I was a fat kid. (And I did the truffle shuffle a lot.)

Most people don’t know this about me. When they meet me now they see someone who is relatively lean and fit. However, I wasn’t always this person. From about 10 years old to 15 or 16 years old, I was pretty overweight.

Looking back now I understand everything I was doing to put myself in that situation.

• I wasn’t moving enough. I was spending too much time during the day sitting in front of the TV playing Xbox, and not enough time moving around — whether outside playing basketball, riding my bike, or just walking around in the sun.
• I was constantly overeating. I used to feel like dog shit EVERY TIME I ate a meal. I’d eat so much that I’d be in pain almost every time I ate. As a family, we ate out a lot. So that’s probably partially to blame. But I thought this level of fullness was normal. And clearly it’s not.
• I was eating a shitty diet. While I was definitely overeating, the quality of the foods I was eating weren’t good. I remember being at home in the summers making cheese quesadillas or heating up hot dogs in the microwave. And SODA! So much f*cking soda as a kid.
• I lacked a real healthy role model. I realize now that the information is all out there on the internet for people looking to get healthy and fit. However, at the time I wasn’t seeking that out. The people I was around had poor diet and lifestyle habits, so that’s what I thought was normal.

So what would I do differently if I could go back and time with the knowledge I have now?

How To Lose Fat (and Get Fit) as a Kid

So I’ve written about the principles of fat loss and muscle development on here before, but I want to tailor the tips to younger guys who want to no longer be the “fat kid” and become healthier and fitter than ever. So here they are:

1. Set a healthy weight goal

If you’re at an unhealthy weight right now, you need to determine a realistic and healthy weight for your height. It can be hard if you’re a kid, because you’re growing, and there is a lot of difference between a string bean, tall, skinny kid and a shorter, stalkier kid.

I think a BMI calculator can be helpful. However, you should take the results with a grain of salt. If you’re especially strong for your age (and obviously carry a lot of muscle) you might be perfectly healthy even though the BMI calculator says you’re overweight.

And the truth is, if you’re still growing your body might not look like you want it to yet, regardless of how you eat. And there’s no reason to drastically cut back on your food intake, especially if you’re growing and want to keep doing so in a healthy way.

So set a healthy goal weight based on your current age and height, and work towards that goal (with the tips in this article).

2. Don’t fall for fad diets

Losing weight (and ultimately getting to a healthy body composition) as a kid is about health, and shouldn’t be about losing as much weight as possible as quickly as possible. As a kid, your body and mind are still developing so going vegan, or carnivore, or keto probably isn’t a good idea. You need a balanced diet to allow your body to thrive and grow naturally. The goal here is also to develop healthy diet habits so you can live as a healthy adult for your whole life. If you continuously lose 10 pounds and then gain back more weight, you’ll just fall in a cycle of crash dieting and then blowing back up to a heavier, more unhealthy body composition.

Rather than taking drastic measures, you should strive to understand the principles of nutrition — like calories, macronutrients, and diet quality — to get the best, most sustainable results. Once you get a good understanding of how you eat impacts your body, you equip yourself to maintain a healthy body composition for the rest of your life.

Read More: How To Overhaul Your Lifestyle For Health

3. Find healthy influences

As I mentioned, I struggled to maintain a healthy body weight when I was younger because I lacked someone in my life who had a healthy way of eating and a exercise/fitness routine. My mom was always really active and has stayed fit her entire life. But I think I had the idea that women were able to stay small because none of them actually ate food. So even if my mom was able to maintain a healthy diet, it wasn’t something I thought I could apply to my life.

However, later when I was in high school my mom started dated a guy who was really into cycling, so I was got wrapped up in that world. Suddenly I was surrounded by adults who rode bikes consistently 4 or 5 nights per week. So I pretty quickly went from having no real healthy influences to being surrounded by older guys who were super into health and athletic performance. I didn’t realize it at the time, but getting into cycling would be a huge influence on me and played a major role in my health and fitness journey.

Some of the guys I rode with were in the middle of their own weight loss journeys. A couple of them had been up over 300 pounds, and through cycling and changing their diets they were able to lose a ton of weight to get down under 200 pounds for the first time in decades. And I developed motivation to lose weight to become a better, faster cyclist. I started racing, and I knew that every pound I lost would equate to me going faster up hills.

