Eight easy healthy habits to incorporate into your everyday life. Photo / Getty Images
Eight easy healthy habits to incorporate into your everyday life. Photo / Getty Images
Ben Carpenter, a fitness influencer, advocates for sustainable weight loss through habit changes rather than dieting.
He emphasises eating more nutritious foods, increasing daily activity, and improving sleep quality.
Carpenter’s approach includes small, maintainable changes such as eating more fruit and vegetables and incorporating ‘exercise snacking’.
As a young personal trainer, Ben Carpenter became increasingly aware of a rising wave of misinformation about diet and exercise flooding social media.
Feeling a duty to combat it, he began posting videos debunking myths and explaining what the science really showed.
Fifteen years later, he has a devoted, 500,000-strongfollowing on Instagram, who rely on his blend of practical, research-based advice and a non-judgmental approach to help them lose weight.
And make no mistake, it is this – weight loss – that the majority of his clients and followers want. “My entire career, it’s always been people’s No 1 goal,” says the 37-year-old, who is British but now lives in California with his wife Sohee, also a fitness trainer.
That’s why Carpenter has written a new book, Fat Loss Habits, to help us ditch dieting for good – but still lose as much as 6.4kg in the next year. “You can achieve sustained fat loss, but you need to shift your focus away from dieting,” he says.
Ben Carpenter's new book Fat Loss Habits is published on January 14.
Although Carpenter has been a personal trainer since he was 18, his own relationship with weight and fitness hasn’t always been straightforward.
He suffers from Crohn’s, the chronic inflammatory bowel disease, which he now manages with medication. But during a flare-up in his 20s, his weight plummeted to just over 57kg and he was incapacitated for months.
“I was so frail I couldn’t walk to the bathroom without someone to help me,” he says. The experience gave him an empathy for others for whom fitness is an alien concept.
Part of Carpenter’s appeal is his unwillingness to blame individuals struggling with their weight. “It’s not laziness, or lack of willpower – it’s a combination of complex factors, including genetics, the food industry, and the messages we have all internalised from diet culture.”
The latter has encouraged us to view dieting and exercise as short-term pursuits: brief, unpleasant interludes, in which we deprive ourselves to an unsustainable degree, before going straight back to our old habits.
That’s why Carpenter’s approach focuses instead on adapting those habits; making a series of small but meaningful changes in our daily lives, which add up to make a real difference – crucially, one we can maintain in the long run.
“Willpower is over-rated,” he says. “If you don’t want to do something, like going to the gym when you’re tired after work, you’re going to struggle to achieve it.”
Instead, he believes we should work at making a few simple actions part of our routine.
“As you practice them more and more, they should start becoming second nature to you and require less conscious effort to stick to them – they’re not things you’re dreading, they’re just part of your day,” he says. “At that point, you can add in another habit, if you want to.”
Start with a self-audit. “Take a proper look at your current diet and exercise routine and consider what you’d like to improve,” says Carpenter.
Then, rather than setting yourself a big, distant goal, such as lose 6kg, focus on more specific actions which will help you achieve it, such as “eat more fruit and vegetables”.
From the following habits, he suggests choosing a handful that appeal to you personally, are realistic for you to implement and powerful enough to take you towards your goal if you implement them consistently.
The aim isn’t to try to do everything. “In the context of fat loss, a majority of your results can come from a surprisingly short list of behaviours,” he says.
To lose weight, we need to eat less high-calorie food, but Carpenter suggests focusing on “what you can eat more of, rather than what you need to eat less of” to avoid obsessing over the latter.
Getting more nutritious, less highly processed food into our diets is “quite possibly the most important habit you can nail which will promote fat loss,” he says.
A simple place to start is by eating more fruit and vegetables. In Britain, just 32.5% of people eat the recommended five portions every day, but replacing some of the other food you eat with fruit and vegetables is an easy way to reduce your overall energy intake without counting calories.
Eating a salad as a starter has been proven to reduce how much people eat at the main course by an average of 12%. Carpenter often eats a bowl of crudites such as baby tomatoes as he makes dinner, and adds finely-chopped or blended vegetables into sauces.
Instead of focusing on what you need to eat less of, concentrate on what you could be eating more of, like vegetables. Photo / 123RF
2. Eat protein for breakfast
Eating more protein can help promote fat loss, and it also plays a role in satisfying hunger and keeping our blood sugar steady, helping us avoid unhealthy snacks.
Some research has shown that giving teenagers higher-protein breakfasts such as an omelette, means they will be significantly less hungry than if they eat a carb-heavy breakfast such as oatmeal sweetened with sugar – to the extent that at their next meal, they ate 81% more food after the oatmeal.
