Today we’re talking losing weight.

I am going to do my best to give you a concise strategy for losing weight – one which is both manageable and sustainable (unlike the majority of diets people go on).

Here are the key things to remember:

• Eat Less
• Move More
• Be consistent with the above (90% is fine, the difference between 90% and 100% is actually pretty insignificant in terms of results)

It’s all about calories in vs. calories out at the end of the day.

Here is an example; let’s say your body maintains its bodyweight at 2,500 calories. If you want to lose weight, you need to create a deficit, plain and simple.

And the way you create that deficit is either by consuming less calories (eating less) or increasing activity (moving more). Generally a deficit of between 250-500 calories is a good start. So let’s say we went with 500, eating 250 calories less and doing a 250 calorie workout per day would do the job.

If you do this on a consistent basis, you will lose weight and when you hit a plateau and you want to push things further, you simply need to adjust how much you eat and how much activity you do.

Generally it’s best to do most of the controlling with diet but further down the line you’ll most likely be doing a fair bit of activity to achieve sub 12% levels of leanness. (For example, to maintain 168lbs @ 12.5% bodyfat, I was consistently eating 1,800 calories a day and do 5 hours of cardio per week – not pretty)

Let’s face it though, 90% of people are not willing to count calories and unless you want to be particularly lean, it’s probably not necessary… so we’ll leave calorie talk there. The only reason I wanted to talk about them is to explain the calorie in vs. out scenario and the importance of creating a deficit.

For most people, a change in their eating habits and a decent plan for being active is all that is required to shed some weight. For example, I reduced my weight from 215lbs to 190lbs by simply doing this and then used a more detailed calorie counting plan to go from 190lbs to 168lbs.  So I was able to lose 25lbs by simply changing my eating habits and having a decent plan for being active.

So let’s start with the eating bit as it’s the most important. And again, there are probably more effective ways to lose fat than this, but I am trying to keep it as simple and manageable as possible so that you will actually stick with it consistently.

Diet

There are two things we’ll focus on – eating less and restricting carbohydrates. These are the two things that worked incredibly well for me and seem to be a consistent amongst those in the knowhow of manipulating bodyweight.

Here is how I want you to eat, Mon to Fri.

Skip Breakfast

The reason I want you to skip breakfast is that for most people it’s the best strategy for ensuring you eat less. Simply put, once you start eating, you kind of get into the habit of wanting to eat more and let’s face it the later you start eating, the less time you have in the day to physically cram food into your mouth. You’ll feel hungry in the mornings at first, but it’ll soon go away, just focus on being busy and you’ll probably find you are more productive each day as a result.

Lunch

Have a well balanced (protein, carbohydrates and fat) meal here, but be conscious of keeping your carbohydrates to a small/medium portion.

So for example, a chicken sandwich with some mayo (chicken = lean protein, bread = carbohydrates and mayo = fat)

or

Pasta Bolognese (beef = protein/fat, pasta and sauce = carbohydrates)

You get the idea, just aim for a pretty clean, well balanced meal and don’t go overboard on carbohydrates. As many vegetables as you want (the fibre content of them offsets the carbohydrates).

Evening Meal

Here we’re going to shoot for a protein heavy, medium fat and low carbohydrate meal. So a chicken salad with oil/nuts or any type of meat with vegetables etc. Again, as many vegetables as you want.

As for snacking, try to keep it to a minimum but if you do, stick to healthy, low calorie options such as fruit, perhaps a granola bar etc.

Some other tips – drink lots of water, learn to like diet sodas as they contain no calories and you can drink as much of them as you want and they make you feel full.

And that’s it Mon – Fri.

• Skip Breakfast
• Lunch – Well balanced meal, being conscious of carbohydrate intake
• Evening Meal – Low carbohydrate meal

Now, on the face of it, this might seem a bit extreme. Even as I type it, I am starting to think that perhaps this is not enough calories, but wait for the best bit….. The Weekend.

The Weekend

At the weekend, we have more freedom, so pretty much do what you like. Just don’t be an absolute PIG. If you nailed Mon – Fri perfectly, letting loose at the weekend should be viable.

The eating like a PIG bit is important though. Remember the calories in vs out bit? If you eat insane amounts of food at the weekend, you may well end up creating an overall surplus or maintenance scenario for the overall week, which means you’ll gain or stay at the same weight.

