Six Moves To Your ThriveLife - Part 2

Reading time: approx. 5 minutes

Welcome back to Thrive Month!

In last week’s edition of the LDT Letter, I declared September to be Thrive Month to ensure that every Over-50 Guy in America has the opportunity to create his own, custom-tuned ThriveLife as we glide into this year’s holiday season!

I introduced my plan to create universal access to the ThriveLife. It’s called 6 Moves to Your ThriveLife, and I shared the first two moves. 

Today, I’ll share Move #3 and Move #4. But first, here’s a quick review of where we left off last week.

Remember that the ThriveLife is a lifestyle strategy for Over-50 Guys to help them lose weight, get fit, and stay fit for the rest of their lives...without crazy diets or grueling workouts. The ThriveLife is a science-based, food-first, gym-optional approach to your forever fitness!

We also discussed Moves #1 and #2:

Move #1 is Get a Checkup. This is the first smart move you can make to start your ThriveLife journey for two reasons:

1. You need to make sure that you’re able to perform sustained physical activity

2. Developing the habit of getting regular (annual) physical exams is your single best defense against chronic disease. I think of regular annual checkups as my Medical Early Warning System.

So, if you haven’t gotten an annual exam in the last 12 months, call your doctor and schedule one! 

Move #2 is Start Moving. Motion is medicine. It’s also necessary to help you develop a calorie deficit, which you will need to lose weight. To effectively lose weight, you need to lose body fat. The best way to lose excess body fat is through Zone 2 cardio exercise, where your heart rate is 60-70% of your max heart rate. Most guys can achieve Zone 2 by brisk walking. This is my favorite form of exercise!

If you missed last week’s edition, you can read it here. 

Move #3 - Exit The Red Zone

I mentioned earlier that the ThriveLife is a food-first approach to fitness. Fitness without nutrition management is a myth!

Nutrition (the foods we eat) is the most important aspect of our health or fitness. If we can change how we eat, we can change how we look; the way we feel; how healthy we are; and how long we’ll live. 

It’s that important!

Yet, many fitness approaches downplay or ignore nutrition. They tell us to hit the gym, work to exhaustion; then do it three more times this week. 

But, it’s almost impossible to outwork a bad diet. 

Most of us Over-50 Guys grew up eating what I call the Standard American Diet or SAD. It’s those brand-name foods that we all know and love. They’re tasty, addictive, and awful for our health!

The key to building a fit and healthy lifestyle is to change how we eat. That doesn’t mean we need to go on a diet. Diets fail over time because most of them are based on deprivation and our brains hate deprivation! 

The answer is something I call Eating Smarter, where we replace bad foods that cause us to gain weight with better foods that help us avoid body fat while building muscle. Without the hunger you’d experience on a diet.  

To help us make better food choices, the Eat Smarter plan categorizes all foods into three Food Zones: Green, Yellow, and Red. I’ve written extensively about Eating Smarter. To learn more check here, here, and here. 

The Food Zone categories are based on how foods affect your body’s glucose levels, and ultimately, its fat storage functions. Certain foods lead to greater glucose spiking and fat storage than others. These are Red Zone foods. See the chart below for a quick summary.

Move #3 advises us to Exit the Red Zone, meaning that we should systematically eliminate these six foods from our eating and replace them with Green Zone foods instead. 

When you do this, powerful changes happen to your body’s composition. Fat storage declines and weight begins to drop. When done right, hunger and deprivation aren’t a problem.

Exiting the Red Zone is the first and most important step to Eating Smarter

Eating Smarter was the key to my 70-pound weight loss 10 years ago. It's also been the key to my ability to maintain that weight loss over the years.    

Move #4 - Daily Meal Planning

Daily meal planning is a smart move that goes hand-in-hand with Eating Smarter. That’s because it's easier to avoid excess calories than it is to work them off through exercise. By planning ahead, you can avoid situations where you’ll be trapped into making bad food choices (eating in the Red Zone). 

For me, this is a simple 5-minute exercise I go through daily, usually when I’m walking before breakfast.  I think about my schedule for the day, and then about my food choices based on the schedule:

• If I’m working from my home office all day, then I have total control over my food choices, so no problem.

• If I’m going to be across town at a lunch meeting, I need to plan where I’ll have the meal. If it's not a restaurant I already know, I’ll check their menu online to ensure that there are healthy meal options. If there aren’t healthy choices, I can either switch the restaurant or pre-eat (eat a healthy snack from home before the restaurant, then order lightly at the restaurant.) Both of these options work!

• If I’m catching a flight, I pack a healthy snack from home. 

Daily meal planning keeps me in control of my food options throughout the day, regardless of the situation. It’s simple and only takes 5 minutes. After 10 years, it’s practically automatic for me now. It’s a pro move that I recommend to all of my friends.

Time to Take Action!

So, now you know four of the six moves to your ThriveLife. It’s time to take action:

• Hopefully, based on Move #1 you’ve gotten your annual exam, or have it scheduled.

• Based on Move #2, you’ve started moving more and getting your daily Zone 2 cardio activities underway. 

• Move #3 calls for you to begin the process of eliminating the six Red Zone foods from your daily nutrition plan. (These are sugar, white flour, white rice, white potatoes, corn, and high fructose corn syrup.) This may take you a couple of weeks to fully complete.

• Move #4 urges you to begin a simple process of daily meal planning to avoid getting trapped into making bad food choices. 

As you adopt these moves, they will become your smart, healthy daily practices. These daily practices are the building blocks of your long-term success. As James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) says:

“We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our habits.”

So, let’s build smart, healthy habits. It’s called the ThriveLife.

Smarter - not harder.

Do You Know Somebody?

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Thanks for reading this week.

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