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Hey friend, 

I am turning 41 this year, and honestly I feel like I am in the best shape of my life.  

I often wonder what kind of shape I would be in if I'd have known what I know NOW back in my early 20's.  

If only I had a time machine 😂

But, I don't, so instead I'll share 10 things I wish I would have known back then that would have accelerated my results AND made them sustainable at the same time.  

And now these 10 principles / steps encompass much of what we do and teach with our coaching clients at Healthy & Whole.  

Alright, ready?  Let's go 🔥

The 10 fastest steps to sustainable weight loss + health I wish I would have known in my 20's...

Step 1️⃣ Make sure you have a baseline nutritional understanding of food inside AND outside of the home.

In other words, make sure you can read and understand nutrition labels so that you can build meals and snacks in which you know the calorie and macronutrient content. 

Ideally, you should know the total calorie content of the meal of snack you are eating, and roughly what percentage of it is coming from protein.

Example:  The Beef Stroganoff w/ Ranch Toast recipe in our cookbook is 378 calories, and 43.9% protein. 

You don’t have to count every calorie (most of our clients don't), but you do need to be able to make sure the meal or snack in front of you hits ideal targets.

If you can’t quantify your food, you can’t control your food.

And if you can't control your food, you can't control your health.

Want a super quick way to figure out how much protein is in a food, product, or recipe?  

Take the total number of protein grams per serving on the label x 4 to get the total number of protein calories per serving.  This works because there are 4 calories per gram of protein.  

Then divide the total protein calories per serving by the total calories per serving, and you'll end up with a decimal like .42 for example. Move the decimal over to the right two spots and boom, that's the percentage of protein by serving.  

Example:  The Stroganoff recipe above is 378 calories per serving and there are 41.5 grams of protein.  

So 41.5 grams of protein x 4 calories per gram = 166 protein calories per serving.  Divide 166 protein calories by 378 total calories per serving and we get .439 or 43.9%.  

Basically anything 40% protein and up is GREAT for a meal, but the higher the better.  

WAIT Matt!  You're telling me I can eat pasta and bread every day and hit a calorie deficit easily with tons of protein?!  

Yep...you sure can.  

2️⃣ Standardize your meals and snacks so you can use them like building blocks.

The only way to control your daily food intake without logging literally everything you eat is to standardize your meals and snacks so they work like building blocks. 

With our clients we use 400 calories or less per meal and we shoot for a minimum of 35% of those calories coming from protein, with 40% or higher being optimal.

For high protein snacks we shoot for 200 calories or less per snack, and we shoot for 40% or higher for protein content in snacks.

MyFitnessPal is the app myself and most of our clients use to help us make sure a meal, recipe, or snack hits those metrics.  Be sure you upgrade to the premium version so that you can turn on Net Carb Tracking so that when you log a meal or recipe it accounts for net carbs for accurate macro %.  

The good thing is once you log a meal or recipe to make sure it fits the ideal calorie and protein ranges, then as long as you make it the same way each time you never need to log it again.  You know it fits.  

Once you’ve learned to standardize meals and snacks like this you can simply scale the number of meal and snack servings you eat from your “menu” each day up or down to increase or decrease calorie intake rather accurately, negating the need to count every calorie.

Most of our clients doing amazing with 3 standardized meal servings and 2 standarized high protein snack servings a day that they can move around and eat anytime in the day.  Works like a charm.  

If you want to increase your weight loss, remove a snack or meal serving.  If you want to slow it down, stop it, or actually get into a building phase you can simply increase those servings accordingly.  

3️⃣ Walk 8,000 or more steps a day.

8,000 steps a day is an achievable and sustainable benchmark that most people can hit. Pushing it up will increase the rate of fat loss if food intake remains consistent, but only do this if it is sustainable or if you know it’s temporary.

Walking is considered to be superior to higher intensity cardio for the purpose of fat loss because it does not seem to increase appetite or cravings nearly as much as higher intensity cardio does.  

It may not burn QUITE as many calories as higher intensity cardio, but if you overeat due to increased appetite with high intensity cardio, your cardio just became wasted time for fat loss.  

Note...higher intensity cardio is still superior to walking for heart health, endurance, performance, etc.

A blend of both is ideal, but in terms of sustainable fat loss, 8000 steps a day is a great daily standard. 

