Phase 2: Take Baby Steps

Which diet will meet my health goals, lose weight, and increase fitness?

Probably all of them. The real question is: which one will you actually stick with?

This isn’t really a “what to eat” post. I may cover my actual diet in another post. This one is more about the things that helped me get started and, more importantly, helped me stick with it.

The biggest mindset shift: don’t think of it as giving things up. For the most part I feel like I added things to my diet and still kept most of the things I enjoy—I just have to moderate them a little more.

If I know dinner is pizza and I tend to overeat pizza, I can go light on lunch to give myself the room to over-indulge a bit.

How I started

(If I mention products I’ll link them at the bottom. I’ll probably do another post with a lot of the gear I like. Since you’re hopefully not eating out as much, you’ll have some money to invest in your health.)

1. Get a good scale.
   If you don’t already have one, this is your first buy. I like gadgets and wanted body fat percentage and other metrics. That’s optional, but having a good, accurate scale is really helpful. A smart scale is even better because of #2.

2. Pick a calorie tracker.
   This really depends on the person. For me, seeing the calories of what I was eating—and what I was about to eat—was very eye-opening.

3. Get a wearable.
   Moving more needs to be part of this. Having something to track movement, heart rate, and sleep is nice and keeps you honest.

4. Find a community.
   I found it very helpful to read other people’s stories and have places to ask questions. Reddit has been one of my favorite places for this. ChatGPT also became a go-to for my fitness and health questions (with the caveat that I try to ask questions where I’d know if the AI was way off).

5. Change your mind.
   Don’t lock yourself into any one way of doing things. Be flexible. Tomorrow you might learn something that’s better than what you’re doing today.

First steps in fitness

(I’ll detail this more in a later post.)

For me, this has been—and still is—walking and running.

I’ve enjoyed walking for many years, probably since my first wearable. The gamification kept me walking and even inspired me to get a standing desk and a treadmill.

But you can have all of that and still not use it.

Back to baby steps:

• I walked.
• I tried to run and “failed.”
• I walked more.
• I added a weighted vest and walked more.
• I was eventually able to run and walk.
• Then I ran more than I walked.
• Now I can run my entire goal distance, which is 5K right now.

I still walk daily as well.

First steps in diet

Don’t overthink food.

I love to cook and can get lost in recipes. The problem with that is time: complicated recipes sometimes mean I don’t cook and end up eating out.

What you eat is going to depend on what you like and where you are in your journey. As a first step, simply:

• Cook more and eat out less.
• Cut out or cut back on sugar.

For me, I wanted to cut my calories but still eat a fairly balanced diet—nothing keto, paleo, or extreme.

Right now we try to come up with simple recipes that are:

• Healthy
• Mostly unprocessed
• Easy and repeatable

We keep fruit handy for snacks or a quick hit of carbs (but still try to be mindful of blood sugar—more on that in the future).

A couple of examples:

• I literally toasted two pieces of bread, put spinach leaves and sardines on top, and called that a meal the other day.
• A common meal for us is baked sweet potatoes with seasoned ground beef and a sauce I make from sriracha and yogurt.

First steps in sleep

I’m still actively working on this part.

Sleep is essential for this whole journey—especially for blood pressure, fitness, and overall health.

Lack of good quality sleep:

• Increases cortisol
• Messes with blood pressure
• Disrupts blood sugar regulation
• Lowers metabolism (which fights against weight loss)

On top of that, I needed time to do the things: run, cook, prep food, etc. Lack of time has always killed my progress in the past.

The simple (not easy) fix: make time by scheduling it.

I conveniently live near my office, so it wasn’t unusual for me to wake up late, shower, do a couple chores, and get to the office just in time. To fit in a run, I started shifting my wake-up time earlier. As I walked and ran farther, I kept nudging it earlier.

As of now, I’m getting up most mornings at 5:30 and in bed by 9:30.

Simple habits that helped my sleep

1. No caffeine after noon.
   Maybe even earlier, depending on how your body handles caffeine. Most days I drink two cups of coffee. I add MCT powder, creatine, and inulin.

   • Creatine and inulin are just for supplementation.
   • MCT powder or oil gives the coffee some fat to bind to, which (for me) smooths out the caffeine crash.
   • It’s also a healthy fat and gives a few calories to start my day.

   I don’t drink coffee in the first 90 minutes after waking, following Andrew Huberman’s advice. I was kind of already doing this because I normally run first thing anyway.

   If I feel like I need another boost later, I’ll either make a half-caf cup or just do a cold plunge. It’s very rare that I drink caffeine after noon.

2. End meals several hours before bed.
   A lot of things need to happen before we get sleepy. One of them is that our heart rate needs to drop. That’s not going to happen if our body is still working hard to digest a big meal or late-night snack.

   Even if you fall asleep, it won’t be good, deep sleep. The most important stages are REM and deep sleep, and we don’t actually spend that long in either one—maybe about an hour to an hour and a half of each.

   A simple way to limit late eating is to introduce a fasting or eating window. I started with a basic 12/12 (12 hours eating, 12 hours fasting). Honestly, 12 hours should probably be default for most people.

   Over time I increased my fasting window to about 16 hours. Most days I’ve eaten all my calories by around 4:40–5:00 pm and don’t start eating again until about 8:40–9:00 am.

Like I said, I’m still working on the sleep part and will probably do a full post just on sleep.

Putting it together

Those are some of the first steps. You can get a long way with just:

• Moving more
• Cleaning up food
• Protecting your sleep

Once I made these changes, I saw improvements in my weight within the first month.

I did hit plateaus—sometimes I’d stop losing weight for a week or so. As you lose weight, your basal calorie needs go down too, so you usually have to trim calories a bit further or move more to keep losing. Most calorie-tracking apps adjust this automatically to some degree.

I’m at a point now where I don’t have to track calories, but I still do out of habit. I have a better feel for:

• How much I should eat based on whether I did cardio
• When I’m actually hungry vs. just eating out of habit or boredom

Baby steps, consistently, add up.