In Episode 5 of the Fit Father Project Podcast, Dr. A talks about how building a good nutrition system will help you eat healthily and lose weight, and how ‘diets’ are always destined to fail you.
Having a system that helps you standardize the majority of your meals will improve your eating habits over the long haul.
Listen to this informative talk about why systems are better than diets and learn how you can build YOUR healthy nutrition system, and make it easier to eat healthy long-term!
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Why Systems Are Better Than Diets: Full Episode 5 Transcript
You're going to win because you're going to be more consistent. You'll have feedback loops that keep you on track. You won't be exerting all this willpower to try to figure out what healthy foods you needy and all this thinking. You'll have made the decisions ahead of time. You have a simple, sustainable thing to follow and you will see results no matter what your goal is, whether it's to lose 50 plus pounds, whether it's to build muscle in your 50s and 60s, whether it's to run a marathon or just generally live healthier.
You need a system; you need to build a system that works for you.
Alright, my friends. Welcome back to this next episode here on the Fit Father Project Podcast. My name is Dr. Anthony Balduzzi. I'm the founder and CEO of the Fit Father Project and Fit Mother Project and today's episode is all about creating your nutrition system — the system. And I didn't say diet, I said the system that's going to enable you to eat healthy food consistently to lose weight, to build muscle, and to actually enjoy your life and your routine as a guy in your 40s, 50s, and 60s. I cannot overstate how important this is.
Because when most guys in their 40s, 50s, and 60s want to lose weight, they figure I need to go on a diet. And it's true. You do need to change your nutrition, but diets are clearly not the answer because if you're anything like the tens of thousands of guys my team and I help in our Fit Father program, you've tried countless diets.
Maybe you've tried all the diets, but you've lost weight and you've regained it because you didn't find something that was sustainable for you. And I believe the reason you haven't done that is because trying to follow someone's diet is the complete opposite of finding your own nutrition system.
Because imagine this, if we could create a system in your life where you're eating healthy foods you actually love? I'm not telling you which foods eat, but you know, your healthy foods and you're able to eat those consistently. You have a schedule that works with your life, with your work schedule, with your family schedule, and it's simple, and you can keep up with it, and you have plans and contingencies for times when you want to have that pizza or have that burger.
You have friends in town; you're watching a sports game. You have a system and a plan for how to navigate those times. So you're not getting derailed all the time. Imagine if you had all that. I'll tell you what can happen. When I began coaching men on weight loss over 10 years ago, at this point I had one of my early clients named VJ, and VJ did not want to exercise at all, but he had about 100 pounds to lose.
So, what we did with VJ is we built his nutrition system, which was literally this simple, we got him a standardized breakfast. First meal of the day was the same, every single day. He loved it. He didn't need to think about it. He could blend up that shake and smoothie really easily. It was delicious.
For lunch, we had him walk to get a Subway sub sandwich. And for dinner, he would get some chicken tikka masala or some tandoori chicken kind of stuff from a local Indian restaurant. And we had VJ execute this nutrition system for over four or five months and he lost over 65 pounds without ever setting foot in a gym, touching a dumbbell, doing anything like that.
VJ ate sandwiches. He had a consistent breakfast and we had go-to healthy meals at restaurants he can order around his house. The reason I bring this up is there's nothing about it that was a diet. I didn't tell you how many carbs VJ ate. I didn't tell you he was on the South Beach or Atkins diet, or whatever.
And what I helped him do is we looked at his life and we're like, OK, what stuff are you doing every single day? When are you waking up? When's it convenient for you to have breakfast? What are your favorite foods? And we built a custom system for him. And when you have a custom system that works for you, There's less friction.
It's not like you have to pack that cooler around and eat six small meals a day of chicken and broccoli … that doesn't work. It obviously doesn't work. We know that doesn't work. So how can we develop your system? And I want to help you start thinking about this in this episode, what are the architectures of a right nutrition system?
The first thing I like to teach when talking about this topic of nutrition systems is understanding that every time that you need to eat a healthy meal, that is a decision point in your life. Meaning you want to eat three healthy meals a day, let's say breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Those are three decision points where you need to exert willpower, cognitive thinking, about what kind of foods am I going to get?