I track my steps with an Apple Watch, and Pedometer++ is my favorite app for steps because of the way it tracks daily goals and shows walking streaks 💪🏻 

4️⃣ Strength train 3 times a week for 30 minutes, and make that 30 minutes count.

Strength training itself is not going to significantly impact fat loss rates, but it will significantly impact how you look, feel, and function at your goal body fat range AND...it will significantly impact your metabolism. 

Muscle is the most metabolically active tissue on the body, and it burns far more calories than fat even at rest.  So if you lose any significant amount of body weight using ONLY diet and walking or cardio, then a higher percentage of weight lost will be lost muscle mass.  And when we lose muscle mass we lose metabolism. 

A lower metabolism means we have to eat even less to lose body fat, and can't eat as much to maintain our results in the end. 

We want to keep as much muscle as possible and as much metabolism as possible so we look great, feel great, and can eat as much as possible to maintain results. 

3 x 30 minute workouts a week is sustainable for the vast majority of people AND will get great results if done properly with the right intensity.

I usually recommend utilizing supersets to increase the intensity and heart rate during strength sessions so you can get the most volume for a relatively short time commitment. 

3 strength training workouts a week (2 minimum) will help you maintain or build muscle when you are not cutting and minimize loss of muscle tissue if you are cutting.

5️⃣ Hydrate effectively by adding electrolytes to your water.

When you are eating a healthy amount of carbohydrate aka not over consuming, and you are being active and strength training, your electrolyte needs will go up, not down. If you don't account for that by increasing your water and electrolyte consumption, you will start feel bad. 

This is why so many people who try Keto end up with what is called "Keto Flu".  It is actually because their body starts dumping water and electrolytes out of the body due to a sharp decrease in carbohydrate consumption. 

It can cause headaches, brain fog, fatigue and lack of physical motivation, sleepiness, and even nausea.  

We like to make our own home made hydration drinks because they are far more affordable than the expensive mixes on the market like Liquid IV and LMNT.  Adding 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon pink salt to 32-40 oz. water and 1/8 tsp potassium choride will dose a homemade hydration drink right in alignment with Liquid IV (1/4 tsp. pink salt) and LMNT (1/2 tsp. pink salt).  

Just be sure to add a packet of your favorite low calorie water flavoring to mask the taste of the salt.  

My water bottle of choice is the Owala FreeSip 40 oz. 

6️⃣ Optimize for enjoyment, variety, convenience, and flexibility in everything.

The harsh reality of sustainable weight loss and health is that if you don't build a healthy lifestyle that you enjoy, you won't stick with it.  

It has to be enjoyable enough that you want to do it. 

It has to have enough variety to prevent burnout and diet fatigue. 

It has to be convenient enough that you CAN do it with your busy schedule. 

And it has to be flexible enough that you can have a social life and family life, go on vacation, etc.  

It takes time to build up a menu of foods, recipes, and fitness activities that meet the required threshold of enjoyment, variety, convenience, and flexibility that YOU need for sustainability, but it has to be done.  

Don’t eat boring food for results, it will backfire. Without the right threshold of enjoyment, variety, convenience, and flexibility in your food and exercise habits, it won’t stick. This is possibly the most important, because the rest won’t matter if you screw this up.

To help our clients with this we give them a cookbook where we have about 150 recipes that are standardized to the calorie and protein content we talked about up above, but all meant to taste like a cheat.  

We have also made it available as a subscription to non-clients and you can find that here.  

7️⃣ Stick to consistent sleep and wake times + integrate 15-20 minutes of self work to prime yourself each day.

How you start each day largely dictates how you feel and function the entire rest of the day.  Which means if you can consistently start (and end) your day in the right way, you'll find your days FEEL consistently better as well.

Set and adhere to consistent bedtime and wake up times, and integrate 15-20 minutes self work like meditation, affirmation, visualization, journalling, and reading into a consistent morning routine to prime yourself each day.

It doesn’t take an hour.  In fact it doesn't take much at all in terms of meditation, etc. to get outsized returns on those activities, but not doing it can sink your battleship.

I can't overstate how MASSIVE the difference is when I am doing this versus when I am NOT doing this consistently.  

If I am not waking up consistently and taking 15-20 minutes to do a small amount of meditation, affirmation, visualization, and journalling, then over time my mental and emotional health really starts to suffer. 

Turns out...if you are depressed and struggling with limiting beliefs you won’t execute on anything like you want to, so the deep work REALLY matters.

