Jeremy Jouette had grappled with obesity for most of his adult life when he realized that it was time to make a change. It was 2011, and he’d recently lost his mother to cancer. Following months of spending time with her in an out of the hospital, he tipped the scale at 340 pounds.
Just a year and a half later, CrossFit training and a strict paleo diet had trimmed Jouette down to a fit 170 pounds—half of his former weight. But he wasn’t out of the woods yet. He gained back 100 of those pounds in the year after his initial transformation.
“I didn’t even realize it until I got on the scale and it was right at 270,” Jouette reflected during an interview with M&F. He got his weight down to 235, but he realized he needed more support to make a real, lasting transformation. So, he signed up for one-on-one diet coaching with Renaissance Periodization in 2015.
“Within about four months, I was in the 180s,” Jouette says. “The lowest I got was 172.” These days, he still uses Renaissance Periodization diet plans via the company’s RP Diet phone app to maintain a healthy weight and fuel his fitness routine. He does CrossFit competitively, and his team won the recent Granite Games in New Orleans in the intermediate division.
What’s more, Jouette is now a coach at the gym that changed his life. His unique situation helps him relate to clients who are struggling with the same issues.
“A lot of people who are fitness trainers or nutrition coaches know how to lose weight, but I don’t think a lot of them have firsthand experience dealing with the emotional things that come with obesity and food addiction,” Jouette says. “I don’t see many diet coaches out there who have truly lost a person’s worth of weight and have battled for years and years fighting cravings and emotions.”
Here are some of Jouette’s top tips for staying on track.
FORGET MOTIVATION—STAY DISCIPLINED
I don’t really like relying on the term “motivated,” because it’s really more about discipline. You can be as little or as motivated as possible, but knowing that you need to stick to your plan whether you feel motivated or not is important. Motivation is fleeting, so you have to be disciplined in order to get where you need to be.
DON’T STRESS IMPERFECTIONS
You don’t have to be perfect all the time. Obviously, chicken and broccoli is better than ice cream, but if you need a couple hundred calories of ice cream every few days to prevent yourself from binging later, that’ll help you more in the long run than being rigid and setting yourself up to be worse off than you were before.
FOCUS ON YOU
The biggest thing that most people miss in changing their lives is that they need to focus on themselves. Friends can be helpful and motivating and try to steer you in the right direction, but ultimately, people have to make the decision for themselves. You can hound someone all you want, but they’re not gonna do it until they’re ready.
FIND THE RIGHT GYM
You need a good gym with a good community—people who will be there for you, support you, be there for you. Finding people whose goals align with yours, who know what you’ve been through, and who will be there to support you definitely helps, but again, at the end of the day it’s all about you.
