Carlos Grider of A Brother Abroad On The 5 Things You Need To Do To Achieve a Healthy Body Weight, And Keep It Permanently

So many of us have tried dieting. All too often though, many of us lose 10–20 pounds, but we end up gaining it back. Not only is yo-yo dieting unhealthy, it is also demoralizing and makes us feel like giving up. What exactly do we have to do to achieve a healthy body weight and to stick with it forever?

In this interview series called “5 Things You Need To Do To Achieve A Healthy Body Weight And Keep It Permanently” we are interviewing health and wellness professionals who can share lessons from their research and experience about how to do this.

As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Carlos Grider.

Carlos is a former Marine, Crossfit Trainer, and travel writer that has traveled through and lived in over 55 countries over the last 4 years. At his site ABrotherAbroad.com, Carlos shares how anyone can make their own adventurous travel experience a possibility and how to get fit for the adventure. Carlos is currently based in Bali, Indonesia surfing, writing, and discovering between travels.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?

Absolutely! My name is Carlos, and I am a former Marine, Crossfit trainer, and long term traveler. In between adventures, I write about adventure travel and how to stay fit anywhere at my site ABrotherABroad.com.

I grew up in the desert of southern California and from a very young age, think six or seven years old, my summer days were spent hiking and adventuring miles out into the Mojave desert. That’s how I spent my afternoons and summer days as a kid, just wandering into wild country to see what was out there, to experience it, and maybe come back with a story.

That desire to just “get out there” turned into trekking and rock climbing. The desertscape gave way to exploring nearby mountains and wooded back country. However the passion for exploring remained the common thread between my stories and adventures.

As I grew older, that desire to adventure and discover while challenging myself led to joining the Marines back in 2002, just after the twin towers fell. My aim was to use that desire to explore and blaze trails to do some good in the world, and led to deploying to the Middle East multiple times.

As the snowball that I am rolled and grew, and as I left the Middle East and separated from the military, combat deployments gave way to adventures backpacking the world and sharing the stories and experiences in hopes to inspire others set off on an unconventional journey of their own.

What or who inspired you to pursue your career? We’d love to hear the story.

My driving desire for adventure and discovery started when I was that seven-year-old kid wandering the deserts of California during summer vacation. However, that Marine I became later in life while learning to explore other countries and cultures melded with the desert trekking kid to make the person I am today. Just as much, the collection of those experiences prepared me for the career I have today as a writer, adventure travel and fitness expert.

The freedom to wander, the exhilaration that comes from discovering the seemingly undiscovered, and the fulfillment felt from just existing in the outdoors penetrated deep into my soul during those early years. I realized quickly that exploration and returning to share those stories was something I was made to do. Travel, explore, tell stories, and inspire others to do the same. That is what I exist for.

On the other hand, the unstructured nature of those combat deployments shaped the unique fitness ideology I have today — which is essentially staying fit for anything that comes in life despite the constraints of minimal equipment, and having minimal resources available. On those deployments, this approach was survivalist in nature and intended to keep me at peak fitness because staying strong, staying fast, and being able to work for long periods was the difference between mission success and failure, or in some cases the difference between life and death.

When I left the Marines and began wandering the world on my own terms, I realized how much this fitness ethos, maintaining a high level of versatile fitness using minimal equipment, enhanced my travels. Not only was I able to adventure further than the average traveler, self-sufficiently and safely, but I was able to take on more, bigger adventures. From trekking to Everest Base Camp Solo, to following the Ho Chi Minh trail solo by motorbike through rural Laos and Vietnam, to wandering Patagonian backcountry alone, I credit my level of fitness and conditioning, both physically and mentally, as the keys to making such fulfilling travel possible without a guide or support.

These days whether I’m surfing, trekking, or just enjoying the energy that comes from being healthy and active, I fully appreciate my body and fitness, and the system I apply to maintain it.

On my site, ABrotherAbroad.com, I share my approach to building a strong, durable, and flexible body that is “fit to travel adventurously” as well as try to encourage others to set out on adventures of their own. I hope that this approach to staying fit for adventure becomes infectious so everyone can experience how life-enhancing fitness and adventure travel can be.

None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Was there a particular person who you feel gave you the most help or encouragement to be who you are today? Can you share a story about that?

