When you decide you want to lose some body fat, build muscle or get back into exercise, it’s tempting to change everything.
You start planning the ideal training routine. Then a new diet. A better bedtime.
Perhaps a smart watch that can tell you how badly you slept after you’ve spent half the night researching watches.
Before you’ve started, you’ve given yourself quite a lot to do.
In more than 20 years of coaching, I’ve often found that people arrive expecting to need a complete overhaul. Sometimes, once we talk through their week, there is already plenty worth keeping.
The useful question becomes: what is one thing we could adjust first?
Before changing your meals, look at your habits
A client recently asked me what they should be eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
We went through their usual meals. They were having protein at all three, alongside a reasonable balance of fats and good-quality carbohydrates. From what they described, the foundations sounded fairly solid.
So we looked at what happened around those meals.
They explained that when their children left some of their dinner, they would often finish it. They had cooked the food from scratch and didn’t want it to go to waste.
Understandable, especially when you’ve spent time preparing something everyone apparently wanted twenty minutes earlier!
But this was happening most evenings, on top of their own meals.
That gave us something specific to work on. Before rewriting breakfast, lunch and dinner, we could address the habit of automatically finishing the children’s food.
One change can be worth making
The adjustment we discussed was straightforward: save suitable leftovers for another meal instead of automatically eating them.
Better still, if the children regularly leave food, serve smaller portions initially and keep any extra available if they want it. That makes it easier to save untouched food for another day.
Suitable leftovers need cooling and storing safely. The Food Standards Agency advises refrigerating cooked leftovers within two hours and eating them within 48 hours, or freezing them. Some foods, including rice, need extra care. [1]
There was no need to invent a precise calorie saving for this client. That would depend on what they were eating and how much. But regularly finishing extra food was a sensible place to investigate.
It was also a clear action they could recognise in the moment: the children have finished, I’m clearing up, and this is where I usually pick at their plates.
That is much more specific than “I need to eat better”.
We would still need to see what happened. Did the change feel manageable? Were they hungry later? Was their progress moving in the direction they wanted? One adjustment gives us somewhere to start, then we review it.
You can keep foods you enjoy
We also discussed looking at a weekend habit once the first change felt manageable.
Take a cooked breakfast. If you usually have two rashers of bacon, two sausages and two eggs, could a smaller portion still be satisfying?
Going from two of each to one of each is one possibility. You might prefer to keep both eggs and reduce the bacon and sausages. The useful adjustment depends on your appetite, your overall diet and what you enjoy.
You can still sit down to a cooked breakfast on Saturday morning.
You’re considering the amount you serve, rather than assuming the whole meal has to disappear.
Research supports the relevance of portion sizes. A systematic review and meta-analysis published online in 2022 found that serving smaller portions reduced total daily calorie intake, on average, compared with larger portions. Evidence about longer-term weight effects was more limited. [2]
That doesn’t tell us exactly what changing your breakfast will achieve. It does give us a good reason to consider portions before deciding that every food choice needs replacing.
Give yourself something manageable to practise
I’m not suggesting everyone should change only one thing at a time. Some people enjoy making several changes together and manage them well.
But when someone already feels overwhelmed, my preference is often to agree on one clear action and work from there.
Changing a habit also takes practice. A 2024 systematic review found considerable variation in how long health-related habits took to become automatic. There was no single timetable that applied to everyone. [3]
You don’t need to wait for perfect consistency before taking another step. Equally, you don’t need to add three new targets just because Monday has come round again.
Start by looking at something that happens regularly. Perhaps you eat while clearing up, pour a drink without really deciding whether you want it, or serve the same portion out of habit even when your appetite is different.
Then ask yourself: what could I adjust here that would help me and still feel realistic?
If you’re eating because you’re genuinely hungry, that deserves attention too. The answer might involve making an earlier meal more satisfying. Simply trying harder to ignore hunger may miss the problem.
Start with what needs changing
A nutritious diet can still include habits that make fat loss harder. Equally, wanting to lose fat doesn’t mean everything about your diet is wrong.
Before changing breakfast, lunch, dinner and your entire exercise routine, take a proper look at what you already do.
Keep what is working. Choose one useful adjustment. Give yourself time to practise it, notice the result and build from there.
You may need further changes as you go. You don’t have to make them all today.
If you’d like help identifying where to start, I offer private personal training at clients’ homes in Henley-on-Thames and surrounding areas, alongside online coaching.
Thanks for reading,
Joseph Webb
Expert coaching. Entirely personal.
Chartered Personal Trainer | FRSPH | FCIMSPA
