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.

===

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.