An old boss of mine named Scott Martin was undoubtedly the most influential and inspiring character during my journey. By osmosis, Scott ingrained in me a desire to strive for the best by identifying and uncompromisingly working towards an ideal of what we believe we can be or believe our world can be. In pursuit of this ideal, I learned from him to eliminate any of the fluff that’s meant just for appearances and slows us down, and double down on what we know works and pushes us closer to accomplishing our ultimate objective.

Scott was a Master Sergeant I worked for when I was in the Marines. He was extremely proficient and capable in a place where many people were anything but. Scott’s key strength was that he focused on what mattered and ruthlessly dismissed what didn’t, meaning at the end of the day, he always accomplished his objective without wasted energy and saved the energy that remained to move onto a new task or mission, accomplish it, and repeat.

At the same time, Scott was known for being “rough around the edges.” He cursed. He questioned orders that could be improved in pursuit of the current objective instead of following them blindly. He uncompromisingly held himself and everyone around him to the standard of doing the right thing regardless of who they were, regardless of what extra effort was required, and regardless whether that person was a superior or a subordinate. Yet, in that same moment, he always looked out for the well-being of everyone that worked for him because intensely cared, for the mission and his family (our team). I deeply admired that. This ruthless dedication to purpose and being someone worth being rubbed off on me as something I wanted to emulate.

Many times, I’ve found myself in tough, uncomfortable, and even life-threatening circumstances on the verge of confusion and frozen about what step was the next right step — and I’d ask myself, “what would Scott do?” which evolved into “what would the best version of Carlos do now?” My answer, and the answer that usually got me moving, boiled down to asking what kind of man I wanted to be in that moment, what was the “right” thing to do regardless of the effort required, and what was the purpose or objective I was willing to dedicate my life to in that moment. Once you achieve that level of intention and depth of purpose, you become dissociated from the outcome, which is oddly freeing. You only care about make a wholehearted attempt and being diligent with the process at hand. If you give that full attempt towards the most honorable outcome, you find, that’s enough to sleep well at night and likely the best thing you can do toward achieving something.

Having that example of someone so dedicated to purpose and doing the right thing helped me learn to look past suffering, fear, confusion, and pain to do the same — expressing my own purpose and the person I wanted to be through my actions. Of course, I didn’t always hit the mark, but internalizing high standards and appreciation of the process made it easier to be a better man and achieve more.

Can you share the funniest or most interesting mistake that occurred to you in the course of your career? What lesson or takeaway did you learn from that?

My 27th birthday, without a doubt, wherein I spent three days stranded on the side of a road in Patagonia had a fantastic lesson in outlook and was definitely a funny misadventure.

I was on my first backpacking trip traveling through Argentina, and I decided to treat myself to a birthday in the Patagonian backcountry. The trip south involved a 19-hour bus ride from San Carlos de Bariloche to frontier mountain town El Chalten with no stops or noteworthy cities in between. The ride was mostly a dirt road and vast views out of the windows of the long-haul bus. My plan was to arrive the day before my birthday, celebrate with some Argentine steak and wine the next day, and then proceed into the backcountry of Patagonia for some time outdoors.

However, my plan and Argentina’s plan were very different.

Nine hours into the ride, the bus broke down. This was in 2011 when few people were carrying cell phones in Argentina. So the driver of our long-haul bus wasn’t able to make contact with the bus company for quite some time to arrange a repair. Additionally, there were only two buses like the one we were riding in all of western Argentina at the time, which meant the other bus was in use and couldn’t spare the parts for repair. As a result, we just had to wait, on the side of the road, on the edge of Patagonia for three days. No additional food. No additional water. Just a bunch of dusty backpackers trying to get to Patagonia and a few unlucky adventurous locals.

I spent the first half of birthday sitting outside of the bus laying on the dirt ground, reading a book, surrounded by mountains, stranded. At some point, I muttered to myself, “well, this is a crazy birthday.” A couple overheard me, two British teachers on sabbatical, and the wife laughed because, oddly, it was her birthday too. At that moment, her husband popped out a cupcake out of nowhere that he’d bought for her birthday and was about to sing to her when she overheard me and brought me into the mini festivities. Her husband roped the entire bus into singing happy birthday, and we shared that tiny little birthday cupcake next to a broken down bus on the side of the road somewhere deep in God’s country. That was probably the most delicious birthday cake I can remember and one of my most memorable birthdays.

We spent another 24 hours stranded there on the side of the road, and I was smiling for most of it.

