instead, it was the simple habits and practices built into their daily lives.  Unfortunately I hadn’t learned anything about helping clients with those.

In other words, I can tell you something with authority: what’s missing from your programs isn’t a mystery nutrient or exercise protocol.  What’s missing is something called change psychology.

For me, when I realized this, I completely reworked our coaching approach here at Precision Nutrition. And the more we learned about change psychology, the better the results our clients achieved.

Learning The Basics of Change Psychology

If you’re interested in learning more about this dynamic field, the best way to get acquainted is to read a few excellent, and landmark, books:

• The Power of Less by Leo Babauta
• Influence by Robert Cialdini
• Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson and colleagues
• Switch by Chip and Dan Heath
• The Blackmail Diet by John Bear
• Motivational Interviewing by William R. Miller PhD, Stephen Rollnick PhD.

These books will open your eyes to a whole new way of coaching.

For example, one of my biggest ah-ha moments came when reading Motivational Interviewing.  Until I read this book it never really occurred to me that with my coaching strategies I could be making my clients less likely to change.

That’s right, even with the best of intentions, even if I deeply care about helping my clients, my own agenda, even my language, could literally make my clients less able to make important changes in their lives.

Powerful stuff.  Lessons we all need to learn if we want to be the best fitness pros we can be.

Wrap-Up and Today’s Takeaways

That’s it for Part 1 of The Compliance Solution.  In just a few days we’ll be back with Part 2 of the video series.

In the meantime, here are three important takeaway messages for you to think about.

• Real world coaching requires a mix of physiology and psychology. And psychology is perhaps the most important of the two.

• To improve your knowledge of change psychology, I recommend starting with Motivational Interviewing.  It’s the best book on coaching behavior change that I’ve ever read; the insights come fast and furious.

• For most clients their biggest stumbling block is compliance, the ability to do what they know they should do. Understanding how to help them overcome their limiting factors is the most important skill you can have as a coach.

PN Certification Program begins Wednesday, March 7th, 2012 — waiting list now open.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to deliver life-changing, research-driven nutrition coaching – so that you can help each and every type of client that comes to you for advice – the PN Certification program is perfect for you.

Based on over 10 years of research and statistical data from over 8,000 clients, the certification is a comprehensive nutrition coaching course designed specifically to teach professionals working in a personal training or strength coaching environment how to get clients in the best shape of their lives.

We’ve opened the waiting list for the March 2012 program. I strongly recommend you get your name on the list now because spots are limited and typically sell out within hours each time we run the program.

Click here to join the waiting list.

Our goal?

To teach elite fitness professionals — personal trainers, strength coaches, therapists, nutritionists — a nutrition coaching system that can transform the bodies of their clients in the shortest time possible.

Our Precision Nutrition community has been abuzz with discussion about this upcoming program. So I decided to answer some of the key questions here, to help those interested learn more about the program.

Q. Why offer a certification like this?

Q. What do you mean when you say, “Exercise alone doesn’t work”?

Q. What results can I expect when I integrate nutrition coaching into my practice?

Q. What qualifies you to teach a course / offer a certification like this?

Q. How does the PN Certification compare to other nutrition education options?

Q. How thorough is the PN Certification?

Q. Will there be multiple levels of certification?

Q. Do I need to have a science degree to become certified?

Q. Once I’m PN Certified, will I be listed on your site?

Q. Would nutritionists and dietitians benefit from this program as well?

Q. Is the PN Certification program accredited by one of the national education boards?

Q. What about those people specifically looking for national accreditation?

Q. Can I earn CEUs from my personal training organization with this program?

Q. How long does it take to complete the Level 1 program?

Q. How about Level 2?

Q. What advice will someone be able to offer clients after completing the course?

Q. When does the PN Certification program begin?

Q. How many people are you accepting in the program?

Q: How can people find out more?

Click here to join the waiting list.

Over 5 years in the making, the PN Certification is the synthesis of everything we’ve learned during the last 15 years of coaching and research in the nutrition field.