Generally speaking though, if you followed Mon – Fri as outlined, you can relax and be normal on weekends. Have a nice breakfast with your loved one, eat out at lunch and a nice hearty meal in the evening. Just remember, you don’t ALWAYS have to have dessert

The reason this diet is manageable is you only have to follow 5 strict days with an end in sight – 2 days of completely relaxing and not worrying about dieting.

Activity

I’m not going to go into detail here as it’s a pretty big topic in itself, but simply make sure you are as active as possible.

Aim to get into the gym 2-3 times a week and do some form of activity. Don’t shy from the weights either – 30 mins weights/30mins cardio is a pretty decent session. Do that’s 3 times a week and you should be set. On top of that simply be conscious about moving around a bit more – bike or walk instead of drive, go for an evening stroll. Whatever – just move about as much as you can.

Wrap Up

If you eat very clean and restrict carbohydrates Mon – Fri and also do 2-3 hours of activity on a weekly basis, you should be able to shed some decent weight. Lets face it right now you’re eating too much or probably not being very active (or both!) so simply doing this should be enough for how much 90% of people want to lose.

If you find yourself not losing weight, then you’re probably pigging out too much at the weekend, reign it in a little, make sure Mon – Fri is spot on and considering moving about a bit more.

And if you end up losing quite a bit of weight, but then stall and want to push things further, then is probably the time to consider a more detailed approach such as counting calories and being stricter on weekends.

If you have any questions, ask away!

Today I’m hating on SEO. For those of you that are not aware, SEO stands for ’search engine optimization’.

In short it’s the practice of optimizing your website so that it ranks high in search engine results. There are normally two main focuses – the actual content itself and technical optimization.

Let’s face it; search engine traffic is a BIG DEAL. Just one quick look at the web stats for one of my sites shows that Google is responsible for 68% of my visits in the last 30 days. Mind blowing really…

So it’s easy to see how we’ve become obsessed with SEO. Get it wrong and your site could just be one of a billion floating around in internet ghost town. Get it right and it can blow up your site and translate into significant revenue (depending on what type of site you run).

So why am I hating on SEO you ask?

Firstly, because people just seem to have become utterly obsessed with it. They sit there hammering out key word rich content and building incoming links on a daily basis and seem to launch a new website or blog every week. If only they spared a thought for the poor souls that have to read this nonsense?

And of course, most are too lazy to do it themselves, so they just farm it out to an SEO company promising top page results.

The sad thing is that because there are so many SEO cowboys out there, there’s a good chance that they will do something silly (duplicate content, dodgy code or using suspect software to short cut work) and this will actually result in one of the important search engines penalizing/blacklisting your site.

The end result? Uninteresting, inaccurate content, poor quality incoming links, a website which normally looks a bit odd to the reader (because it has been optimized for the search engines over the reader) and a good chance you may get blacklisted.

EPIC fail.

Now to be fair, those obsessed with SEO normally do build higher levels of visits to their site. So, it’s all good right?

Maybe not….

What’s the point in just having more visits if it’s just numbers in your web stats? Surely you want people to actually find your website content useful and maybe even enjoy it? Surely you want to be able trigger some type of call to action or to be able monetize your audience in some way?

This is what people forget. Purely building more visits is useless if when people go to your site, they quickly leave when they realize it’s a bit…. eh…

The other factor in all of this is when people get so obsessed with SEO, they normally put more time and energy into it and then neglect the actual content, service or product they want to offer and if you don’t have this, you’re dead anyway.

Ok, so I’ve hated/ranted enough, so in my bid to give you some good, useful content – here are my top tips for what counts in SEO land. This stuff can get fairly in depth, so I am keeping it pretty short on purpose (I have a day job too!), if you have any questions about it, just ask in the comments.

1. Title Tags and Descriptions

First of all, get your titles and descriptions in good shape (these actually reside in the code of the page). The reason these are important is because when you do a Google search this is what is displayed to the user and ultimately plays a big part in their decision to click through to your site or not.

Here is an example:

Don’t get all bent out of shape trying to craft the most perfect titles and descriptions, just keep them meaningful (they should be an accurate representation to the content), key word rich and concise.

I normally go for the following format for the title tag:

Page Title | Site name

So using the picture above as the example, an article on my Wannabebig site called ‘Eating Optimally for Massive Size and Strength’ would be:

Eating Optimally for Massive Size and Strength | Wannabebig

And my description is normally a short sentence which helps sell the article and summarizes what the content is about. So, for the ‘ Eating Optimally for Massive Size and Strength’ article it looks like this:

If you can control daily insulin releases by eating the right foods at the right time, you can start to unlock your true growth potential!

