How I lost 30 pounds

JP Michel
6 min readJun 10, 2023

I lost 30 pounds in 6 months (and kept it off). Here are the 7 principles that helped me achieve this.

I have no idea is the formula would work for others. Please take what you like and leave the rest!

  1. Create a ‘mantra’

I used a ‘mantra’ to describe what I need to focus on to achieve my goals. This helped me simplify my biggest issue and what to do about them. My coach Linda Lamouroux came out with this one: “It’s not complicated. It just takes commitment.”

This mantra helped me focus on the specific behaviors or habits I needed to implement. This way, I could invest all my energy into execution. The benefit? I didn’t need to waste mental energy on “what ifs” or worrying on whether or not I had the right plan.

Instead, my energy was to focus only on the metrics that mattered. In my case, the metrics were calories (lead) and weight (lag).

The mantra might not sound simple, but it was a key insight that drove my success.

Why is this important? This principle is important because committing to this plan and mantra was the one decision that made 1000 other decisions for me.

2. Set a goal

I started off at 203 pounds on September 6th and I set a goal to weigh 185 for December 1st, before a vacation. I reached that goal very quickly. So I set a new goal to weigh 180 By December 1st, (I got to 181!).

And then I set a new goal to weigh 175 By February 1st. At the end of February, I reached 171 pounds, and I now weigh the same in June.

Why is this important? My goal served to connect my actions to my preferred future self.

3. Track what I eat

Write down everything I eat in MyFitnessPal.

In my mind, this was more important than counting calories. I didn’t even need to think about lowering the calories yet. In fact, I give myself a goal of 2200 or 2300 calories per day.

And just by tracking I naturally eat a little bit less than I usually do around 1800–1900 calories but if I go to 21 on certain days, I have no issue with that.

Why is this important? Tracking what I eat raises my awareness and consciousness of what I’m eating. This helps me cope with our modern reality: an unnatural, extreme environment of unlimited food and non food items that I can eat at almost any time of the day.

Writing down what I eat also removes the possibility of storytelling about what I have or haven’t eaten, thus warping the truth and not seeing how much I’m actually eating.

4. Avoid foods that irritate me.

This takes radical honesty and acceptance, which I allowed myself to practice. I’ve had over 10 years of digestive issues ever since I came back from 6 months in Africa.

The truth is that gluten does irritate my body. You can see this irritation as small weight gains for several days after I consume gluten. According to some experts, these small weight gains are a reaction to food insensitivity. And this may be due to inflammation.

Other foods that have triggered me are strawberries, tomatoes, walnuts and bananas. I also cut out all grains, nuts and legumes and reduced my consumption of alcohol to one per month.

Why is this important? Even though I can’t explain fully why these foods irritate me, I’m learning by experience. Which I think is a key driver for everyone’s diet is not to decide ahead of time what is the best diet overall for humans, but to practice and try some of them and see what works for you. Same thing for food intolerances.

It’s also too hard to lose weight when your digestive system is in inflammation for 3 days out of the week. You just don’t lose weight fast enough. You just restart the same cycle if you have a big cheat day with gluten on Saturday. By Tuesday, you still won’t have lost the weight that you’ve gained on Saturday. So you’re barely moving the needle. It’s very discouraging. So it’s worth avoiding!

5. Finish your last meal as early as possible

My rule was: If you finish eating before seven, that’s okay. If you finish eating before six, that’s good. If you finish eating before 530, that’s great. And I’ve even given myself permission to stop eating before 5pm.

This timing works really well in the winter, when you can match the light and sunset schedule.

I first learned this and was encouraged to practice this by Sam Pelletier.

Why is this important? The more time I had to digest and rest my digestive system, the better.

6. Create accountability — text your weight twice a day

The first two weeks are the most difficult. You’re fighting inertia. You’re trying to raise your level of commitment. You’re trying to build a new story and a new identity.

You’re basically becoming a new person. Am I a person that weighs 203 or 185 or 165? You have a new definition of self and health that’s happening so you need some extra boost during that time.

One easy trick to help through this transition is being accountable to someone else. You can do this by sending them your weight two times a day: at night and in the morning. I find that doing it twice a day is easier than doing it once a day. (In the same way, paradoxically, I find that sometimes doing something every day is sometimes easier than doing it three times a week only).

Another thing I did was commit to posting a picture without a shirt on Instagram. While I initially resisted the vanity of it, I found the benefits outweigh the costs. Essentially, it’s important to create a powerful image to visualize success, and a picture of your body looks is a great proxy for these other goals.

7. Plan a cheat meal

I plan for them. I take them very seriously. I don’t have gluten. It takes planning ahead of time instead of deciding something at the last minute because cheating has to be very satisfying psychologically, but it also has to not irritate you very much. You also need to end the cheat meal early (before 5 or 6pm) to properly digest.

Surprisingly, I find this often difficult to plan, enjoy and maximize!

When I don’t plan a cheat meal and just wing it, I’m often disappointed.

Why is this important? The cheat meal gives you fuel to know that you have the power and control, and you’re able to let go of very strict parameters you’ve set.

8. Pay attention to how you feel

The most important principle that I’ve done out of all this is paying attention to how I feel. I’ve done this in three ways:

  1. Being hungry used to be the worst thing that I felt. Now it’s one of the best feelings. When the feeling of appetite arrives, I see it as a sign of health. So I pay attention to my appetite.
  2. Paying attention to how I feel in the morning is the ultimate predictor of my digestive and overall health. It’s a very subtle cue but it’s an important cue. I know now what feeling extremely good is, and what feeling bad is. When I don’t feel great, I can tie it back to something I did or didn’t do the night before. For this to work, you need to sleep extremely well not to skew the results and really pay attention to what’s happening to your digestive system. This requires you to get sun exposure in the morning to have a good circadian rhythm, getting to sleep early, and using blue eye blockers at night.
  3. Pay attention to stress and my stress eating. Let’s call it emotional eating. For me, it can happen on Saturdays or in the evening. Now that I know this, I can observe what’s happening. Is something making me feel anxious? Can I reduce the anxiety, or cope with it differently than by eating food?

Why is this important? How you feel is based on intuition. Your intuition is cutting across millions of data points to give you intelligence. Listening and interpreting this intelligence leads to powerful insights.

9. Lock it in

To crystallize this learning and progress, Linda suggested that I “lock it in” by choosing a weight that I would not surpass. In my case, I chose 175. What this means is that if I come close to, or go over 175, I will review my goals/habits/behaviors and readjust.

Why is this important? I don’t want to restart from scratch at 203, I want to keep building forward momentum.

Noteworthy exclusion: Exercise. I purposefully did not include exercise in this strategy. I was not focused on creating a caloric deficit through increased exercise. There are many reasons for this, but it deserves another post!

I hope this post might be useful to others!

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JP Michel

Founder @mySparkPath and creator of the Challenge Cards, an innovative way to prepare youth for the future of work. http://bit.ly/2YCW0ZR