Designed specifically for elite fitness professionals working with clients in a personal training or coaching environment, it’s based on the university nutrition courses we teach and the data we’ve collected from thousands of Precision Nutrition clients over the years.

And there’s nothing else like it, anywhere.

Nutrition certification for elite fitness professionals.

I’ve always felt that nutrition is the missing component in the fitness profession; without it, a client will simply not see results, and a coach will simply not be able to generate them.

But where would you go to learn the essentials of sport and exercise nutrition, and how to coach it?

Everything that exists is usually re-purposed material from clinical dietetics (i.e., feeding people in hospital situations) or is more suited to advanced academic study (i.e., post-graduate research).

Nothing, and I mean nothing, deals with the problem we face every day: how to use nutrition coaching to elicit marked improvements in health, performance and (especially) body composition in an exercising client.

We literally wrote the book on it.

So we literally wrote the book: finding no suitable textbook, we created one from scratch: The Essentials of Sport and Exercise Nutrition a 500-page opus, now in it’s second edition, covering every aspect of the science and practice of nutrition coaching.

In addition, we’ve created a whole video lesson curriculum, a challenging exam to test your mettle, and in general, a contribution to the betterment of the fitness industry as a whole.

Basically, we’re going to do everything in our power to change the game. We’re out to train a new kind of fitness professional. And the certification is a massive step in that direction.

More details, and how to join the waiting list:

If you’re interested in finding out more, we’ve set up a pre-registration page with more info about the program. There, you can also get on the waiting list.

Since, in our last group, we filled every spot in less than 24 hours, the current spots will go quickly. So everyone on the waiting list gets a 24 hour “presale” window to reserve a spot before we open it to the general public.

There’s no charge to be on the waiting list, so if you’re interested in the certification program I highly recommend you get on it, because your chance of getting a spot will be much, much better.

Click here to join the waiting list.

What is the top New Year’s resolution? Lose weight.

Every year, people with good intentions set out to lose weight, only to have even more weight to lose the next year later. (Resolutions seem like such a good idea when you’ve got a party horn in your hand and a gold cardboard top hat on your head, swimming in a champagne-induced fog.)

One problem is that people try to lose weight quickly. Unfortunately, even if they manage to drop a few pounds fast, they bounce right back… and often, keep on gaining.

By slowing down the weight loss process and teaching life-long healthy habits, PN’s very own Lean Eating program is designed to avoid the cycle of perpetual weight loss.

Now, research confirms our methods. (But we knew that already.) Only slow and steady progress leads to lasting change. Why?

Appetite hormones: Why self control is not the problem

Myth: weight loss is all about self control.

People berate themselves or are judged by others for carrying a few extra pounds. To be fat means you’re weak-willed, spineless, and/or impulsive.

Fact: Powerful hormones control our perception of appetite and hunger, as well as our eating behaviour.

While you still have the option of self-control, your body definitely has a strong voice in the matter. And “willpower” breaks down easily under stress; when blood sugar is low; and/or in environments that don’t support weight loss (like an office where everyone has a candy dish and it seems like someone has a birthday cake every day).

Here are some of the more well-known hormones that influence appetite, hunger, and satiety.

For more about leptin and ghrelin take a look at another research review of mine on leptin and ghrelin.

The ideal hormone combo to suppress appetite and help you lose weight would be:

• more CCK, GLP-1, PYY, and leptin
• less ghrelin

What happens to hormones over the long haul?

The study I’m reviewing this week looks at what happens to appetite hormones after 10 weeks of dieting up to 1 year later. Yup, your lemon-cayenne diet from last year may be making you feel more hungry this year.

Sumithran P, Prendergast LA, Delbridge E, Purcell K, Shulkes A, Kriketos A, Proietto J. Long-term persistence of hormonal adaptations to weight loss. N Engl J Med. 2011 Oct 27;365(17):1597-604.