And that’s it. Leave alone and resist the temptation to keep fiddling about with them.

2. Search Engine Friendly urls

Keep your urls key word rich and a sensible structure and leave it at that. So for example the url for my article referenced above is http://www.wannabebig.com/diet-and-nutrition/eating-optimally-for-massive-size-and-strength/

3. Frequent, good quality content

Search engines like frequently updated, key word rich content. The trick is making sure that first and foremost your content is something that your reader base will enjoy and find useful and/or effectively sells your product or service.  In fact, I would urge you to write it for your reader first before evening thinking about SEO.

Once you are happy with it, give it a key word rich title (not the same as the above title we talked about, think chapter in a book title) and then go back through the content and see if there is an opportunity to make the body of the content a little more key word rich (without sacrificing the quality/flow).

Lastly, aim to update your site with new content a couple of times a week. Search engines like sites who update frequently and on a simpler level the more content you have, the more content that can be indexed.

If you run a reasonably static site, consider adding a blog as this will give you an excellent way to create short pieces of content on a frequent basis.

Bottom line – frequent, good quality content builds high quality traffic – that’s the plain truth.

4. Quality incoming links

Incoming links are very important and there are two factors here – quantity and quality.

There are normally two ways to build good quality incoming links. Strangely enough, high quality content organically builds incoming links because you will find people will read your content and then WANT to reference and link to it form their site.

You could also go out and ask for them for a link back or trade links with other sites (just bear in mind external links on your own site can affect your search engine rankings). The bigger and better ranked the sites linking to you, the better your search engine benefit.

And that’s it.

Just focus on those 4 things and again don’t get all obsessive about it, it should only be a small part of what you concern yourself with. Producing a good looking, usable site with frequently updated, high quality content is 98% of the battle. So why spend huge amounts of time on the other 2%?

And don’t always worry about the pure numbers. HIGH quality traffic means more than just pure traffic. Care about things like the length of site visit, what content people are reading more often, the most exited piece of content and the level of interaction from your readers (comments etc). It’s better to have a small, loyal and interested reader base, than just big numbers of people landing on your site, but leaving after 5 seconds.

A Great Example

I want to leave you with a good example of a guy who I think is getting it spot on.

Nate Green runs a lifestyle blog called The Nate Green Experience, and to be frank I’m in awe (but not surprised) of how he has built a really high quality online following. I doubt his overall site numbers are massive, but you can tell from the comments on his blog that his reader base really enjoy and appreciate his content.

His blog posts often get 50+ genuine comments and his site is one of a handful that sit in my Google Reader.

Nate is nailing it, check this out:

- Good looking, usable site – check
- Sensible title and description tags – check
- Frequent, good quality content – check
- Incoming links – to be fair, I haven’t checked but my guess is that he has some decent people linking to his content and I know he writes exclusively for a very popular online magazine which links back to his site – bingo!

And I bet if you asked Nate what he does from a search engine perspective, he would probably just tell you he doesn’t focus on it too much, he just focuses on good content.

If there is one thing you take away from this post it should be that everything has a habit of falling into place when you just create a good looking, usable site with frequently updated, high quality content

This is why I love reading books. In each book I read there are a couple of take home messages that really hit home. And it doesn’t have to be an outstanding book, sometimes even an overall average book can have just one very relevant take home message that makes a massive difference to you.

They can be obvious and jump out right away and at other times it can take a while for things to sink in and then you may get a bit of an ‘aha moment’ at a later date (often an external factor triggers the memory).

This happened to me recently when I read Rework by 37 Signals (which is an outstanding book by the way). There was a topic about the importance of not just selling to your customers, actually educating them. And over the next couple of days my mind started to race about just how important this is and it inspired me to write this blog post!

So many companies either miss this point entirely or try and do it and fail miserably and end up missing a huge opportunity.

So what does educating your customers mean?

Well, most products or services fall within a particular area of interest right? If you are selling a product or a service, your customer base obviously has a passion or at least some interest related to your product or service right?

So rather than simply sell them your products/services, if you can help educate them in your particular area of interest you’ll build stronger, more loyal relationships with your customers, which will ultimately mean they will buy more and more often from you and they will refer more customers to you.

Why?

Because you’ll show them that you actually CARE about them. You’ll show them that you’re not simply a faceless business without a personality in it purely for the transaction, but you actually have a passion for doing what you’re doing and you care that your customers have a rich experience.

