Why We Love You Can't Screw This Up by Adam Bornstein
Why we love You Can’t Screw This Up: Why Eating Takeout, Enjoying Dessert, and Taking the Stress out of Dieting Leads to Weight Loss That Lasts by Adam Bornstein
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If you’ve worked with us then we’ve already told you it usually comes down to how you eat and your success after you leave us will come down to your ability to develop a system that’s flexible, works for you and doesn’t avoid delicious food, great times, travel and all the things that make life great.
You Can’t Screw This Up: Why Eating Takeout, Enjoying Dessert, and Taking the Stress out of Dieting Leads to Weight Loss That Lasts – you can read a quick write-up on our Recommended Gear page – provides a codified and simply laid out approach to doing it. There are hundreds of “diets” and “programs” out there that will give you success but unless you learn how to make health and the enjoyment of life work hand-in-hand on a daily basis the results will only last a short period of time.
As we’ve told you, “There are certain fundamentals that have to be met and once we find a simple and enjoyable way for you to meet them everything will into place.”
The book is an excellent reference and these are a few things we really love about it.
1. The lifestyle change approach.
a. The book does a great job explaining why changing your lifestyle is critical and that makes it a game changer.
b. Other programs offer short-lived results that become part of a cycle that goes on and on until you get frustrated and give up. The book provides a way to avoid the trap or, if you’re already there, get out of it.
c. The improvement you see in health and body composition should be the automatic result of the processes you implement. (If you’ve been coached by us you’ve heard this one before.)
2. Exercising, making good eating choices and being healthy should be simple and automatic.
a. If healthy habits are second nature there are no worries about going astray and the book explains how they go together to complement one another.
b. We tend to make things far too complicated and, as a result, they’re not sustainable. Just like work, family, eating, vacations and business travel are part of your normal life then exercising, eating well, sleeping, managing stress, recovery, etc. (the Five Pillars of Fitness) should be too.
c. The sections on eating and the workouts are prime examples of keeping things simple. He references Atomic Habits and then uses it to lay out a plan that leads to a sustainable system.
d. As James Clear himself has said, “Goals are for people who want to win once. Systems are for people who want to win repeatedly.”
e. A lifestyle is a system and a life of health requires a system to achieve it. The book offers a step-by-step approach to doing it.
3. Eat good food and enjoy life but learn to do it within the limits of a healthy system.
a. This one is crucial and probably the most important point. The book makes it clear that having great food, traveling and enjoying holidays and great times – within the limits of a healthy system – is what makes it sustainable.
b. If you wonder (or dream) when you can go back to the way things used to be then the program or diet you’ve chosen has failed. We want losing fat, adding muscle and keeping the results of those two things to be variations on the basic system we’ve created.
c. If you can have Taco Tuesday, Stir-Fry Wednesday and Hamburger Friday, especially while losing body fat, you’re not suffering and the system will work indefinitely.
4. Using “programs” and “diets” will, at some point, end with you right back where you started.
a. The book makes it clear – and backs it up with studies – that most people trying to “diet” based on restriction or use a “program” that doesn’t work for them end up regaining all the weight they lose and, in many cases, actually end up heavier than before.
b. We’ve all seen ads, testimonials and photos on websites or social media showing the incredible progress a client has made over a 90- or 180-day period but nothing on what they look like 3 years later.
c. If you build a lifestyle that’s sustainable and automatically provides the outcome you’d like then you’ll know how good you’re going to look in 3, 5 or 10 years.
5. Consistency and simplicity win out over complexity.
a. A short and simple exercise program that you do consistently is far better than the ideal workout you never do because it’s too complex, too long or you dread doing it. There’s one in here.
b. Building a diet and eating plan that’s simple and uses delicious foods you look forward to eating goes a long way towards consistency and the book has plenty of examples showing how to get there.
c. We’ve always tried to be clear that perfection is the enemy of excellence and love that most of the book is about consistency and simplicity.
d. You’re never going to be perfect. How many Super Bowls has Tom Brady lost? He’s not perfect (the answer is 3) but no one is going to argue that his 7 Super Bowl wins demonstrates excellence. He’s the GOAT because he was excellent not perfect.
6. Slow but sustained progress leads to a permanent change in body composition instead of weight loss that soon returns.
a. We want it and we want it now but it just doesn’t work that way. There’s great advice on becoming comfortable with steady progress and how doing so actually works better at delivering results that are permanent.
b. I love the explanation, accompanied by graphs, of weight plateaus and how they’re simply a steppingstone along the way. Most of the time when the scale doesn’t drop an unreasonable amount in an equally unreasonable amount of time people toss everything out the window for the next shiny object promising something for nothing.
c. While clients always agree something worthwhile takes time, patience and effort they become frustrated if they don’t look like a physique athlete or body model in a few short months. Talking about patience and allowing the process to happen is important and well done in the book.
7. The importance of sleep.
a. If there’s one thing I could get more clients to improve it would be this one. It’s a part of our curriculum – you can read about it in our article I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead – and there’s a reason.
b. We put our children to bed early because we know that’s when their bodies grow. By the same token, that’s also when our body repairs itself. In the body composition game that’s called adding muscle and burning fat.
c. I think we’ve all experienced the effects of sleep deprivation but not really understood or acknowledged that’s actually what it was.
d. Everyone agrees we make bad decisions when we’re not well rested and they also agree those bad decisions have led to eating episodes we wish hadn’t happened.
e. Kudos for making it a point to emphasize this one.
This is a great book.
I think it might be the first and only book I’ve read that details what’s required to build improved health, and the physique you’ve always wanted, through a leaner body. It also provides a basic method to implement it by adding a small piece at a time.
I’d like to see more on patience and not sweating the process along with some guidelines on how to determine if you’re eating correctly and progressing properly but I also understand you can quickly make a book like this into a tome so full of details and corner-cases that it loses the simplicity we love about it.
As I mentioned in Item 6, failure to see progress – often unreasonable to begin with – is the number one reason clients abandon the process and search for the next “get rich quick” scheme promising results.
Of course, that makes this a perfect spot to tell you that our coaching has always been about changing lifestyles so they support the outcomes you’d like to achieve. We emphasize building systems that produce the body composition changes you want along with health, vitality and the ability to enjoy life to the fullest. Best of all, you won’t be in danger of losing your hard-earned results.
I know where you can find something just like that. You can go right here to check it out and sign up now!
Regards,
Henry
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