This salsa recipe is light years better than you find in most restaurants, way healthier, and way cheaper. You will be shocked at how good it tastes.

Tip: If you cannot afford the high carb/calorie counts in tortilla chips, slice a cucumber and use the slices as chips. Really pile on the salsa because it is the star of the show.

One 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes with juices

One 14.5 oz can fire-roasted diced tomatoes with juices

1 large handful of chopped fresh cilantro (just do it…)

1/4 cup sliced fresh jalapeno pepper (more or less depending on your tolerance of heat)

1/4 cup chopped scallion (or onion)

Juice of 1/2 lime

1 clove of garlic (minced)

Salt to taste

Combine all ingredients with a food processor. Season to taste with salt.

Most of us do not have to overthink our health. You don’t need to follow fads and keep up with every new study. Really, it is just a matter of following some tried-and-true wisdom that has been around a long time.

Here are my six steps to good health that will not wreck your life.

1) Get engaged

Better health starts with a decision, but a decision is not enough in itself. Once you decide to start improving your health, decide what your plan is going to be, and then, make sure you have a way to monitor your progress.

Remember: the metrics you decide to watch are the metrics that are going to improve. 

You simply cannot play around with this and just do healthy things when you feel like it. Rather, it has to become a regular part of your life.

2) Start moving

You don’t have to overdo exercise. You don’t need hour-long workouts. If you feel you have no time to exercise, just find ten minutes a day to do something relatively intense. The important thing is to get started. Ideally, you will eventually exercise closer to 20 minutes/day, but in the beginning, just get started with something.

3) Begin eating better

Don’t punish yourself or make yourself dread upcoming meals. Forget extreme diets and don’t eat foods you don’t like. Rather, just start making intentionally healthier choices about what you eat. Identify unhealthy foods that you can live without and replace them with healthier options that you like too.

4) Make sleep a priority

Identify reasons why you are not sleeping enough and fix them. You might need a more regular schedule or you may simply need better curtains in your room. But, research has shown over and over that sleep is vitally important to your overall health. You can’t ignore sleep quality and stay healthy.

5) Control your media intake

Your emotional/mental health will affect your physical health. Don’t read/watch things that make you anxious, bitter, or angry. Find ways to replace subpar media with great media that will improve your mind. Read well-written fiction, history, or classics. Or, try the Great Courses (my obsession).

6) Don’t beat yourself up 

You will never be perfect with your plan. Some days, you will not feel like exercising, and some days, you will eat junk food. You won’t always sleep well and sometimes you will binge junky media. When that happens, just acknowledge it, move on, and resolve to do better the next day.

If you are doing healthy things and hitting health goals, it is good to celebrate. But, you have to be careful about that because as it turns out, those “rewards” are often devasting. Here is a picture we took this week in an ice cream shop.

Want a milkshake? At this shop, it will cost you up to 2500 calories! In terms of exercise, that is roughly five hours of running or 10 hours of walking.

I can’t prove it, but my guess is that people “rewarding” themselves after a workout leads to an awful lot of weight gain.

Be careful. You cannot out-exercise milkshakes with calories in the four-digit range. I am not saying to never drink a milkshake, but you have to count the cost.

In college, I had a roommate who was a wrestler. He was always shifting weight classes, and typically, he was told his weight class just a few days before an event.

What that meant was that he might have to gain or lose ten pounds in less than a week. And strangely enough, he almost always hit his weight target.

He did not do it in a healthy way though. One week, he was eating three Big Macs for breakfast to jump to the next weight class, and the next week, he was starving himself to drop to another weight class.

Obviously, this kind of extreme weight management is unhealthy. Binging on fast food is obviously unhealthy. But starving yourself is unhealthy too and counterproductive because it results in a loss of muscle mass and energy.

Remember: if your weight loss regimen is causing you to lose muscle mass, you are doing it wrong. If you don’t have enough energy, you are doing it wrong.

This is why you want to pace yourself so that you are losing 1-2 pounds/week. If you try to be more extreme than that, you might see great short-term results, but you are setting yourself up to fail long-term.

Here is why that is true. Muscles burn calories, even when at rest. So, if you lose muscle mass, you are actually losing the ability to burn calories down the road. When you stop dieting, you will find that you will gain the weight back even faster.

