Target 100: The World's Simplest Weight-Loss Program in 6 Easy Steps
280
Target 100: The World's Simplest Weight-Loss Program in 6 Easy Steps
280Hardcover
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Overview
—Jessica Simpson
When did weight loss get so complicated?
Today, it feels like there are a million different apps, tools, workouts, and eating plans designed to help you lose weight. Some promise success via drastic, unlivable restrictions, others are so complex they turn losing weight into a second job.
In Target 100, celebrity weight-loss coach Liz Josefsberg shows you don't have to be a slave to your weight-loss program. You don't have to count every gram of every nutrient and every calorie you eat at every meal. Believe it or not, weight loss can be simple.
It can even be . . . fun.
A 15-year veteran of the weight-loss industry and who lost—and kept off—65 pounds herself, Liz has accrued a high-profile clientele. She helped Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson lose weight and transform her life and coached Jessica Simpson to shed over 50 pounds of baby weight (twice!). But along with the likes of Charles Barkley and Katie Couric, Josefsberg has also coached thousands of others, everyone from stay-at-home moms to office jockeys. Along the way, she's learned what works—and what doesn't—when it comes to lasting weight loss, and she's ready to share her secrets with the rest of us.
Target 100 streamlines the weight-loss process into six easy-to-follow guidelines and shows you how to adjust them to fit your lifestyle, personalizing the program so that it works for you. Josefsberg offers tips, worksheets, and powerful insights to help you fine-tune a range of weight-related behaviors, from battling stress to getting more sleep, setting the stage for permanent, long-term weight loss.
Instead of counting calories, you'll learn how simple changes come together to jumpstart your health and wellbeing, such as:
• Drinking 100 ounces of water a day
• Exercising for 100 minutes a week
• Adding 100 minutes of Sleep a week
• De-Stressing for 100 minutes a week
• And more!
Warm and no-nonsense, encouraging and informative, Target 100 is a holistic and revolutionary wellness book with a simple message: You don't need to be perfect to lose weight, or transform yourself into someone you're not. You can lose weight for good, with the world's simplest weight loss program.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781944648664 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BenBella Books, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 12/19/2017 |
| Pages: | 280 |
| Sales rank: | 1,159,290 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
About the Author
Liz’s work today centers on advising companies at the cutting edge of weight loss and emerging health solutions. She consults in the wearable technology sector, creates weight loss programs for forward-thinking entities and is deeply involved in helping technology enabled weight loss and health devices come to market. Liz’s perspective is derived from her own weight loss success and insatiable quest for the newest information, technology and education available to help men and women achieve their goals with more ease in the everyday world. Liz has consulted for companies across the country, including for one of the largest fitness chains in the U.S, Life Time Fitness, Misfit Wearables, LEVL , LifeReimagined, Stash and more. Her insights on behavior modification, consumer behavior, customer service and the health market have made her a sought after expert in the field.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
HABIT AND ENVIRONMENT — YOUR SECRET WEAPON IS YOURSELF I
When I start working with private clients, I tell them the first session will be an hour and a half instead of the usual hour. They understand this initial meeting is vital because it is when I will explain the foundations of the program, and walk them through the tools they will need to master in order to succeed. But that foundation, and these tools, are never what they are expecting. They show up expecting to hear about a food plan and exercise regime — basically assuming that I will tell them what to do and what to eat to lose the weight. Instead, I begin by explaining why that approach hasn't worked in the past, and why it won't work now. This chapter is my nod to that first client meeting. I want you to let go of your ideas about what a diet book should be and come at this with a fresh set of eyes and an open mind.
What if I told you that you are basically not present for over half of the health decisions you make in a day? That they are not really decisions at all? In fact, they are habits — habits so ingrained that you likely don't even know you have them. Uncovering these and triggering new, more conscious involvement in your choices is what will remove the barriers that have kept you from success. Target 100 is built on a set of holistic guidelines in six areas (nutrition, hydration, exercise, movement, stress, and sleep). These guidelines can be life changing. But without the engine of habit change behind them, they are just another set of rules that can't (and won't) be followed long term. Let me be very clear: Understanding and applying the formula for changing habits is the only way to achieve lasting weight loss. This is where — and why — most plans fail. There is lots of telling you what to do and very little explaining how to do it. The reassurance I find myself giving to clients — so often that it has become my catchphrase — is: You are not broken. People come to me bewildered and in despair, asking: "Why is it that I can accomplish so many other things in my life, but this one goal defeats me again and again?" It's not because they are "weak," it's because they've been using the wrong tools — imagine if you tried to pound a nail into the wall using a screwdriver! They've been using the wrong tools because for years they've been urged to fight the wrong enemy: the fight is not with food, it is with habits.
