How to stick to a diet long-term.

Plus: Fixing your weak links, habits that work on your worst days and a weight bench recommendation.

Hey — Dean here.

Welcome to a late 208th edition of this newsletter.

It was a hectic week for me.

My brother and his wife were visiting from China — he is building a LEGO land theme park in Shanghai.

I played chauffeur for the past 5 days, driving 5 hours on Tuesday to pick them up at the Toronto airport and immediately turning around and bringing them to Sudbury.

On Friday my chauffeur duties were reversed.

I felt the impact of all my driving yesterday. I got to bed early though and feel much better today.

Here’s this week’s 3-2-1 newsletter that I hope will help you skew personal transformation success in your favour.

1/ Design habits that work on your worst day.

Fact → We have far more “bad” days than we realize.

Problem → We adopt habits that only work on our good days, but fail us miserably on our bad ones.

Solution → Flip the script. Design habits that work on your bad days. If it works on those days, it will work on all days regardless of how life decides to treat you.

Example → Don’t set the goal of walking 10,000 steps, which is easy on a good day, but hard to achieve on a bad day. Instead, set the minimum at 5000. Having a minimum makes it more likely you will consistently achieve your desired outcomes.

2/ Create eating habits that scale long-term.

The simplest way to do that is to steal this mindset best selling author Austin Kleon uses when it comes to books.

But instead, your mindset will be…

I will not eat foods I don’t like.

Takeaway → A diet is easy to stick to when you love what you are eating.

3/ Fix your weak links.

Fact → When life throws you an unexpected curveball, you do not rise to the levels of your greatest strengths, you fall to the depths of your greatest weaknesses.

Problem → Weaknesses are like holes in your roof. They get exposed when conditions turn ugly.

Solution → Identify weak links — ie. poor food discipline, highly volatile in stressful situations, easily crushed when receiving critical feedback — and do the work to start repairing them so when conditions turn nasty, you rise to the occasion.

1/ Failure is self-inflicted.

2/ Steal these eating principles and philosophies.

For the record, I don’t eat like Jeff does.

But, what I love about his video is that he shares the principles and philosophies that guide his eating decisions.

I share many of the same, but I apply them to a different eating framework that I have found works for me.

There is a lot of wisdom in this video that you can steal and apply to your own “Diet for One” approach.

PS → And if you watch to the end, you will hear Jeff talk about why he doesn’t have cheat meals. I also have the same mindset around this. It’s a mindset you should definitely consider stealing.

1/ I love this.

I mentioned a few newsletters ago I was considering buying something to organize my weights and other equipment I had.

I had 9 questions I asked myself to ensure I was making a good decision.

I then waited 10 days before I decided this was worth purchasing.

And I love it. It took me about an hour to set up, but I have found the organization of my equipment has taken my training to a new level.

Here is the amazon link if you are interested.

🙏 Thanks for reading my friend.

👀See you again next week.

PS → 🥳Enjoy the newsletter? Please forward to pal. It only takes 30 seconds. Writing this took me 3 hours.

Did you know?

I do premium one-on-one coaching for those looking to lose at least 10% of unwanted body weight.

I have lost 23% of unwanted Dean and it has transformed my entire life.

Imagine how your life would change if you could lose 5%, 10% or more of unwanted you.

Let’s book a time to chat.

To learn more start here.