The same is true for your metabolism. If you give your body fewer calories to work with, your metabolism will slow down as your body adjusts. People with slower metabolisms are going to burn fewer calories. You want to be careful not to retrain your body’s metabolism because again, after you quit dieting, you may end up gaining weight even faster.

When you create a calorie deficiency, you need to be looking for about 500-600 calories/day. In other words, if you calculate that you burn about 2,000 calories a day, you should be trying to consume around 1,500. This will keep you on a healthy weight loss pace where you are losing a pound or two a week.

The moral of the story? Take it easy and take your time. Don’t go too crazy. This is a marathon and not a sprint.

Just to remind you what a healthy weight loss pattern looks like, here again is mine from last year.

Here is a principle about business: if you want a business metric to improve, just start watching it and tracking it. As if by magic, that metric will usually start going in a positive direction.

Why? It is simple really… If you start watching a metric, you will naturally start making decisions with that metric in mind. Eventually, those decisions will start to pay off.

This concept works outside of business of course. Weight loss is the same way. If you want to lose weight, you need to track some metrics.

For example, you need to track your weight itself. Put aside your fears, get on a scale, and record the weight you see. Start weighing yourself every week at the same time and recording it.

There are two other big numbers I want you to track:

How many calories your body is burning

You can generally get a handle on this number by using a simple calculator to determine how many calories you burn at rest. Then add the number of calories you burn through exercise on an average day. You will likely end up with a number that is in the range of 1800-2500 calories per day.

You only have to do this calculation once every few months or so. Once you have the number, you just need to make sure that you keep your calorie consumption under it. Ideally, during weight loss times, around 500-600 calories under it.

How many calories your body is consuming

Let’s face it: calorie counting is tedious. Even with today’s apps and online diaries, it can be a bit overwhelming. I get it.

Please do it anyway…

The truth is you will almost certainly not lose weight if you are not watching/recording your calorie numbers. You will fudge (no pun intended) things, underestimate serving sizes, forget snacks, and in general, rationalize bad decisions left and right.

We do not sell any online services that help you track the foods you eat. There are several good ones and I encourage you to research them. I will tell you that I lost my 30 pounds with WW (Weight Watchers). It costs a little money, but it is money well spent. WW has been around for decades because it works. And, it really is easy to record foods using their points system.

I can’t say how important this is. Please just bite the bullet, get on a scale, and start managing these two calorie numbers. Here is what happened to my weight when I did. (This chart came out of the WW app.)

Weight loss has a lot of complicating factors, but at the end of the day, it comes down to this: you have to consume fewer calories than you burn.

When I talk about creating a calorie deficiency, I am simply referring to getting to a point at which you are consuming at least a few hundred fewer calories a day than you burn. Ideally, it should be around 500-600 calories, which should translate into 1-2 pounds a week in weight loss.

I have been telling you for a few weeks to start making two lists:

* a list of foods that are healthy that you enjoy eating

* a list of foods that are unhealthy that you are willing to temporarily remove from your diet

The truth is that those two lists are probably the key to setting up your calorie deficiency. All you have to do is replace the foods on the second list with foods from the first list. It will not even be that painful since you enjoy the foods on the first list.

As an example, candy is on my second list while fruit is on my first list. I made a conscious decision to stop eating candy and start eating a lot more fruit instead. I replaced some meats with more grilled chicken, and some lunches with protein shakes.

Simple? Pretty much.

This is the essence of weight loss. But, if I stopped here, I would not be going far enough because we really need to quantify things. We need hard numbers so you are not guessing.

For example, we need to know how many calories you burn in a day both while resting and while exercising. We also need to know about calories in food. I am going to recommend calorie counting because calorie counting really works. It does not have to be too hard though. You can easily keep up with your calories in less than ten minutes a day.

Yes, it is really not enough to just say consume fewer calories. Numbers matter. The hard numbers translate into targets and goals, and the psychology of goals makes all the difference.

We will get into those next week.

Making life improvements is sort of like getting into a pool when you know the water is going to be cold. You can either ease into the shallow end or jump into the deep end.

We all know of course that just jumping into the pool is going to be less painful in the long run, but many of us go to that shallow end anyway. Why? I have no idea. Someone should do a study on that.