And trust me, this will set you apart from 95% of your competitors and your customers will notice and reward you for it. This is also a great way for a smaller business with larger, more established competitors to stand out amongst the crowd.

Ok, I’ve been a bit vague, so let’s take an example.

Your name is Betty and you run a cake shop (I just picked Betty because Betty’s Cake shop has a nice ring to it lol). You are one of three cake shops in the area. You tend to have a pretty varied customer base, making cakes for occasions but also offering lots of little treats for people to grab on the go etc. People in town love your cakes and you’ve got a pretty good reputation for having tasty cakes, but then so do your competitors. You’re pretty equally matched if we’re going to be honest about it.

Now, you could simply just sell cakes to your customers. You do it well and people like them so it’s all good right?

Well sure, but you could go a step further and really show your customers just how passionate you are about cake making and also educate them on the art of cake making (they at least have an interest in eating cakes and probably for making them).

Just a few ideas off the top of my head…

• You could actually tell and show your customers how you make cakes
• You could have a kitchen open day where your customers can see you in action making your cakes
• You could run classes where you show your customers how to make great cakes
• You could share your recipes and hand them out to your customers for free, making it easy for them to have a go themselves
• You could hold a competition for the best made customer cake (free cakes for a week for the best one!)
• You could sell your customers cake making books and magazines or even just have them available in the shop to browse
• You could have a blog on your website where you share your cake making wisdom with your customers

And the list could go on.

The key thing here is that you are actually showing just how passionate you are about making cakes and you’re making a genuine effort to help enrich your customer’s lives in cake making.

And genuinely is the key word here. You have to go about this with passion and a real thirst for sharing the joys of cake making with the world. If you fake it, your customers will notice that too and it’ll be worse than not doing it at all.

And don’t worry that you’ll be giving out your secrets. Do you honestly think if you give out your recipes your customers will be able to make cakes just as good as you? If they could, well you’re probably not just that good at making cakes Most likely though you have a real gift for making great cakes and that cannot easily be copied.

Now, imagine if you did this and your competitors just sold cakes?

You would definitely stand out from your competitors and be more popular. Your customers would visit you more often and buy more from you. They would tell their friends about you and most importantly they would be your fan rather than just being your customer which in turn makes referrals so much more powerful.

Think about other companies that do this well. Big supermarkets like Sainsbury’s and Waitrose don’t just sell good food, but they help their customers have the best food experience. Just selling them good food is not good enough.

Take a look at www.waitrose.com for a good example. You can find recipes from Delia and Heston, great picnic recipes and spots in the UK and they have a free weekly magazine which contains product reviews, lifestyle articles, events, recipes etc. And this stuff seems to stand out more than their online store!

I do this with my own business too. Sure, we sell products on AtLarge Nutrition (and they are great products). However, in addition to that we run Wannabebig where we are insanely passionate about helping our customers achieve their fitness goals more quickly. Whether you want to get big and strong or lean and mean you’ll find really useful and inspiring articles and a large, helpful community that will help you get there more quickly. We literally spend thousands of dollars every month paying the best writers in the field to write content for us so that our customers can be as well informed as possible.

So whether you own your own business or work for someone else, I encourage you to think about how you can share your passion and educate your customers rather than simply sell to them – you’ll be pleasantly surprised just how much it can grow your business and help set you apart from your competitors!

I’d love to hear from you if you already do this or perhaps have ideas for doing this in the future!

What’s the most common excuse you hear from people when they fail to see something through?

‘I just didn’t have enough time…..’

I’ve used it, you’ve used it and you’ll know others that used it. However 95% of the time, this is just a lame excuse for not having enough determination to get something done.

Now I fully appreciate that time can be a factor in things and when it is, you simply have to have to suck it up, prioritise and get the most important stuff done. Every one of us though could be using our time more effectively and if we did we would make much more progress in the areas that are important to us.

Have a plan for the day

First of all you have to use the bulk of your time wisely. You absolutely have to have a PLAN for the day and if you are smart you will have a plan for the week and you’ll pull your daily plan from that. If you start your day without a plan, you’ll be more likely to do random things or get dragged into things that other people want you do to.

Get into the habit of sitting down for 15 minutes each morning and planning out what you intend to do that day. Put rough timings on each task and if your aim to work for 5 hours, plan just shy of that to account for inevitable distractions. Once you have a list of tasks timed up, put an asterix next to no more than two, these will be your MUST DO’s for the day. Then put them in the order that you plan to do them and attack them.