In this chapter, we will learn the formula for habit change, and in every chapter after this, we will apply it. It is the glue that will make this plan stick. The best part? You can use this simple formula to change more than just your weight or even your health — you can use it to change any behavior that isn't getting you what you want.
UNDERSTANDING HABITS
Habits affect more than just your health decisions: it has been estimated that up to 45 percent of everything we do in the course of a given day is habitual. So, what is a habit? As defined in Webster's Dictionary, a habit is "an acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary." Have you ever driven a car only to arrive at your destination with no recollection of the drive itself? That is what is meant by "involuntary behavior." As hard as it is to believe, nearly half of what you do every single day is rote behavior that you repeat on a kind of autopilot, triggered by an assortment of emotional and sensory cues.
Take your morning routine. If you were to actually pay attention to the way you brush your teeth, you would notice that you do it almost exactly the same way each time. From the way you hold the toothbrush, to which side of your mouth you start on, to how you stand and spit and rinse, it is all perfectly choreographed. When you hop in the shower, you probably have a similarly predictable routine for how you wash and dry yourself. Most of the time I am totally unaware of what I am doing in the shower: my mind is elsewhere, on the day ahead or lost in other thoughts. My body mindlessly carries me through the motions. An interesting exercise is to take note of your own shower routine and then try to change one piece of it. For instance, I noticed that when I shower, I always shave my right leg before my left. Every time. When I decided to begin shaving my left leg first as an experiment, it was amazing how difficult it was. First off, I kept forgetting! I'd remember after I was already halfway done shaving my right leg. Then, on the days when I did remember, it just felt weird. There is really nothing more logical about starting with the right leg than with the left, but not to felt wrong somehow. I didn't like it; I wanted to go back to the "old way" I was comfortable with. And yet shaving is very different from habits involving food. There aren't biological, hormonal urges driving me, and there is certainly no guilt or shame wrapped up in the way I shower. Think about how much more difficult it might be to change habits entangled with those additional factors.
Your brain works hard to create habits so that you do not have to make the same decisions over and over again. For instance, what if you had to decide how to shave and how to brush your teeth each and every morning? You'd be wasting important decision-making energy you need for the more complex parts of your day, and so your brain tries to conserve that energy by relegating decisions like this to the realm of habit. This isn't just a metaphor: Our logical thinking takes place in the frontal cortex — your brain keeps that vital space from being tied up by shunting habitual actions to an entirely different part of the brain. This is a good thing! It is why you can think and perform other tasks at the same time.
Your habits are imprinted on your brain as neural shortcuts, and the more you habitually do something the stronger that pathway becomes. Think of it like a road: As you perform a habit over and over, the road gets smoother and wider, easier and more automatic to travel. This is why trying to simply "do things differently" via brute force is so seldom successful. To create a new, fledgling habit, it must be burned into a neural pathway; at first it will feel like driving over a rough dirt road, and your brain would always rather default to the well-worn path.
And yet we believe we can alter behaviors that have been with us for years by simply following a new meal plan! Changing your habits is a skill, one that requires you not only to learn to recognize them, but also to understand how they work.
THE HOW OF HABITS
Let's look at the anatomy of a habit. Habits are set in motion by what's called a "trigger" or a cue. That trigger can be anything from a time of day (morning = brush my teeth) to a physical sensation (yucky morning taste in my mouth = brush my teeth) to an emotional response (tired and trying to wake myself up = brush my teeth) to a simple thought pattern (just had coffee, should brush my teeth). Triggers are all around us, in our environment and our near-unconscious thoughts, but they go mostly unnoticed. The trigger prompts a behavior, and over time, if the pair is repeated, the trigger comes to be strongly connected to the behavior, which becomes a habit. To use one of the examples above, you might be triggered to brush your teeth after having coffee by thinking you should. But unless you keep repeating the practice of brushing your teeth after you have coffee, it will not become a habit.
Once a habit is triggered, we move into the "routine" part of a habit's anatomy — for instance, the actual action of brushing our teeth. This then leads to the habit's final piece, which is the "reward" we get from the routine. When we brush our teeth, that reward is a clean feeling, better breath, and so on.
Taken together, these three pieces make up what we will call "the habit loop."
When we think of a habit, the second piece of its anatomy, the routine, is generally what we think of, but in fact, the other two pieces drive our actions. By the time it is habit, the routine is mostly involuntary. It is only by recognizing the other parts of its anatomy — the triggers in particular — that we can step in and change a habit.