If you take people who usually skip breakfast and give them a high-protein breakfast instead, there’s evidence it can promote weight loss over skipping breakfast completely. So it makes sense that starting the day with protein, such as eggs or yoghurt, is a positive step.
3. Be mindful of fat
Not all dietary fat is bad – avocados, nuts and olive oil are all beneficial. But Carpenter points out that it’s very easy to consume in excessive quantities without even realising it. In Britain, most adults eat too much saturated fat via the likes of biscuits, cakes, pastries, and red meat.
Grilling meat instead of frying, trimming off extra fat, eating smaller portions of sauces such as mayonnaise and opting for lean proteins such as chicken and fish are easy habit adaptations. “You’ll be surprised how easy it is to make some little changes that add up to substantial reductions if you’re eating a lot of them,” says Carpenter.
We are consuming more of our calories from drinks than ever before.
4. Stop drinking your calories
We are consuming more of our calories from drinks than ever before – unsurprisingly, given that blended coffees containing milk and sugar are in the region of 200 calories.
Research shows that consuming sugar in liquid form doesn’t fill us up in the same way as eating the same amount in solid form, which means these drinks usually represent additional calories on top of everything we eat. Drinking a lot of sugary drinks is reliably linked with weight gain and worse health.
Carpenter recommends drinking water where possible, diluting sugary drinks like fruit juice and, if you can’t live without them, going for reduced-calorie versions of fizzy drinks.
5. Increase your lifestyle activity
“Most people don’t realise your body burns more energy keeping you alive and moving around in daily life than from a typical workout,” says Carpenter.
The biggest contributor to the energy we burn is called non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or Neat, which consists of all movement outside intentional exercise. Research increasingly points to this activity in our day-to-day lives as the key to weight management.
“Build more activity into your daily routine – get a standing desk, take calls standing up and take the stairs instead of the escalator,” he says.
Build more activity into your daily life. Photo / 123rf
6. Take exercise snacks
One global study suggested a dismal 17% of adults meet the recommended target for exercise which, according to health data, is at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity per week.
The good news is there’s a growing body of research showing the benefits of exercise snacking, or short bursts of activity – 10 minutes a day of which could add almost two years to our lives, according to researchers.
“I’m a big proponent of exercise snacking,” says Carpenter. “Pairing bursts of activity with something you already do in everyday life, such as waiting for your coffee to brew, can help reinforce the habit-building.”
In our sedentary lives, it’s hard to meet the recommended goal of walking 10,000 steps per day, but every little helps.
7. Sleep well
Poor sleep quality can impact your body fat, possibly because when we’re sleep-deprived, our bodies can experience hormonal changes which make us feel hungrier.
In one study of just a single night of sleep deprivation, people who only slept for four hours instead of eight consumed 559 more calories the following day.
Conversely, another study showed that people who received sleep counselling to extend their sleep by just over one hour per night naturally consumed 270 fewer calories compared to those who carried on with their normal sleep patterns.
“Making sleep a priority will help you regulate your appetite, improve your diet and increase fat loss,” he says.
8. Eat regularly, without distractions
“Keeping a regular mealtime eating pattern rhythm helps to decrease our snacking habit,” says Carpenter.
Trying to eat roughly the same amount every day is also important: one study shows that people who dieted consistently all week were more likely to maintain their weight loss than people who dieted even more strictly during the week and then relaxed it at the weekends.
Distractions while eating, such as the television, can interfere with the body’s natural ability to tell us when we’ve eaten enough food, so it’s best to eat without these.
Some research has also found a link between how fast we eat and the risk of obesity, so “slowing down your eating by chewing for longer and putting down your cutlery between mouthfuls is smart”.
“I advise having a to-do list at the start of every day, and writing down the habits you want to ingrain, for instance, ‘a 15-minute walk’,” he says. “Ticking it off gives you that little dopamine hit, and writing down what you’re doing helps you to see what’s working and keep you motivated.”
How to track your habits in three steps
1. To know what you need to change, first work out the habits that usually trip you up. “Work out the barriers you’re facing, such as hating the gym, or eating more food in certain environments,” says Carpenter.
2. Devise strategies to overcome these barriers. “Think practically: for instance, would you enjoy exercising more in a group? Could you make nutritious foods more convenient, for instance by taking fruit to work to keep you away from the vending machine, or ensuring you have fast, healthy options ready at the end of the day when you’re tired and hungry?”
3. The “intention-behaviour” gap means intentions alone aren’t enough to change behaviour. People who monitor their behaviours and progress often see better long-term results.
Fat Loss Habits, Diets Don’t Work Habits Do, The No Bullsh*t Guide to Losing Weight, by Ben Carpenter (Hachette, $39.99), is published on January 14.