As I look back, so many things went wrong — the bus broke down, there were no spare parts available in the company, there was no replacement bus available for a couple days, I didn’t pack nearly enough snacks, we spent three days showerless in the cold — but I enjoyed that “adventure.” However, I distinctly remember feeling at peace and fully accepting what was happening throughout the entire experience, and I think that is the key to why this “misadventure” is such a beautiful memory. It wasn’t bad. It just “was.” With that acceptance, so many elements in the situation switched neutral or negative to positive, while other positive things just fell into place. The shared birthday. The cupcake. The song. The fiery birthday sunset as the lights faded into the mountainous backdrop in a place I’d heard legends about for years. The new friends added color to the experience. I can remember very few times in my life when I’ve felt that level of contentment. At the same, I can remember fewer times in my life when I’ve reached that level of acceptance, and subsequently inner peace, and just existed in the moment.

Adventure is what happens when everything starts to go wrong, in travel or in life, and outlook and acceptance will determine whether we file those memories away as good or as bad.

That memory will always be filed away in my mind as beautiful, and the experience burned into my mind that accepting what we can’t change and controlling our own outlook on everything else is a tool within our power to “enjoy” whatever comes our way and live in the moment.

Can you share your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Why does that resonate with you so much?

“We often overestimate what we can accomplish in a week but underestimate what we can accomplish in a year.”

I love this quote.

In a world of instant gratification and quick fixes, we often forget that the two most important ingredients for any lasting result are time and diligence. Whether we’re seeking a healthier weight, personal growth, a healthier relationship, or professional success, we often demand too much of ourselves, and the world, too quickly. We then burn out because we forget that consistency and concerted effort, in the long run, are the most important factors for building something positive that lasts.

The fad diets, the failed new year’s resolution, and piling on too many life changes too soon all fall into this category of overestimating what is achievable in a small frame of time. For many, these attempts all too often end with burnout accompanied by a demoralized feeling and a return to our old ways, old results, and old states of being.

On the other hand, being strategic about taking on small changes and tasks that we know we can remain consistent with over months and years is the true path to any lasting positive outcome. These small, achievable actions repeatedly performed over long periods form the foundation of the larger changes they empower us to take on later.

So, whenever we’re envisioning a bright new future state, I recommend focusing less on the size or quantity of changes at the beginning and more on the consistency of maintaining those small changes over months and years. That is the path to enduring success in anything.

Beaches are made up of grains of sand. Mountain climbs are achieved with small steps. In the same way, immense successes are the accumulation of many small actions performed consistently in the long term.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?

At the moment, I have three major projects I’m working on:

• The Infinite Fitness Program: A fitness program designed to create versatile, lifelong fitness without a gym and with minimal equipment
• The Backpacking Trails around the world: This project is a series of books and content guiding aspiring wanderers on the common “backpacker trails” of the major regions — the Banana Pancake Trail, The Gringo Trail, The Balkan Walk, and the Maya Trail
• Mapping the Digital Nomad: A project aimed at understanding who successful digital nomads are, what they do, and how aspiring digital nomads can set themselves up for success

The Infinite Fitness Program is a fitness methodology and program that I wish scrawny 18-year-old Carlos had back in 2002, just before he joined the Marines. I’ve designed it for him. The approach builds adventure-ready, strong, durable, and flexible bodies using a minimum of equipment and methodologies that any traveler, service-member, athlete, or person at home can perform anywhere. By combining the best of gymnastics, calisthenics, powerlifting, tactical fitness, and kettlebell training, I and others have been able to build bodies that are ready for virtually any sport or adventure and can be maintained well into old age, without a costly gym, at home, or on the road. An infinitely capable body maintained anywhere. That’s the Infinite Fitness project.

The “Backpacker Trails Around the World” project is a nod to my backpacker heritage and lifestyle. The books and content I’m producing now map out and simplify the major travel paths through the most popular backpacking regions — Southeast Asia, the Balkans, South America, and Central America, adding the Middle East and Africa as well. These “trails,” the “Banana Pancake Trail,” the “Gringo Trail,” the “Balkan Walk,” etc. are almost like traveler conveyor belts. Once a solo traveler arrives in the first city of each “trail”, the inertia of the backpacking and budget travel infrastructure pulls them along in a fulfilling and pleasurable way and surrounds them with quick friends and likeminded adventurers in a surprisingly endearing way.