Now, brushing our teeth is a good habit — but not all of our habits are good. And habits can be nested together with other habits and become hard to untangle. Perhaps you have a bad habit of waking up too late to eat a healthy breakfast, which leaves you rushing to work, where there is a donut shop in the basement. That lateness habit is a trigger itself. The stress, lack of preparation, and lack of time kick off a routine of stopping at the donut shop, one you continually fall prey to once it is established because it also comes with a powerful reward. That sugary donut is delicious: it gives you a quick burst of energy in the morning, and it gets happy chemicals flowing after the stress of being late, providing what feels like a much-needed treat before the long workday begins. Traditional diets would tell you: "Hey, just start eating eggs for breakfast." Unfortunately, this doesn't address the root of the problem (your trouble waking up on time) or the fact that eating eggs for breakfast instead of running out the door requires myriad new tasks and behaviors including shopping for eggs or other ingredients, getting up early enough to make breakfast, and finding a way to make this new routine feel rewarding so that you stick with it long enough for it to become a habit. Knowing you should eat a healthier breakfast doesn't get you very far — you might succeed in keeping at it for a short time, but once the novelty fades or you hit a bump in the road, you'll revert to your old habit, because the new routine wasn't properly planned for and supported.
The good news is that you are not beholden to your habits. Any habit can be untangled and broken with the right combination of awareness and skill — and there is really nothing you can't make into a habit if you want to.
Habit formation is the process by which a behavior, through regular repetition, becomes automatic or routine. The magic is in the repetition and in consistency. Consistency is not the same thing as perfection — interestingly, perfection is much less important. In a recent study of habit formation, missing a day of performing the behavior mattered less than whether participants returned to performing it the very next day. In short, what will matter as you are building new, healthier habits for weight loss isn't whether you "slip up," it's what you do afterward — whether you pick yourself up and keep trying.
The same study also revealed that the average time it took for a behavior to become automatic was 66 days — with a range of 18 to 254 days. This speaks volumes: there is no one-size-fits-all-habits timeline. Some habits will be relatively easy to break or build, while others will be harder, have more layers, and take more time. Rome wasn't built in a day — and neither are habits. Target 100 doesn't promise a "21 Days to Flat Abs" type of solution. What I can promise, though, is that the success you achieve this way will actually last. I am also 100 percent confident in you. Whatever your past failures or personal challenges, I promise you are not somehow the one person out of the thousands I've worked with who just "can't" You've got this.
Breaking old habits and creating new ones are two sides of the same coin, and an especially effective way to tackle either is to replace a habit that already exists with something different. Maybe your problem is oversleeping and grabbing that breakfast donut, or maybe it is late-night eating — for my friend Katie, it was a long-standing habit of eating dessert every day after lunch. Katie's habit was one that she'd developed as a child: In her home, they always ate dessert after lunch. Even when she took a packed lunch to school, it always included a dessert. Katie knew this practice was standing in the way of her weight-loss progress, but it was tied up in emotional and habitual knots.
To tackle this habit, we first identified its parts. Katie's trigger was lunch. Each day she ate lunch and each day, immediately afterward, she had dessert. Even the time of day had become a trigger — she found herself thinking of dessert as soon as she noticed midday approaching. The routine, of course, was the actual behavior of eating dessert right after lunch. The reward was the sweet treat itself, and perhaps having something to look forward to, a moment of indulgence in the middle of the day to escape stress. Now, as we saw in the earlier examples of swapping donuts for eggs at breakfast or switching up my leg-shaving routine, just telling herself to stop eating dessert after lunch won't cut it for Katie, not long term. Instead, she must use the habit loop to trigger a new routine that will get her the same reward, or another one that is just as desirable. So, knowing Katie would otherwise forget, we set a timer on her phone for around lunchtime that reminded her not to have a treat after lunch. The new routine was eating lunch without dessert. The reward we came up with was that for each day Katie avoided the old habit, she could put two dollars in a jar for new clothes. This gave her the same feeling of "treating herself" that she got from dessert.
It may take some trial and error to find a reward that works for you. For some habits, and some people, the natural rewards — feeling better, having more energy, losing weight — are immediate or compelling enough that no extra thought is needed. Or the routine itself is so effortless and divorced from emotion that all you really need is a trigger. Other times, especially if you are at a place in your process where results are slow, you will need to experiment to find a healthier replacement for an old routine that still provides the reward you are looking for. You may find the reward you decide to use doesn't quite hit the spot — sometimes you think you know what you are getting from a habit, but in reality the reward is something else. In cases like this, you may have to go back and try a new reward until you hit on something that fits. Maybe replacing your afternoon croissant with a less carb-heavy serving of dark chocolate didn't work, because while you thought the reward of the croissant was the indulgent sweet, it was actually getting up from your desk and walking to the bakery, getting a break from work.