If you want an amazing book that can get you started, I recommend The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod.  This book 1000% changed my life, and if you read it and implement it your life will never be the same in the best of ways.  

They also have an incredible app that I use literally every day during my morning routine with tons of guided meditations, affirmations, visualizations, journaling prompts and even book summaries to read.  It's amazing.  You can get it here for Apple devices, and here for Android.

8️⃣ Check your bloodwork every 6 months, and supplement as needed.

When you are dialing in your daily eating for a goal like weight loss, it usually means you might not get quite as much variety in as usual, and definitely not as much volume. 

This can sometimes lead to deficiencies in some key nutrients, and trying to obsess over eating this food to get this nutrient in this amount, and that food for that nutrient in THAT amount, can be really tiring. 

For most, it's not a bad idea to supplement with high quality fish oil, vitamin D3 / K2, and possibly a multivitamin just to make sure your bases are covered so you don’t have to “nail” your micronutrient intake through food alone.

Taking these supplements is pretty easy, and relieves you of the concern of getting it just right with food choice.

As always though, I recommend getting extensive bloodwork done at least once a year, and most optimal would be every 6 months so you can adjust as needed.  

Personally, I use an amazing service called Function Health that was founded by Dr. Mark Hyman, a big name in the Functional Medicine space.  

I pay $500 a year, and they run EVERYTHING once a year, and then send me for a follow up on the most important things halfway through the year.  

I can track everything in a really cool app on my phone, and a doctor reviews all of my labs and adds notations and comments and recommendations that I can follow for supplementation and or dietary shifts as needed.  

Last I checked there was a waiting list, but since I am a Functional Medicine Certified Coach you can click here and skip the line if you want.  

Everyone always asks me where I recommend to buy quality supplements from.  There are many great companies out there, but a lot of bad ones as well. 

I have used Thorne for all of my supplements ever since I got my nutrition certification years ago as they were approved by my certification organization.  

You can get a 15% discount on products in my dispensary here.

9️⃣ Read every day and clean up your media consumption.

If you are what you eat physically, then this is twice as true when it comes to what you feed your heart and mind.  

It’s not that you can't indulge in junk media here and there, but 80-90% of the media you consume should really be growth focused. Once you’ve done this consistently for a while you’ll understand the value.

It’s not sexy, but it’s a game changer for results, success, and mental health all in one.

When I severely limited time watching main stream media, reality tv, streaming platforms, playing video games, etc. and replaced all that consumption with things like growth centered audio books, podcasts, educational YouTube videos, and so on...my life and my mental health changed dramatically, and yours will too.  

Here are 3 of my favorite books of all time to start with if you need a great book recommendation:

1. The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod
2. The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
3. Secrets of The Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker

I'm more of an audiobook kinda guy, so I listen to all of my books using Audible.  

🔟 Surround yourself with people who share your values and challenge you to be better.

When it comes to getting results and sustaining them, this one was an unexpected lesson that has been a game changer. 

As humans we have a deep desire to be accepted. So whoever we spend the most time interacting with, we will have a strong desire to be accepted by. 

Which essentially means if we are making it a priority and value in our life to pursue healthy eating, activity, exercise, growth, etc. on a daily basis, then we have to make sure that people we spend the most time interacting with SHARE those values. 

We rise or fall to the values and standards of our circle. 

Make sure the group you spend the most time interacting with is a group that requires you to be better and to live to a high standard to be accepted. Otherwise you’ll lower yourself to their standards to be accepted, and that's not a good thing. 

In this way your circle can be a prison or a pathway to a the life you desire.

Building sustainable health is a marathon, not a sprint...

The list above is the fastest path I know to truly sustainable weight loss and optimal health, but depending on where you are starting it can seem pretty overwhelming. 

The key is to just start.  

Choose one thing on the list above and start working on it.  

We overestimate what we can accomplish in one year, but underestimate what we can accomplish in 3-5 years.  

If you start today, you'll be glad you did in 6-12 months, and you'll be amazed in 3-5 years.  

Play the long game and your future self will thank you.  

- Matt

When you're ready, here's how I can help:

If you're looking to lose weight sustainably while building a flexible lifestyle that you enjoy, I can help.   Apply for coaching here in the Healthy & Whole Mentorship Program.  

Disclaimer: This email is provided for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute providing medical advice or professional services. The information provided should not be used for diagnosing or treating a health problem or disease, and those seeking personal medical advice should consult with a licensed physician.