Methods

This year-long study involved 50 people with BMI between 27 and 40 (classified as overweight and obese), who went on a crazy low-calorie diet for 10 weeks (though the researchers called it a very-low energy diet).

What’s a crazy low calorie diet? Oh, say 500-550 kcal for people that had an average weight of 95 kg (209 lb), which is one-third of their basal metabolic rate. To live without moving at all, these volunteers would need about 1700 kcal on average. No question they were really hungry and needed a hell of a lot of will power to stay on this diet.

The problem with calorie math

This intake of 500-550 kcal means that each day these volunteers are eating at least 1200 kcal less than they need.

Since fat has 3600 kcal/pound, you could use basic (and flawed) calorie counting to figure they should lose a pound (0.45 kg) of fat every three days. At the end of 10 weeks (70 days) they should lose just over 23 pounds (10.6 kg), or 11% body weight in fat.

The problem with thinking of yourself as just fat that’s burned like a candle is that you overlook things like hormones that through evolution respond to starvation by storing calories more efficiently.

A few hundred years ago, it was a good thing that your body responded to starvation by storing as much fat as possible. Thrifty hormones saved lives. Now when starvation is self-induced in a sea of food it causes problems.

Results

During the first 10 weeks of the study, when the volunteers were eating a very low calorie diet, they lost 9.4 kg (20.7 lb) of fat and 4.1 kg (9 lb) of lean body mass, but that didn’t last over the next year.

As the year went on after the diet, they slowly gained half the weight they lost. At first glance, that doesn’t sound too bad. They lost a fair bit of weight in a short period, and then a year later, they were still ahead of the game.

Hormonal effects: short term

The problem is what happens to these volunteers’ hormones — the hormones like leptin, ghrelin, peptide YY, etc. — that regulate appetite, hunger, and satiety.

After 10 weeks of starvation the volunteers had less leptin, peptide YY, and cholecystrokinin, as well as more ghrelin and gastric inhibitory polypeptide. The result: The volunteers felt more hungry. Cue the need for even more will power to keep the weight off. Sound familiar?

Hormonal effects: long term

We knew that crash dieting messes up appetite regulatory hormones for a short period, but until now, nobody had looked at the long-term effects of very low calories on these hormones.

Why didn’t anyone look at what happened a year or more later?

Well, it’s hard to get people signed up for a year-long anything, let alone having them go on a starvation diet for over two months first. Plus, it’s a bit of a surprise that a short term diet would do much a year later. These scientists must have had to convince a lot of people that this study was worth doing.

One year after dieting the volunteers still had less leptin, peptide YY, and cholecystokinin; and more ghrelin, gastric inhibitory polypeptide and pancreatic polypeptide.

What happened to hunger? Still higher after a year. Think about that. A full year after dieting, the volunteers still felt more hungry. No surprise that most dieters regain weight lost and more… eventually.

Conclusion

If you try to lose weight quickly, you’ll end up trying to lose it every year instead of taking a year to lose the weight once.

It’s clear that very low calorie dieting has long term impact on hunger and appetite hormones lasting at least a year. Now imagine what multiple crash diets might do.

By the way, stringent and chronic restriction also affects hormones that control gastric motility (the speed at which food is processed) and neurotransmitters (brain chemicals).

Thus, if you regularly “diet”, not only do you end up always hungry, you have indigestion and “brain hamsters” like anxiety or depression, and you rarely feel psychologically satisfied by eating — you always want more, or have strong cravings. Show me a “professional dieter” and I’ll show you someone who feels generally lousy physically, mentally, and emotionally. Hormonal disruption is strong stuff.

Could yo-yo dieting lead to cumulative changes in appetite regulation hormones? Very likely. Several years of yo-yo dieting later, you may feel much more hungry than when you started. Good luck with willpower then.

Bottom line

Lose weight quickly while nearly starving, only to gain most of it back (or more) and feel hungrier than when you started. Or lose weight slowly, for good, and feel better than ever… eventually.

What would you choose? If you want door #2… well… have we got a program for you.

Click here to join the waiting list.