Another important point is that many habits have tasks associated with them that you will need to complete before they can be set in motion — for instance, if your goal is to begin eating healthy dinners at home instead of grabbing takeout on the way home from work, you will need to ensure that you have healthy food in the house.
Below is a template you can use to work out the details of any habit change you decide to make.
TAKING EMOTION OUT OF THE PROCESS
There are two ways emotion affects the weight-loss process. One is that emotion can drive habits and food choices. Often we have a set of habits built around our emotions so that feeling the emotion prompts an immediate desire to eat or to do something to either escape that emotion or augment it — to soothe or celebrate. It's as automatic as following "shave and a haircut" with "two bits." For example, if you head to the vending machines every time your stress levels rise at work, pretty soon it becomes an ingrained habit. Stress hits, and you are standing with your mouth watering and your hand reaching to pull the candy from the machine before you really know what you're doing. Does this sound like you?
For me, it wasn't a vending machine, it was a glass of wine. I worked all day while my husband, a Broadway actor, worked all night. I would arrive home from work, exhausted, to manage dinner and homework and bedtime for two kids all on my own. There was not one second of transition time — I was off to the races. Stressed and lonely, I started pouring myself a glass of wine every night around 6 PM. It relaxed me a little and made me less irritable. Unfortunately, it also made me more likely to snack while making dinner, and eventually I began to suspect it was interfering with my weight maintenance. That was a tough habit to break. It was being triggered both by emotion and by time of day — once the habit was solidified, just seeing the sun set in the sky could turn my thoughts to that glass of wine. As I set out to break the habit, I realized another problem was that we stored opened bottles in plain sight, white in the fridge where it was the first thing you saw on opening the door, and red right out on the kitchen counter. Just seeing the bottle was a trigger (and not needing to pull out the corkscrew made it that much easier to pour myself a glass). So my first move was to move the bottles! Then I set an alarm on my phone with a reminder to go upstairs each night around 6 PM. I needed to busy myself in an area that did not trigger the habit while performing a task that would give me the same feeling I was getting from the wine. The wine was calming, and sipping it made me feel like I was carving out a little space just for myself. Cleaning and organizing gave me a similar feeling, and getting upstairs — alone, where it was quieter — took my stress level down. I realized that however busy I was, I could afford fifteen minutes to decompress, and so every night when the alarm sounded I went upstairs and did something soothing and orderly, like folding laundry — sometimes I called my sister for a chat at the same time. Just that brief distraction was enough to break the habitual loop that had been running and set a new one in motion. (Incidentally, this is another example that shows why it's so important to personalize your plan and your approach to habits and rewards — not everyone, I am aware, finds folding laundry relaxing! Yet knitting, which is calming for some people I know, would probably have sent me stomping back to the wine bottle in frustration.)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Target 100"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Liz Josefsberg.
Excerpted by permission of BenBella Books, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword Jennifer Hudson x
Introduction: My Story 1
Getting Started: The Basics
Chapter 1 Habit and Environment-Your Secret Weapon Is Yourself 13
Chapter 2 Introducing the Six Targets 45
Taking Aim-Your Ten-Week Plan 55
Targets 1 and 2: Food and Water
Chapter 3 Beginning with Breakfast 65
Chapter 4 Food That Fuels 83
Chapter 5 Water, Water, Everywhere 109
Targets 3 and 4: Exercise and Movement
Chapter 6 Exercise Therapy 123
Chapter 7 Move More 141
Targets 5 and 6: Stress and Sleep
Chapter 8 Stress Less 157
Chapter 9 Sleep Your Way to Success 175
Targeting Tools: Support and Technology
Chapter 10 You Need a Network 193
Chapter 11 Technology Is Your Friend 207
Recipes 223
Acknowledgments 241
About the Author 243
What People are Saying About This
"When I was losing weight, Liz was more than my coach; she was my rock, and I couldn't have done it without her. She just got it, because she'd been through it herself (and helped about a million other people through it, too). Target 100 is Liz in book form—smart, supportive, and full of practical, simple solutions. Liz changed my life and my whole concept of dieting—and now can change, yours too."
—Jessica Simpson
"Liz is no joke. She helps people change their lives, me included. She is special and if you're ready for real change, you're ready for Target 100. "
—Charles Barkley
"If you are struggling with your body, Liz has walked in your shoes and understands the practical steps for clever solutions.”
—Mehmet Oz, MD, professor at New York-Presbyterian: Columbia University Medical Center
"I just love the perspective that Liz brings to weight loss. Need a shot in the arm? Look no further than Liz Josefsberg's Target 100. So many clients have benefited from Liz's exceptional guidance and simple approach, and you will, too."
—Rocco DiSpirito
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