Whether a would be traveler has two weeks, two months, or two years to spare, this approach and the trails I describe make a seemingly daunting experience possible and very natural for new travelers. Plus, all of this is possible on a fairly tiny budget. The Backpacking Trails project is about writing compact guides and essential starter content that get people traveling on these trails, with just enough information to get them through the first few days of travel while encouraging them to carve out their own adventure.

“Mapping the Digital Nomad” started as a research project, surveying hundreds of digital nomads to understand who they are, what they do, and where they live, which grew into a Digital Nomad Study and a living guide to jobs that successful digital nomads are doing now. The project has grown into a book, in progress, that captures lessons learned by successful digital nomads and paints a detailed picture of who are digital nomads and what they do. Most importantly, the coming book shares how those who aspire to work and travel can successfully transition into becoming a digital nomad.

For the benefit of our readers, can you briefly let us know why you are an authority in the fitness and wellness field?

I am an authority on maintaining a high level of versatile fitness, including strength, stamina, and flexibility, in austere environments and with minimal equipment.

My training, both as a Marine and a functional fitness trainer, and my years of experiencing staying at peak fitness and “adventure-ready” while in austere environments has evolved into some highly effective strategies and an effective system for getting and staying fit.

I’ve been able to run marathons on a day’s notice, do treks through the Himalayas in half the recommended time with no assistance, perform physically demanding work in combat zones for days with no sleep, and teach myself outlandish new sports safely, such as surfing, rock climbing, and free-diving, in under a couple of weeks. All of this has been achievable due to a very versatile yet high base level of fitness that I’ve been able to maintain without a gym.

The system, and the smaller tactics that comprise, I use has been shared countless times with my community of readers and beyond with immense success and great results.

OK, thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview about achieving a healthy body weight. Let’s begin with a basic definition of terms so that all of us are on the same page. How do you define a “Healthy Body Weight”?

I’d like to start by actually defining what is not “healthy body weight,” as common misconceptions of what healthy body weight is can point us at an incorrect target.

• Healthy body weight is not necessarily what the bodies on fitness magazine covers look like — for myself and many of my clients, the times we’ve felt the healthiest we didn’t look like the models on these covers, and that’s fine
• Healthy body weight is not the same for everyone — skeletal build, genetics, fitness history, and health history make the best target bodyweight different for everyone,
• Healthy body weight does not mean 0% bodyfat or anywhere close. Though many may want 7% body fat, the number of lifestyle changes required and time required, and the stress of maintaining such low bodyfat would likely decrease quality of life more than improve it ultimately meaning that target isn’t the healthy ideal

On the other, a healthy body weight universally increases the quality of life.

Healthy body weight is:

• Achievable and maintainable within the immovable constraints of your life
• A weight in which you not only look good but more importantly feel good
• Best judged by body fat percentage and a minimum healthy body weight

Because every person reading this article has different bone structure and density, muscle makeup, and genetics, when assessing what a healthy bodyweight is, it is important to focus on what is a healthy body weight for you based on your body makeup. Don’t get caught up in trying to look like anyone else, as this is definitely a mistaken target that will lead you astray.

Healthy body weight is that weight at which you feel the best, that you are able to do everything in your life that you love (or would love to do), and that carries the lowest risk of disease over your lifetime.

Specifically, healthy body weight for you will likely be the weight at which you have 7% to 18% body fat for men and 14% to 25% bodyfat for women while additionally having the at least the minimum muscle mass and bone mass that allow you to safely do everything you enjoy.

My recommendation: target the 7% to 18% body fat for men, and 14% to 25% women range and then add a consistent strength, stamina, and mobility increasing fitness routine to maintain a capable body. The bodyweight that comes with that is your healthy body weight.

How can an individual learn what is a healthy body weight for them? How can we discern what is “too overweight” or what is “too underweight”?

Body fat percentage is the most accurate indicator of healthy weight and allows us to calculate ideal body weight for the individual, which makes body fat percentage a much better metric to assess on an individual basis to assess than actual body weight.

Bodyweight consists of fat, muscle, and bone. Muscle and bone are valuable. We rarely, if ever, want to reduce either of these. Muscle and bone are what allow us to do what we love well into old age. So, if a person’s body weight is higher than “normal” due to muscle mass or bone density, as long as this doesn’t create any other health issues and body fat percentage is in a healthy range, this is absolutely a good situation that we want to maintain. Looking at an absolute recommended bodyweight based simply on height could give a misleading view as to how healthy the bodyweight of this muscular man or woman with a healthy bone structure actually is.