In regards to weight loss, people are the same way. A few go in hard and committed, but most decide to just start easing in the right direction. For example, they might say things like this:

* I will start by cutting soda out of my diet.

* I will stop eating after 8:00 pm.

* I will start cutting back on carbs.

* I will start taking my lunch to work instead of going out.

* I will start walking two miles every night after dinner.

These are all great things to do, but here is something important to know:

While you can possibly maintain your current weight with small adjustments to your lifestyle, you have to do something more radical to actually start losing weight in a meaningful way.

Let’s consider why this is true. Though there are many factors at play and while I run the risk of oversimplifying things, losing a pound of fat requires you to create a deficiency of somewhere around 3,000 calories.

Here is an example. Let’s say that you are burning 2200 calories a day and eating 2200 calories a day. In that case, you will be maintaining your weight. Now, if you choose to make a modest improvement to your lifestyle, you can begin creating a calorie deficiency, but probably only a few hundred calories per day at most.

In that scenario, you would lose weight, but only a pound or two a month.

The more likely scenario is even worse. If you are worried about your weight, you are probably at a point where you have a daily surplus of calories and are slowly gaining weight. In that scenario, simply making small adjustments may at best stop the weight gain and at worse, just slow it down.

The bigger problem though is not the weight loss itself. It is the psychology involved: the discouragement of trying to make sacrifices and seeing no results. If you are sacrificing without results, your lifestyle improvements will not last long. You will give up.

My suggestion is to stop playing around and jump in the deep end of the pool. Get your weight loss done by creating a significant calorie deficiency. If you can start eating 600 calories less than you burn each day, you will start losing a pound every 4-5 days and hit a healthy target of 1-2 pounds/week.

Seeing those kinds of results will keep you going. And more importantly, once you start seeing results, you can start to see a finish line. You will not have to do this for the rest of your life. In my case, it took me about 4 months to lose 30 pounds. At that point, I resumed a fairly normal diet with modest improvements that allow me to avoid calorie surplusses and weight gain.

I should say that creating too big of a calorie deficiency is not healthy either. In fact, if you don’t eat enough to maintain your muscle mass, this will all boomerang on you. Almost every credible health professional says that you should be targetting a weight loss goal of just a few pounds a week at most. Shoot for that reduction of 500-600 calories a day.

Next week, we will get more into how to get this calorie deficiency set up. Keep working on your list of unhealthy foods you are willing to eliminate and healthy foods you enjoy eating.

Practical thoughts about weight loss 

There is plenty to both like and dislike about Dave Ramsey, the personal finance guy. For me, Ramsey is a mixed bag, but I have learned some things from him over the years.

Until I understood better, I used to get annoyed by one bit of advice Ramsey would give. A caller would ask what order he should use to pay his debts off and Ramsey always said to pay the smallest off first. I thought that was stupid; purely from a financial standpoint, the debt with the highest interest rate should always be paid off first. Why would you pay off a debt with a 1% interest rate if you have another debt with a 20% interest rate?

The truth is Ramsey knew something I did not yet understand: people are not going to get out of debt unless they have the will to get out of debt, and they will not have the will to get out of debt unless they believe it is possible.

And the best way to get them to believe it is possible is to get them some wins under their belt.

In other words, Ramsey’s approach to debt is more psychological than financial. He knows that the psychology of debt reduction is more important than saving a few dollars on interest. He wants people to quickly learn that debt reduction is possible and once the wins start coming, it can actually be fun.

The same is true for weight loss. The psychology of weight loss is far more important than the specific weight loss plan you choose. 

What matters most is that you get into the game, believing you can win and probably more importantly, believing that your weight loss regimen is not going to destroy your life.

And that brings me to this week’s weight loss tip: don’t do a weight-loss regimen that is going to destroy your life. Pick a plan that you can tolerate or even enjoy.

We will talk about this next week, but make sure that your diet includes foods you love. For example, if you are addicted to ice cream, choose a diet that allows you to still have some ice cream once in a while (even if less frequently with smaller portions).

The truth is that you are not going to be successful if you try to do something that you will hate. We will talk about this more next week, but here is a little homework for those of you considering weight loss. I want you to start making two lists:

* a list of healthy foods you enjoy

* a list of unhealthy foods you eat now but can live without.

We will get into these lists next time.