“Hunger forced me to try things I’d never seen before” – Benjamin Ajak

This will be a cold painful truth. But if you seriously want to lose weight, or build muscle, or make any change you must get comfortable with being uncomfortable. It is cliché and lots of people say it. But it’s true. If you want to get in better shape, you need to experience real discomfort when you are working out. I mean, it sucks! It burns, your arms and legs will feel rubbery, you might be sore the next day or two, but if you are not willing to pay that price and feel that discomfort, your body has no reason to change.

The same holds true for diet. There is so much out there about dieting and doing it without starving yourself.  In some ways, they are right, we don’t want to starve ourselves. But we do need to be uncomfortable. To lose weight no matter what the fad diets promise you, you must take in less. You do need to eat whole and nutritious foods, but compared to what you used to eat that got you fat, you need to eat quite a bit less. This means you will feel hungry and you will want to satisfy those cravings. If you are serious about losing weight, you must get comfortable with feeling those hunger pangs.

I don’t expect you to be training to be a world-class bodybuilder competitor, but contrary to their poise on stage and in the magazine shoots, to get that lean for competition, they dial back the calories. They feel hungry most of the time. Dorian Yates talks about how miserable you can feel and how much it can suck to feel that way and know you still have a work out to do. These guys must make sacrifices to get that lean! It is this stage in the training that is what often separates the true champions from the other would-be victors. Could they get this phase of their diet right and stick to it?

Again, this is not about starvation; that never works. But if you are serious about losing weight, you will need to go through a period of discomfort. This also should not truly go away once you reach your target either. We have all seen people yo-yo. (Been there myself.) Once we reach our targets, it does not give us permission to then give in to every food and drink desire we have. It is amazing how fast you can undo all that hard work.

There it is: the secret to losing fat. Cut out the crap, eat less than what you have been used to, and get used to feeling uncomfortable with doing so.

Now, if only figuring out the equations for warp drive were this simple….