On the other hand, beyond a certain percentage of body weight (18% for men and 25% for women), additional body fat nearly always comes at a cost to quality of life. That cost could be lost self-confidence looking in the mirror, decreased stamina in the activities we love, or an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Beyond a healthy point, any additional body fat always comes at a cost.

Because we’re aware of this distinction — muscle and bone are generally good, and body fat beyond a certain percentage of body weight comes at a cost — we can assess healthy body weight by specifically assessing the amount of body fat relative to our overall weight.

Beyond 18% bodyfat for men and 25% for women is still in the “acceptable” range by many standards, but people will notice a decrease in quality of life beyond these points, specifically in stamina and risk of disease.

Addressing the point of being underweight, keeping body fat low is not the only aim. We also want to maintain muscle and bone to allow us to safely and effectively live an active lifestyle and move throughout life effectively and safely. To achieve this, we want to keep our weight above a minimum weight while keeping our body fat below the healthy maximum threshold.

For determining healthy minimum weight, I recommend using the National Institute of Health’s Body Mass Index (BMI) chart (Available here: https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/lose_wt/BMI/bmi_tbl.htm) for identifying minimum healthy weights. Though I am not a fan of the general BMI approach, the NIH’s research on minimum healthy body weight is useful and a good starting point. To find your minimum healthy body weight, simply look at your height on the NIH’s BMI table and identify the lowest weight depicted in the chart (with a BMI of 19). No matter where your fitness journey takes you, aim to keep your body weight above that weight listed for a Body Mass Index score of at least 19.

Fat is something we want to minimize, but muscle and bone are valuable components that we need to live a healthy life, so we should aim to preserve them..

This might be intuitive to you, but it will be instructive to expressly articulate this. Can you please share a few reasons why being over your healthy body weight, or under your healthy body weight, can be harmful to your health?

In both situations, being overweight or being underweight, the unhealthy weight ultimately decreases our quality of life and directly puts us at risk of disease, which is why they’re a concern. Enjoying a long, active, and fulfilling life is the goal, and both situations, being overweight or underweight, run counter to that.

In the case of being overweight, or more specifically obese, the extra body fat inhibits us from performing in our daily lives the way we would love to, reduces stamina and performance across the board, in sports, sex, and generally in an active lifestyle, and increases our risk of cardiovascular disease and heart attack.

In the case of being underweight, making sacrifices to keep weight too low compromises our immune systems and can result in malnutrition in a way that breaks down valuable muscle and skeletal tissue. If our weight drops so low that we are significantly cannibalizing muscle and bone, we’re giving up the components of our body that move us and enable us to engage in a healthy, active lifestyle safely.

In contrast, can you help articulate a few examples of how a person who achieves and maintains a healthy body weight will feel better and perform better in many areas of life?

Being in that healthy body weight range, which involves a healthy body fat percentage and a healthy minimum amount of muscular and skeletal tissue, puts us in the perfect place to not only perform well in an active lifestyle but enjoy it.

The key benefits I like to highlight about healthy body fat and body weight are:

• It empowers us to live and enjoy performing well in the sports and activities we enjoy
• It increases energy levels thanks to our bodies recovery systems being at peak performance
• It allows for peak sexual function thanks to improved cardiovascular health
• It naturally improves confidence, and mood subsequently, not just in aesthetics but also in our ability to move

Ok, fantastic. Here is the main question of our discussion. Can you please share your “5 Things You Need To Do To Achieve a Healthy Body Weight And Keep It Permanently?”. If you can, please share a story or an example for each.

1. Adopt a version of intermittent fasting (12, 14, or 16-hour fasting windows) to take advantage of the benefits of confining food-driven hormone spikes to a specific window of time and to push the body to burn energy stores before we refill them by eating more food.

When traveling over the past four years, maintaining a consistently healthy diet has been one of my major struggles. Whether I was flying or taking buses over a 24 period or just couldn’t find fresh vegetables or healthy proteins, finding healthy food at all times tended to be a struggle. I realized early on that eating healthy within a smaller window, or even eating mediocrely healthy within a smaller window, was better for my waistline than grazing throughout the day on subpar food.

