Change for Those Resistant to Change

A couple of years a go, I had a consult with a client that will probably go down in history as one of the biggest moments of my career. It was with a woman who has been battling obesity for her entire life and had almost decided to give up. She had high blood pressure, was pre-diabetic, had chronic knee, hip and back pain, and was on enough medications to make a pharmacy jealous, and was 312 pounds while standing 5’4″.

When we first met up, we spent pretty much the majority of the first consult simply talking in the office, me trying to find out what she was looking to do and what I could do for her, and her trying to tell me what had failed in the past and how this time wasn’t going to be any different, and why she didn’t understand why she even bothered being there in the first place. She was what we now jokingly called a “defeatist elitist” in that she absolutely KNEW she wasn’t going to lose any weight or get healthy.

Now before I started going into a run-down of what the workout program would look like, complete with mobilizers, activators, flux capacitors, metabolic hybrid engines and what-not, and even more exciting concepts like intermittent fasting or eating breakfast or cutting back on triple triples (for the non-Canadians out there, Google it), I had to take a bit of a different plan of action.

Behaviorists everywhere have said repeatedly that the most new traits or habits that a person can begin working on simultaneously is 2. What that means is that if she was willing to show up to the gym to work out, she would only successfully be able to handle one other behavioral change without hitting the point of being overwhelmed.

Now coming to the gym itself was about the equivalent of six new habits (showing up, changing, warming up, doing the workout, cooling down, and getting out of Dodge while the getting was good), so throwing another one on there was going to be tough, but dietary lifestyle interventions are the bread and butter of change.

I started out with a simple question: “What are you willing to change to see some sort of positive effect on this weight loss goal?” The key component was what she was willing to change, not what I wanted her to change. She had to think about her lifestyle and figure out what she could change and how that change could fit in comfortably. We came to the conclusion that she would begin to have a piece of fruit for breakfast, in light of the fact that she ate no breakfast and tended to have her first meal at her desk at work, composed of a coffee and pastry. Once she had her piece of fruit, we could work on other changes.

That first week, we only met up twice. The first time she was visibly nervous and scared that everyone would look at her and judge her. to get her in the right mindset, I had her stop in the middle of the gym floor and asked her to look around at everyone else in there. “Now take a look at them. Who are they all looking at?”

“No one.” She seemed amazed at this fact. Sure, there were the odd people talking with each other and trainers and clients working hard or joking around, but no one else was looking at anyone else.

“Yep. They are all concerned with what they are doing in here to worry about what you’re doing in here.” By coming to the realization that no one would really worry about what she was doing or stare at her or judge her, she was more than willing to start coming to the gym on her own and working out regularly.

Once she started coming to the gym a few times a week on her own (took about a month), we started working on changing something else. One thing at a time, we gradually started to see some progress in how she was eating, what lifestyle components she could control and change for the better, and she began to get more intensity in her workouts. Within the first month, she saw little to no weight loss. Within the first 6 months, she had lost 21 pounds. By the end of the first year of training, she had lost 40 pounds, a little under 1 pound per week. She had weeks where she increased weight, but the general trend was slowly in the right direction.

Sure, she could have lost more weight faster, but she had so much resistance set in place that me pushing too hard would have caused her to push back and either go in the opposite direction or give up altogether, much like her previous attempts.

In total, she managed to bring her weight down from 312 pounds to 228 pounds over five years. She’s managed to keep the weight off, take her diet through a complete 180 (which is different from Jason Kidd’s rookie press conference where he said he would take his team through a complete 360 transformation, effectively ending up where they already were), and is working out regularly.

As much as I would have loved to get complete buy-in for a diet overhaul and lifestyle re-modification, she was digging her heel in against it, so I had to flex my will and get her to do what she was willing to do, one step at a time.

We can focus on building the biggest, best fat loss program in the world, and give it all the cool names we want and get all the scientific backing we want, but the people who need weight loss the most will only really work on one type of program: The one they choose to buy in to and that has minimal impact on their lives.