Then you've got to go get them. You need to assemble it. There's a lot of steps that go into this. Now we put the challenge of the three decision points per day on top of your busy life. And it's no wonder why we're turning to convenience foods like takeout or junk food — its because we don't have the system.
So the first thing we have guys do is standardize that very first meal of the day. Imagine you have three meals per day, seven days per week. That's 21 decision points, 21 land mines. So you need to dodge if you want to eat and live healthily. But what if we remove that first third of them in breakfast every single day, so you had a regimented delicious breakfast?
That's consistent that you don't need to think about that. You can make it under five to 10 minutes. It fits you whatever time you want to have that breakfast, whether it's at 5:00 AM or it's at 11:00 AM and your fasting doesn't matter, you have a dialed in first meal. Our most successful clients — and we've seen this on over 40,000 people — have a dialed-in first meal.
This is a key aspect of your nutrition system. For many guys, it's using things like our Fit Father SuperFuel Protein inside of a smoothie. So you can whip up this delicious smoothie. It's so easy. It tastes great. Keeps you full to lunch. It has the right amount of calories, protein, nutrients to keep you energized and you love it.
And you don't even need to spend much time doing it. Or it can be some kind of egg breakfast, or it can be overnight oats with some fruit berries, all these different kinds of amazing things. The point is not what it is. It's do you know what it is for you? And if you want help with this, certainly our Fit Father program that actually gives you our meal plan with all these different kinds of, we call them go-to meals, that you can have for meal number one, but regimenting, that is key.
Because if you don't do that and you end up having some crap for breakfast — juices, muffins, pastries cereals, you're setting yourself up with this whole tailspin, your blood sugars out of control. You're starting this whole craving engine. So when you get to lunch, you're more likely to eat crap food. But if you can standardize that first meal, you set every new, fresh day off with the right tone, you're getting the right nutrients into your body.
You're feeling amazing and you don't need to think about it. It was part of a system. The system becomes a habit. Habit becomes consistent action. Consistent action gives you consistent results. Then you get this positive snowball that's possible. So first thing, standardize your first meal. The second thing is to pave the path for your success, with your nutrition, by doing some meal preparation.
So meal prep. Why is it important? Why does it help? It's because on Sunday I can go get all these groceries with my wife. We can cook things up in bulk and then we've paved the path for success. And I know whatever my go-to healthy foods are. I'm buying those things in bulk, cooking them in bulk.
Maybe I'm getting fresh fruit. Maybe there are vegetables you like, like broccoli or steamed spinach or asparagus. Maybe you like salmon, chicken, steak, eggs. Maybe you're vegan or vegetarian and you do tofu, Tempe, things like this. Making the decision that you're going to buy those healthy foods you love and bulk and cook them in bulk one day of the week sets your whole path for success.
Because imagine this … imagine if every time you needed a healthy meal, I personally knocked on your door. You open it up and here's me, Dr. A handing you your favorite healthy food. Hey, here's your favorite meal? It has protein veggies, healthy fats, healthy carbs. Enjoy it. I'll be back in a few hours for your dinner.
That would be an incredible service, right? We'd stay on track. We're eating foods we love, it's hand delivered to us. The next best thing that actually works long-term is meal prep, because we're doing that for ourselves. Anthony on Sunday is saying to Anthony on Wednesday, I got you, bro. I'm going to make this food on Sunday.
And now I know when you need to have a healthy meal, you know, on Wednesday at lunch, let's just say I'm grabbing whatever protein I had slapping it together, whatever veggies I cooked in, bulk throwing a little avocado or something on the side. And I'm out the door, a simple, healthy meal with foods I actually love because I bought the foods I love and I cooked them in bulk.
So the second pillar of this nutrition system is having some meal prep in place. It is so easy and it's going to help your family too. If you make the decision that you want to grill up a bunch of stuff once per week, and you have protein for the week and you pair that with some kind of veggie, literally, you're developing a system that works for you.
Very, very good. Another thing with any good system is it has to have protection against vulnerabilities. And vulnerability is when it comes to a consistent, healthy eating plan are things like late-night cravings and snacks, things like friends and family coming into town and we'd go out for some big crazy meal, or we drink a lot of alcohol and that derails our progress.