By eating intentionally within an 8-hour window and fasting for the remaining 16, I gained more energy throughout the day because my body wasn’t busy digesting food, and my body wasn’t processing the hormone spikes that come with each meal. Additionally, I could feel my body shifting into burning fat stores during that 16-hour window where I wasn’t feeding. This single tactic, eating intentionally within a window of time and allowing my body time to burn stored fat for energy and focus body processes on recovery, has been my best tool for controlling bodyweight (and bodyfat) while traveling.

2. Adopt the practice of a “savory breakfast.”

Sweet breakfasts tend to be loaded with refined sugar and carbohydrates, causing hormone spikes, with insulin being the worst offender, that lead to increased appetite, storing food instead of burning it as energy, and overeating later in the day. On the other hand, savory breakfasts tend to be protein and fat-rich, which power recovery and provide efficient fuel while delivering a more satiating and insulin bunting meal.

Picking between specific foods as to what is good and what is not can be draining on willpower, especially early in the morning. However, reprogramming the common notion that breakfast has to be sweet (and consequently sugar-laden) gives a low effort, binary response to choosing a breakfast that is easier on our waistline. If the breakfast is savory, it is likely protein-rich and satiating, so embrace it. If it is sweet, it will probably stick to your waistline quickly and cause hormone spikes, so skip it.

3. Cut out refined sugar by increasingly confining it to a specific period, such as a single meal or a single day, until it becomes rare in your diet.

Additionally, forgo refined carbohydrates (bread, cake, pasta) as often as you can. Replace consumption of these foods with nutrient dense vegetables and minimally processed, protein-rich foods.

Sugar is arguably the biggest culprit when it comes to obesity, so we all know we need to limit sugar intake. However, the dopamine hit we receive when consuming a heavy dose of sugar makes it akin to many other things in life we get addicted to. So simply “quitting” is a more gargantuan task than it sounds like. Few people have the willpower to cold turkey quit eating sugar. Taking this approach of tapering off sugar intake in an easy to remember way and an easy way to hold ourselves accountable is the way I’ve observed as most effective for cutting down sugar.

Start by skipping sugar in your coffee or skipping sugar at breakfast. Then, move to confine sugar to every other day. Grow to confining sugar binges to Sundays. Continue until you’ve reached a sustainable approach to sugar that supports the healthy body weight for you and is repeatable in the long term.

4. Do an elimination diet to discover what specific foods cause any degree of allergic reaction or chronic inflammation in your body, record the results, and apply them to your diet going forward. Then, use the list of harmful foods to eliminate anything from your diet that inherently doesn’t work for your body or causes chronic inflammation, bloating, detrimental appetite spikes, etc.

Eliminate any of these foods that you discover prevent your body from running optimally. Be sure to consult your physician before taking on an elimination diet.

We all have very different genetic makeups, expressed in very differently in our bodies and gastrointestinal systems. Because of this, the odds of a one size fit all diet working for everyone (or just you) aren’t in your favor. Instead of eliminating everything you like from your diet, aim to eliminate the troublemakers that are wreaking the most havoc on your body. An elimination diet will help you identify these “troublemaker foods” to keep off your plate, allowing you to create a more sustainable eating plan without unnecessarily eliminating food you love.

I’ve traveled and lived on five different continents, and because food varies wildly from region to region, I’ve had to do an adapted form of an elimination diet to identify what foods in each region create negative responses in my body. The result is now I know the shortlist of exactly which foods in which regions of the world power me up and which foods slow me down. Now, I’m able to quickly screen out known troublemakers to avoid bloating, inflammation, and unnecessary weight gain wherever I go.

Doing the same for you, figuring out what doesn’t work and avoiding it, will produce wonders for your waistline.

5. Move every day, and get a sweat on for 30 minutes at least four times a week.

This tactic is only effective for keeping body weight at a healthily low level if sustainable positive dietary and nutrition habits have been adopted first. However, using your body will ensure you stay above your minimum weight by conditioning and maintaining healthy muscular and skeletal tissue.

The emphasis of this series is how to maintain an ideal weight for the long term, and how to avoid yo-yo dieting. Specifically, how does a person who loses weight maintain that permanently and sustainably?

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time and over a long period. That approach and mindset, small compounding steps with an eye on long-term outcomes, is how to avoid the “yo-yo” effect and maintain a healthy body weight permanently and sustainably.

