So You Want to Lose Weight and Get Stronger

We're entering a new year and that means a lot of people are making a resolution to lose weight and get stronger. A vast majority of people give up on their resolutions within two to four weeks. If you're a regular at a gym, you can see this play out in real time. You'll see a sudden flood of new members at the beginning of the year. That initial flood will slowly diminish over the next month until the attendance rate returns to pre-new-year normal.

Just because you make a resolution to lose weight and get stronger doesn't mean you have to fail. The biggest mistake most people make with their fitness resolutions is immediately jumping into the deep end. They thrash about, almost drown, and then give up. The following are my suggestions to help you succeed in becoming more fit in 2025.

1. Ask Yourself If This Is What You Want

It's easy to say you want to lose weight and get stronger. It's another thing entirely to do the work. Before you begin, take a few moments to honestly ask yourself if this is what you want to do. Do you seriously want to dedicate about two or three hours a week to exercising? What activities will you give up to carve that time out of your week? Exercise is only productive if you also give proper time to recovery. Muscles are damaged at the gym. They are repaired and made stronger in your sleep. Are you going to get enough sleep? Again, if you're not already getting seven or more hours of sleep a night, what activities will you give up to carve the extra time out of your week? What about your diet? Are you willing to eat healthier? Will you cut out junk food and instead focus on meat, vegetables, and consuming enough water? Will you forego processed pre-made meals and instead take up cooking your own meals?

I don't mean this section to be discouraging. It's better to recognize you're unwilling to make these changes right away because if you're not, you're going to fail no matter what. Better to save yourself the cost of a gym membership if you're not going to use it.

2. Develop a Plan

If you don't go in with a plan, you will end up chasing every rabbit you see. If you chase every rabbit you see, you won't catch any of them. You need to focus your efforts. You need to prioritize. Going to the gym three days a week won't be productive if you don't have a plan for what you're going to do there.

Create a list of goals. Try to make them manageable. Then determine which goal you want to focus on first. For example, let's say you have three goals: lose 100 pounds, press 100 pounds overhead, and run a marathon. Those are pretty lofty goals. If you choose to pursue them, you'll likely become discouraged because they will all take a long time to realize. So let's revise those goals into something more manageable. Let's instead focus on losing 10 pounds, pressing 40 pounds overhead, and running a 5k race. These goals can be realized in a reasonable amount of time, but not necessarily at the same time. Losing weight involves eating at a caloric deficit (you use more calories in a day than you consume). Building muscle on a caloric deficit is challenging. Trying to lose 10 pounds and press 40 pounds overhead at the same time might not be the best choice.

This is where prioritization comes in. Let's assuming that the order of the list is also the order of your priorities. You want to lose 10 pounds more than the other two goals. You want to press 40 pounds overhead more than run a 5k race. You can certainly work towards these goals together. Strength training can help with weight loss. Weight loss can help with running a 5k. The reason for prioritization is deciding which rabbit to chase when you're looking at several. If you want to lose 10 pounds more than you want to press 40 pounds overhead, you can eat a more severe caloric deficit to lose weight faster. It'll hinder your strength gains, but you'll catch the weight loss rabbit rather than not catch either the weight loss rabbit or the strength training rabbit.

Plans aren't set in stone. You can change them. Don't fret over your plan being perfect. Just have some kind of reasonable plan. You can update it as the need or desire arises.

3. Small Incremental Changes

You've reflected on whether weight loss and strength training are things you want to pursue and developed a plan. Now what? The fastest way to lose 10 pounds is to stop eating altogether, but it's a stupid plan.

Many people fail because they make too drastic of changes too quickly. They decide that they want to lose weight so they completely change their diet. They stop eating all of the foods they love and force themselves to eat foods they hate. They decide that they want to get stronger so they hit the gym every day. They come home sore every day and that makes them cranky. Needless to say, they become miserable. Then they give up.

You don't have to jump into the deep end of the swimming pool when you start. You can walk into the shallow end. You can even spend some time in the kiddy pool. Small incremental changes over time are more manageable than big changes all at once. Consider your diet. If you want to lose weight, you don't need to immediately stop eating everything that isn't a vegetable or meat. Simply cutting back on the amount of soda you drink is a good first step. If you drink two cans a day, first cut yourself back to one can a day. Eventually you might cut yourself back to a can every other day, then a can a week, and eventually a can every month or two (you don't need to stop entirely, but you can). You don't have to immediately replace potato chips with vegetables. You can add some vegetables to your meals and eat fewer chips. Then you can adjust that ratio more and more in favor of vegetables. Over the span of weeks and months you slowly phase our the junk food for something more nutritious. The small improvements over time add up.

What you're doing with these small incremental changes is forming new habits. Many poor health choices are habits you've developed. You developed a habit of drinking soda and snacking on junk food. You developed a habit of doom scrolling social media. You developed a habit of sitting on the couch and watching television. Breaking habits is difficult. Slowly transforming bad habits into good habits through small changes is easier. You don't have to stop watching television entirely and replace that time with walking. You can instead set aside 15 minutes of your television time to go for a walk. You can then slowly decrease your television time and increase your walk time. Over time you'll go from a couch potato to a person who walks a lot of miles every week.