Have a plan to deal with distractions

You need to have a solid plan to deal with distractions that will come your way. It could be idiot colleagues just looking to waste your time aswell as theirs, people coming to you with non-urgent discussions/tasks or whatever.

You need at least a couple of ‘head down’ parts of the day where your head is literally down and you are working uninterrupted – it’s amazing how much you can get done when you set yourself up to make this happen.

Shut down your Email and any instant messengers (and computer if you can!), turn off your phone, make your colleagues aware that you will be unavailable and if anyone does come up to you, be stern (but polite) and let them know you are extremely busy and on a deadline and you will get back with them later.

Make extra time

‘I cannot wait until they ivent a 25 hour day’

You must have heard this before. The truth is most people don’t need more hours, they just need to learn how to utilize and leverage the time they currently have.

I did a bit of a test this week. I have been meaning to read/listen to audio books regularly for years now and if I am honest I think I buy 5 times as many books as I actually read lol. So this week, I tried to make sure that I took advantage of the times of the day where I was generally doing tasks where I could easily do something alongside it. Walking the dog, Taking a crap, making and eating breakfast, driving, doing cardio etc. And I have nearly gotten through a whole 3 hour audiobook this week.

So I challenge you to have a think about times of the day which you could be doing something more useful alongside it. If you drive for an hour a day, you could be filling your brain with inspiring, motivation information…. or you could just listen to Chris Moyles talking rubbish

Do Work!

Over the last 10 years or so I have either listened to or read at least 30 different systems of setting life goals. I’m glad I did because over the years I have ended up taking bits from each one and narrowed it down into something that works for me.

Strangely enough (being slightly sarcastic here) what works best for me is a very simplistic approach that focuses on what actually gets you closer to your goals – taking ACTION.

And I thought I would share this with you

Before I do, if you are looking for a goal setting audio program/book, in my opinion Anthony Robbins Time of Your Life is absolutely fantastic.  It’s very in depth and a word of warning, it can be overwhelming and overall I think it’s too complex a system to use but it definitely covers all of the key angles of setting and achieving life goals.

Anyway, back to my super simple system – this will take less than TWO hours to plan out the next 12 months goals and your next weeks goals!

1. Identify the key categories of your life – wow this sounds a bit hard, but it isn’t. Literally spend no more than 15 mins jotting down 5-6 areas of your life that are important to you. (ones you truly want to spend time on and achieve results in)

Here is my list: (I have 7)

• Physical
• Friends and Family
• Ella (my girlfriend )
• Financial
• Learning
• Me
• Business/Entrepreneur

2.  Ok, so now you have your key categories list, you need to create a few key areas within each one which you will focus on. This helps you channel your energy in the right places in each category. No more than 5, preferable 3-4 and this should take you no more than about 15 mins.

Here is my physical as an example:

Physical

• Mobility
• Strength
• Physique

3. Ok, so now that you have your key categories and a few key areas in each of them, you need to identify what you want to achieve in the next 12months and then 3 months. The reason I only go for 12months and 3 months is this is enough to give you enough long term and short term focus – anything more just complicates things and this stuff changes regularly anyway. Spend about an hour doing this.

Here are my physique goals (within my physical category) as an example:

Physique Goals

• 12 months: 185lbs @ 10% bodyfat
• 3 months: 12stone @ 10% bodyfat

4. You’re nearly there now! You now have key categories, key areas in each and some 12 month and 3 month goals! You’re actually have a plan for your life and are in control of it, congrats!

The last bit is weekly planning.

At the beginning of the week (I prefer Sunday evening) review each key category and decide which areas you will focus on and jot down some action items for the week. Now, you don’t have to come up with an action item for every area and every category, keep the big picture in mind. For example one week I may want to focus mostly on my physical category and not worry about my financial category. In fact maybe I want to do that for one month and then I will get back round to the financial area. As long as you don’t neglect one for too long, think the spinning plates metaphor.

So you might end up with say 10 action items or maybe only 5, it’s really up to what and how much you want to do that week.

Once you have your total list of action items, circle 3 as absolute musts and do them no matter WHAT.

Then nail those items in the week.

Repeat next week.

What it all boils down to is having some idea of where you want to be spending your time (key categories and areas) and what exactly you want to achieve in those (12M and 3M) but then focusing on the actions that will get you there (weekly planning)

There are of course lots of other things you can get into (visions, purposes, more specific time planning etc etc) and if you lack the motivation within to be working on your goals it is a good idea to look into them, I’ve just tried to share a simple and effective way for you to control your own life with simple goal setting!

Let me know if this is useful to you!