Instead of taking on multiple huge changes at once, by adding one small, sustainable change at a time and focusing on internalizing that single change before adding new habits, we not only make building a healthier life easier to handle, but we also make it sustainable by gradually internalizing changes for long-term improvement.

Once we internalize that one small habit, the effort required to keep the habit going are so minimal that the inertia of our new, healthier life keeps it in place. Over time we view the adopted habit as less of a “change” and more of our “current lifestyle.” Once the “healthy change” has become a “habit,” we can move on to adding another new, healthy change until that change becomes a habit, and we continue repeating the process.

These small habits could be replacing sugary sodas with a calorie-free club soda or coconut water, replacing the nightly slice of cake with fruit, yogurt, and honey, getting into the habit of an 8-hour eating window, eating veggies before protein and protein before starches, or any number of small achievable healthy lifestyle changes.

By focusing on compounding many small changes gradually, we naturally build a life that supports the new healthy body weight. This, in turn, allows us to focus on living and enjoying our “new lifestyle,” instead of stressing about maintaining weight.

Small changes, internalized as habits and compounded over time as they add up, are the key to creating large changes.

What are a few of the most common mistakes you have seen people make when they try to lose weight? What errors cause people to just snap back to their old unhealthy selves? What can they do to avoid those mistakes?

• Making too many big changes at once or too soon. Instead, start with one small change first and work from there.
• Jumping on fad diets because someone suggested them. Instead, focus on understanding your own body’s favorite and least favorite foods, patterns, and needs, and match those quirks to suitably healthy habits and foods according to your needs.
• Focusing more on exercise than what they eat. Though an active lifestyle is a component of a healthy life, nutrition and eating habits affect body weight more than any other external lifestyle factor, including exercise. Focus on eating right as much as moving right.
• Not rewarding and incentivizing themselves enough. Motivation is already the biggest hurdle to achieving a healthy lifestyle, so aim to motivate yourself. As you build new habits, reward yourself with something healthy and encouraging. You should be your biggest fan and biggest motivator on this journey.
• Chasing someone else’s goal. Don’t lose weight or adjust your body to look like someone else. Instead, lose weight and maintain healthy body weight to improve your quality of life. That depth of purpose will lead to a much more fulfilling and sustainable outcome.
• Not sticking with it long enough — one month isn’t enough; plan for a year. We overestimate what we can achieve in a week and underestimate what we could do in a year. You’ll achieve more with a small change performed consistently over a year, or five years, than you will with a big diet change performed for a single month.

How do we take all this information and integrate it into our actual lives? The truth is that we all know that it’s important to eat more vegetables, eat less sugar, etc. But while we know it intellectually, it’s difficult to put it into practice and make it a part of our daily habits. In your opinion what are the main blockages that prevent us from taking the information that we all know, and integrating it into our lives?

I recommend creating a list of all of the possible changes you can make, the habits you can alter for a positive outcome, list them all from smallest/easiest to hardest.

Separately, list the incentives and rewards you can give yourself to keep the motivation up when you’ve achieved a goal or internalized a habit.

Then, take the easiest thing — perhaps limiting yourself to one soda per day — and do that daily until it is brainlessly internalized.

Twenty-one days of repeated action creates a habit, so wait until that point before adding your next habit. When you’ve achieved that point, reward yourself with something from the rewards list, and add one more small change until that new addition becomes a habit. Then repeat until you’ve worked to larger things on your list.

By the time you are working on internalizing more difficult habits, your willpower muscle in relation to health and fitness will be stronger. You’ll be more emotionally connected to the anticipated benefits. The general theme of a “healthier lifestyle” will be internalized heavily. This new internal strength and external inertia of your new, healthier habits will be enough to make the more difficult things on your list easier to achieve later than they would have been at the beginning.

On the flip side, how can we prevent these ideas from just being trapped in a rarified, theoretical ideal that never gets put into practice? What specific habits can we develop to take these intellectual ideas and integrate them into our normal routine?

Just do it. Pick the easiest possible positive change that when you think about it makes you feel “I can do that!” Then, just start.

The key is to just start. You don’t have to do it perfectly on the first day. You can trip up. You can fail, but simply starting and building a habit of diligently trying each day is the key. Repeat that attempt every day, and it will become a successful habit.