4. Start with small changes

It’s tempting to go ALL IN to get quick results, but that usually equates to losing weight the hard way — i.e. starving yourself. And if you want sustainable results, it’s better to gradually make changes over time. Also, if you think that dieting has to suck, you’ll probably never reach your goals and stay there. If dieting means pain and suffering, it will be a temporary thing that you do for awhile to lose 10-20 pounds and then you’ll balloon back up and repeat the process all over again. Ask yourself: What if it could be easy? Because it can be.

When it comes to diet and nutrition, small tweaks make massive changes. This is because we eat every day. And the results of those changes compound over a lifetime.

I always think of the example of putting cream and sugar in your coffee every day versus drinking your coffee black. Two ounces of cream and two tablespoons of sugar in adds about 150 calories to a cup of coffee. If you have two coffees every day (which is less than I drink 😏), that adds an extra 2,100 calories to your weekly intake. And to gain one pound of fat, you need to consume 3,500 calories. So over the course of a month, that small tweak could be the difference you gaining 2.4 pounds or maintaining your weight. If you add that up over a year it’s over 100,000 calories difference in your consumption, which could mean the difference between you staying the same weight compared to losing over 28 pounds.

So the farther out you expand your time horizon, the easier it is to understand the impact of your dietary choices. Eating an entire pizza today could have very little impact on your overall health outcomes, if the other 95% of the time you’re eating a balanced diet that allows you to not gain fat. However, if you eat an extra piece of pizza every day, that could be the habit that causes you to gain 30 pounds over the course of a year.

5. Eat less processed food

How often do you eat a meal and find yourself feeling absolutely terrible after eating it? It’s unfortunate but a lot of people find themselves feeling awful after they eat. And I think this is a clear sign that we’re eating the wrong things. I find that this is most common after eating out at a restaurant and eating a meal containing a lot of fried foods, processed carbs, or sugar. This rarely happens when I eat at home — because I don’t use vegetable oil, I avoid processed foods, and the meals I eat are just a lot simpler.

As a young person it can be hard to dictate what you eat. Either because you are at the mercy of whatever your parents make for dinner, you go out to eat where your family goes, or because you don’t have the resources to buy higher quality, whole food ingredients yourself. However, if you can request that your parents buy better groceries — think lean meats like beef, chicken, or fish, and fruits and vegetables — do it, and your whole family can benefit. If you can’t just try to limit the processed, junk food that you consume as much as possible.

Processed foods are harmful to your health because they are easier to overeat, spike your blood sugar, are less filling, contain harmful ingredients and additives, and cause you to crave overly sweet or salty foods.

As this image shows, the more processed a food becomes, generally the more calories it contains.

6. Move more!

While it’s possible to lose weight entirely without exercise, I think adding exercise helps out in more ways than just weight loss. When you move your body more, your joints will feel better and you’ll generally feel happier.

Moving more during the day is tough, especially if your diet is poor. If you constantly have low blood sugar because you’re not fueling properly, no wonder you feel like shit. When you have very little energy going outside for a walk doesn’t sound like fun. However, once you start moving it becomes infinitely easier to keep going. Just go walk around the block a couple of times. You’ll get some sun, burn some calories, and prove to yourself that you can do it.

7. Break your addiction to sugar

Part of what led me to being overweight was consuming too much sugar. I think a lot of kids do this, but they are able to combat it by being physically active, and by eating less during the rest of their day. But I remember crushing multiple cans of Sprite per day, and always having plenty of ice cream sandwiches in the freezer for me to pull from.

And when you’re eating a lot of sugar, especially processed, low-quality, sugary foods it’s hard to stop eating it. Your blood sugar spikes and then crashes and then you need more sugar to get that spike again. If you’re trapped in this cycle you’re probably hungry all the time, so if you want to get to a healthy weight and maintain it, you need to break that cycle.

8. Avoid weight loss supplements

Weight loss supplements don’t work. They may allow you to lose 5 or 10 pounds in a week, but it isn’t sustainable. Your goal if you’re trying to lose weight should ultimately be to maintain a healthy weight. I think too many people focus on short term weight loss, and not the lifestyle and diet changes necessary to lead to lasting, sustainable change.

