In the gym world, while the first week of January may be the busiest time of year, the start of September is a pretty close second.  Summer winds down, people come back to work, the school year boots up, and everyone generally seems to be ready to buckle down and make some change in their lives.

All too often, however, people set out on that road by making a bunch of big changes.  They completely revamp their diets.  They start working out five or six times a week.  And for a few weeks, it goes like gangbusters.  But by a month in, almost all of them have fallen off the wagon, reverting back to their original habits.  Because – as both the research and most people’s direct experience shows – large-scale, all-at-once change is extremely difficult to sustain.  And much like tooth-brushing, fitness habits really on help so long as you’re actively keeping them up.

But here’s the good new: there are a bunch of small changes that are surprisingly effective, and highly sustainable.  I’ve been researching a ton of them for Composite, and I’m going to start sharing them here, too: simple things you can do that make a disproportionately large impact on your fitness and health.

To encourage you to actually put these suggestions into use, I’ll be posting them one a month.  That gives you thirty days to actively focus on one behavior, baking it into unconscious and automatic habit by the time you start on the next one a month later.

Here we go.

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KISS Weight Loss Habit #1

This one’s as simple as it gets:

30 minutes before each meal, drink 16oz of water.

That’s it.

But according to a recent study in Obesity, just that single, stupidly easy intervention allowed subjects to lose an average of 10.5 pounds in 12 weeks.  (!!!)

I’ll skip over the science (which hinges on tricking your brain’s satiety sensing system), and stick with the simplicity theme.  A big glass of water, a half hour before you eat.  That’s it.  But that alone is enough to jump-start serious weight loss.  Try it for a month, and then check in again for the next one.

Here’s a depressing fact: the average American gains about two and a half pounds each and every year.  Which means, over the decades, you can probably expect to slowly balloon up to increasingly ill health.

Of course, there are a slew of ways you can counter that upward trend, from healthier eating to walking more each day.  But there’s one hugely effective approach that people often overlook: building some muscle.

Unlike fat – which just sits there – muscle is metabolically active.  Which means that, just by existing, muscle burns calories.  A pound of muscle, in fact, burns about 10 calories a day.  And while that may not sound like much, it adds up surprisingly quickly.  Over the course of a year, each pound of added muscle burns off a pound of fat.

Thus, if you put on just five pounds of new muscle in one year, you would burn off five pounds of fat annually after that.  That’s enough to not only offset the average 2.5-pound gain, but also to help you lose 2.5 pounds each and every year instead.  In other words, as the decades added up and everyone else slid downhill, you’d be getting ever healthier, and looking increasingly good naked, instead.

Normally when I mention this to anyone over even just 30 years old, they tell me they’re too old to get started on lifting weights.  But as a great recent study showed, men in their mid to late 90’s, beginning strength training for the first time, still managed to build substantial strength and put on new muscle mass in just twelve weeks.  So, really, you don’t have any excuse.

In fact, research seems to be showing that strength training positively impacts pretty much every aspect of health and is possibly the single best way to ‘die young as late as possible’.  Yet, for whatever reason, the majority of exercisers still tend to pick up cardio training first (along with maybe some stretching), while overlooking strength training entirely.

But if you do what the majority does, you’ll get what the majority gets; and, here in America, in terms of bodyweight and general health, that’s probably not what you want.  So, buck the trend, and add in a couple of short strength training sessions each week.

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A quick addendum:

In discussion with friends here today, I was reminded that there’s often confusion about what actually constitutes strength training, and about how people gain muscle.  To make a long story short, it boils down to something called ‘progressive overload’ – essentially, lifting incrementally more weight over time.  If you can press ten-pound dumbbells overhead today, and are still pressing those same dumbbells in six months, you haven’t gotten any stronger, and you won’t gain any of that fat-burning, health-promoting new muscle you want.  Instead, you need to build to twelve then fifteen then twenty-pound dumbbells over future months to see results.

That’s hardly a new revelation.  It dates back at least to the 6th Century BC, when Milo of Crete became the most famous athlete in all of Greece after winning the gold medal in wrestling (the big deal sport at the time) six Olympics in a row.  He was a farm boy and had trained by picking

For the last year or two, I’ve been starting each quarter with five days of Fast-Mimicking Diet, a low calorie (1000C on the first day, 700C each on days two-five), low protein quasi-fast that research is increasingly backing as a great tool for cancer prevention, longevity, and general health.  This quarter, I started the FMD a few days early, at the end of June, so I’d be done in time to BBQ binge on the 4th.  And, as per usual, I also used the FMD as a chance to take a week off from the gym, both because I think an intermittent complete break from training is wise in general, and because it’s almost a necessity for me given the week’s calorie restriction versus my normal, fast-metabolism-driven ‘human garbage disposal’ eating style.

Most quarters, however, I still do a bunch of walking during my FMD-ing.  But as my previously-mentioned knee tweak is still on the mend, without really meaning to, I’d also temporarily dropped from my usual daily 10-15k steps to just whatever bare minimum of limpy walking was required to get to work or meals or move around indoors.  Thus, for the final days of last week I was barely moving, and over the weekend, I pretty much wasn’t moving at all.

Early this year, when I started having back pain, I traced it to a similar walking fall-off, and ‘miraculously’ cured myself just by starting doing sufficient daily walking again.  But, apparently, I’m a slow learner.  Or, conversely, maybe I didn’t realize how quickly the absence of walking could be felt—especially if I’m also not pushing myself in the gym.

Indeed, by Saturday night, I got in bed, and spent several hours staring at the ceiling before I was finally able to fall asleep.  And then, on Sunday, despite being super tired all day, I again got in bed and couldn’t fall asleep, this time for pretty much the entire night, watching the time slowly tick by in fifteen minute increments until I gave up and groggily got out of bed at 5am.

By Monday, I felt terrible.  But I was also at least just smart enough to have identified potential cause and effect.  So, I got in at least 7500 steps, tweaky knee be damned.  And I made it to the gym for a short workout, easing back into light squats, presses, and deadlifts.

Monday evening, I was out cold almost before my head hit the pillow.  And then slept like a log for eight and a half hours straight.

So, if your own sleep is less stellar than you might hope, consider adding some movement into your day.  Even thirty minutes of fast walking makes a big difference for me, and that’s a small amount of time to invest for seven or eight far-more-pleasant hours of snoozing in exchange.