As humans, most of us don’t have the ability to flip on multiple habits at once. We do, however, have the capacity to focus on doing one thing repeatedly until the conscious effort required to keep the action going is nearly zero. That is what we’re aiming for.

For now, just start and let the process take care of itself.

Examples of habits I recommend considering to maintain healthy body weight:

1. Reduce to only one soda or sugary drink a day
2. Reduce to no sodas or sugary drinks a day, replaced by a low-calorie club soda or coconut water
3. Start the day drinking a liter of water before consuming anything else
4. Avoid adding refined sugar to anything, starting with drinks and progressing to foods
5. Eat the food on your plate in this order: vegetables, proteins, starches
6. Learn to stop eating when you’re satisfied, not when you’re full
7. Replace processed deserts with “whole foods,” unprocessed desserts, and beneficial treats such as fruits, yogurts, and dark chocolates
8. Eliminate refined carbohydrates on a set number of days per week
9. Aim for at least one meal per day of strictly whole foods
10. Apply an “eating window” and intermittent fasting for a window of 12, 14, or 16 hours (consult physician before starting)
11. Switch from empty calorie-dense beers to lower calorie alcoholic beverages (e.g., vodka soda)
12. Replace processed and packaged snacks with less damaging and more nutritious whole foods such as edamame, simple popcorn, or veggies and a vinaigrette
13. Move your body for at least 30 minutes daily, whether during yoga, walking, or exercising
14. Perform resistance or strength training at least once per week at least to jumpstart metabolism and build quality of life-enhancing strength
15. Experiment with making your favorite foods and drinks at home to control ingredients and make them healthier and more nutritious

Ok, we are nearly done. You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Travel and experiencing the outdoors is an opportunity we all have. If I could inspire more people to put their smartphones down, turn off Netflix, skip the next “aspirational purchase,” and just get out there, to anywhere, to a new a country, to a new national park, or onto a new adventure, my purpose and my objective would be fulfilled and would have touched in a positive way that lines up with my purpose.

Exploration, and travel as a subset of that, is my first love. The best parts of me have been shaped by wandering into the unknown with an open mind and a desire to see, feel, and experience. My best memories come from “just getting out there,” traveling, and going further into the outdoors.

I would love to inspire a movement of people breaking out of their comfort zones and exploring — either the outdoors, other cultures, or other countries. The growth and fulfillment that happens just by going into and feeling a new place are inexpressibly immense. I want more people to have those same, life changing experiences.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them :-)

Barack Obama, without a doubt. To me, he is a pleasant enigma I would love to get to know on a personal level. Though we saw countless hours of his life in the spotlight, because of the inherent filter those who live in the public eye are seen through, it was impossible to understand fully what motivates him, what drives him, and what he lives for. He would not have achieved his level of success without immense strength and intellect, but at the same time, he appears to exude so many respectable and moral qualities that the world would be a better place if more people had or were exposed to.

I’d love to just sit and have a conversation with him to learn what makes him the person he is on a deep character level and learn from him.

In the same vein, I would love to have a conversation with Dave Chappelle.

Here in Bali, during the pandemic, I was lucky enough to join a group of friends in establishing and building Bali’s first significant standup comedy scene in English. Every week we the team put on a new one-hour standup comedy show for over a year straight, which has grown into a weekly sold-out show of 200–250+ audience members that we perform for every week. Now, mind you, before the pandemic, none of us were standup comedians. We quite literally learned it on the fly, and we each had to develop our own style of comedy that was worth listening to every single week.

Very quickly, my style changed from lowbrow humor to social commentary that mirrored the type of travel writing I do on my site. I decided to use the stage to tackle complex issues — think elections in Russia and how they are related to political movements like BLM in the US, religion while living in a country that is very sensitive to conversations about religion, and how the COVID-19 pandemic is manifesting differently in areas of unequal economic development. That current adventure in comedy has been eye-opening, and I gained a whole new appreciation for the depth of Dave Chappelle’s social commentary and awareness. I’d love to chat with Dave about his outlook on the world now and thoughts on the future.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Drop by my site www.ABrotherAbroad.com. I share my latest ideas and discoveries there, and I’ll also make the results of the Infinite Fitness, Backpack Trails, and Mapping the Digital Nomad projects available there.

Additionally, I love connecting and sharing ideas, both giving and receiving, so anyone who wants to connect can find my contact information there. I’d love to hear from them.

Thank you for these really excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success.