The way weight loss supplements typically work is that they use caffeine or other stimulants to blunt your hunger temporarily. However, if you become dependent on these supplements to avoid overeating, you’ll likely have a rebound effect once you stop taking them.

I think one of the more valuable aphorisms I’ve heard is: there are no shortcuts. And this applies really well to diet and exercise. You can’t just spend your whole life seeking hacks and shortcuts to make things easy. You know what you need to do, and you know it might suck. But that’s exactly why you should do it.

9. Use a fitness tracker

Fitness trackers (or at least your step tracker on your phone) are great for letting you know how much you’re moving during the day. I think these offer a big wake up call to people who think they move around a lot, but when they check the numbers they find that they hardly walk around during the day.

When I started tracking the steps I took every day, I was probably walking around 2.5 miles (or about 5,000 steps) per day. Over the past few years, I’ve increased my daily steps up over 10,000. If I get lucky, I might even average over 12,000 steps per day for an entire month.

Walking is my favorite form of cardio — by far. It’s easy. I can walk all day and not get tired. It doesn’t increase my hunger. And it’s easier on the joints than running. Especially if you’re overweight, you should walk a lot more than you run. Trust me it will get you leaner than any intense HIIT workouts or tons of running.

10. Build muscle

This might feel counter-intuitive, but the answer to your poor body composition isn’t always weight loss. Sometimes you just need to build muscle. And getting stronger is never a bad thing, so you should probably do it anyway.

One thing I just realized recently was that the more muscle I have on my body, the more food I need to eat to fuel that muscle. So building muscle is a great way to “speed up your metabolism”. In addition to allowing you to eat more, having more muscle also makes you more injury-resistant, improves your blood sugar levels, and reduces your risk for metabolic conditions like diabetes.

Building muscle is an active process, so you’ll need to workout to do so. This will increase the amount of movement you have in your day, which is another benefit.

Read More: Today I Learned America is Under-Muscled

11. Fix your sleep

Sleep makes everything better. The more you sleep, the more recovered and rested you’ll feel while you’re awake. When you get quality sleep, you are less likely to crave high-carb, low-quality foods.

Here are a few tips I recommend to anyone who wants to sleep better, and feel more rested during the day:

• Make your room dark and cool. Light in your environment signals to your body that it is time to wake up, so make it dark! A cool room is also optimal for getting high quality sleep. According to Sleep Foundation, your room should be between 60 and 68 degrees.
• Go to sleep at the same time. Just like you get in a routine to exercise and eat healthy, you can get in a healthy routine to sleep. When you make it a habit to go to bed at a similar time, it’s easier to fall asleep.
• Avoid staring at screens for awhile before bed.

12. If you’re a kid, eat like a kid

I think one thing that kept me overweight as a kid was that I stopped ordering off the kids menu when I was around 10 years old. I can’t remember why I first started, but it was probably after trying something my dad was eating and realizing it was way better than a cheeseburger or chicken tenders.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this change meant that I was eating for a person way bigger than me — an adult. Eating portions intended for people two feet taller than me meant I was eating way more calories than I needed to in a day (in a single meal).

This one decision probably set me on a path to overeating at most of my meals for the next five years or so. Portion control is important, not because it keeps you from overeating once. But because it becomes what you’re accustomed to. So if you eat an appropriate amount and you get used to that, odds are you won’t end up overweight — or at least as overweight as you would be otherwise.

The kids menu has its issues…namely that the foods on it are mostly fried, or high-fat, processed options. But eating fewer calories in a smaller burger and fries is better than overeating something else.

You can do it!

If you’re a “fat kid”…I want you to know that you can completely transform your life and become one of the fittest people you know. I think that’s part of the reason I write about health, diet, and fitness so much. It’s not because I think I’m the world’s foremost expert, but because I want to inspire kids who are in the situation I was once in. I want them to know that you aren’t stuck being overweight and out of shape because of your genetics or your environment. You can change those things!

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My goal with this site is to help as many people as possible solve problems that I’ve overcome in my own life. Subscribe to stay up to date on my posts.