How I Lost 10lbs in 4 Weeks

Don't change, just edit

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Coming out of COVID, I wanted to lose some weight.

I am a pretty active person and have been most of my life.

But naturally, COVID made it pretty hard for me to stay physically active.

While I used to play a lot of sports, four knee surgeries has pretty much confined me to the gym where I can use an elliptical and some free weights from time to time.

However, despite getting back in the gym consistently once the quarantines lifted, I really wasn’t seeing much progress on losing the weight I had gained.

Now this isn’t a fitness newsletter by any means - but it is one about growth and how growth occurs.

As you get older and the days start to fly by and blur together, you start to realize something.

Your habits represent a large part of who you are and how you define yourself.

Each day, you go through tons of different micro-habits:

Brushing your teeth

Making your bed

Taking the dog out

Eating various meals

Scrolling the news or social media

And so on…

As time continues to flow by, like water in a stream, your habits become the rocks that shape the water’s direction and the subsequent grooves that become your day-to-day life.

And that is why habits are so powerful.

A single new stone set in a stream can alter the direction of that stream - and the world that is carved out around it - forever.

Habits are like investments - and the impact of those habits is like interest.

This is why one small investment in a habit today can lead to a significant return as time goes on.

So why don’t we all have amazing habits?

Because we try to “change” too much at once.

When we get motivated to get healthier, we buy a gym membership or a class pack and throw out all of our old food as we firmly declare that “this time is different!”

Except it isn’t.

A few weeks later and we have only gone to one or two classes and all of our new fruits and vegetables have gone bad…

So how can we actually achieve change?

By focusing on small edits instead of big changes.

And therein lies the secret to how I lost 10lbs in just 2 weeks.

I realized that the food I was eating was a bigger factor for my weight than I had previously imagined and I just looked at what I was eating most regularly.

Not the one-off times where I treat myself, but the actual daily staples of my diet.

And having grown up Jewish in the northeast, a bagel was always a cornerstone of my breakfast, especially during COVID.

It was tasty and I was very used to it, which always gave it a somewhat nostalgic place in my diet (even if bagels in the south are lacking :).

But the bagel is also a bomb of carbs in the morning that made me a feel a little weighed down during the day.

I had also grown to love PB&J as a snack or a lunch in a pinch.  Tastes great and, again, a bit of nostalgia.  

But the jelly in the sandwich had a huge amount of sugar, which didn’t seem great for my weight either.

So, instead of buying a whole bunch of kale and taking up Pilates, I decided to make a small edit to my eating routine.

No more bagel and no more jelly - that’s it.

Instead, I added in some eggs and a low-sugar protein bar for the snack later.

Again, that was it.

No change to my workout regimen.  No overhaul of my diet or grocery list.

Just two edits.

Then I added the third and final ingredient key to any significant growth.

Time.

Like interest, the power of habits increases as the time we stick with them increases.

In 4 weeks, by just editing out those two items, I lost 10lbs.

And the best part is that this principle can be applied to any aspiration you have for yourself.

Small edits can lead to big improvements when you give yourself time to see the effects.

And by framing your new choice as an “edit” instead of a “change,” it becomes much easier to stick with.

Thinking of things as “changes” is scary and invokes fears that we are judging and losing ourselves at some deeper level.

But editing is just about altering a small habit we already do everyday.

What is something you are trying to achieve?

What is one small edit you could make that, if given time, could lead to big results?

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