Most guys let these small things that are part of a healthy, balanced life derail them completely. Whereas if you had a system that had contingencies in place, For late-night snacking, for how you're going to manage those nights out, where you're eating different food off the plan. If you had a system in place, you could glide through that with so much ease.
So when it comes to cravings, do you have healthy food in your house? That's like healthy snack food. So some dark chocolate covered almonds, some kind of healthy dessert, a little bit of fruit. Do you have a go-to sweet fix that is healthy, that you can keep around the house for when that craving inevitably does happen?
Because no matter how long you do this health thing, eventually there might be, you know, you have that sweet tooth, you had a long day, you just need something in your system to help satisfy that craving. Do you have that in place for you? If you don't, that is a simple area of opportunity, because if you can just get rid of that one late-night snacking issue you had, you might lose five pounds just from that over the course of a couple of months, just from getting rid of those calories.
It's that powerful. And then do you have a proactive system in place that when you have friends and family in town or you go out for a date night with your spouse and you have a big meal, do you have that preplanned into your schedule?
Do you know that Friday night is your free meal? You get one free meal a week, and then the next day you get back onto your consistent regimented breakfast and you're back on the plan. These are the kinds of things that our Fit Fathers do. And we do it consciously. And these may seem like small things, but they're not, these are the big things because when you have these right kinds of little habits and triggers in your life, you're going to be able to make more consistent, healthy choices, which means you're going to win.
Because you're going to be more consistent. You'll have feedback loops that keep you on track. You won't be exerting all this willpower to try to figure out what healthy foods you need to eat. And all this thinking you'll have made the decisions ahead of time. You have a simple, sustainable thing to follow and you will see results no matter what your goal is, whether it's to lose 50 plus pounds, whether it's to build muscle in your 50s and 60s, whether it's to run a marathon or just generally live healthier, you need a system.
You need to build the system that works for you. And so if you want more help with this, obviously we have our full Fit Father program that gives you a meal plan and workouts. I personally coach you to succeed, all that great stuff, but that's not the point of this podcast. We have that website, we have Fit Father Project — there are links all over the place.
And where you can see that the point of this podcast is to get you thinking about your life, about your systems, and about what you can improve. Because if you can see the gaps, the gaps in your routine, you can fix them and you can close them and you can build a stronger house. You can build a stronger foundation and everything's going to start to work better because my promise to you is this …
You start living healthier and every area of your life is going to improve. Your energy is going to go up. Your confidence is going to go up. Your productivity is going to go up. Everything rises with a healthier body. That's what's possible for you. So in these episodes, we're going to keep these a little shorter on these punchy systems, style, health, philosophy, health tips.
I'm going to be coming at you straight direct to camera, direct to audio at least once per week, to give you these kinds of motivations and strategies. And in upcoming episodes, we're also going to drop incredible interviews where guys are going to come on this show and talk to you about the system that they figured out.
What's worked for them to produce such incredible transformations. I'm so excited to share those with you. So welcome again to the Fit Father Project Podcast. We are just getting started. I want you to reflect this week on systems. What are the systems in your nutrition that you have in place that are good?
Where are the gaps in your holes? What are you committing to improving for next week? Because that's all it is — being better than yesterday and doing that consistently. You can win my friend; I'm going to help you win.
All right, everyone. We'll catch you on the next episode. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the Fit Father Project Podcast. If you love what you heard, please rate and review our podcast on Apple Podcasts. It really helps spread the show to more men who need this valuable info. To watch full video episodes of this podcast and other motivational videos to inspire your training and more, visit our Fit Father Project YouTube Channel. It's free and everything's made for busy guys over 40 like you. Visit youtube.com/fitfatherproject to get access to our entire video library. And finally, if you or someone in your life is interested in becoming a Fit Father or needs help losing weight, building muscle, or living healthier after age 40, visit fitfatherproject.com, where you can see our proven programs, something in line for guys 40 plus, and free meal plan and workouts to get you started. This is Dr. Anthony Balduzzi signing off. I'll see you in the next episode.
*Please know that weight loss results & health changes/improvements vary from individual to individual; you may not achieve similar results. Always consult with your doctor before making health decisions. This is not medical advice – simply very well-researched info on why systems are better than diets.
