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How Others Do It: Kishan Shah

he shows you talking to us about how people have help, how he and how his his clients have managed to make massive transformations in their life. Um hey, Keyshawn. Okay, very good. Very good. How you doing? It's been a while doing fantastic. Congratulations And everything with padlock. I've been following it. Really, really awesome. Launch and I went to a meeting with a couple of friends and one of them asked me like, Oh, you know, what do you do with people? They're trying to lose a significant amount of weight. How are they gonna have those daily reminders? And I saw something on TV that shocks you. Go funny. You should mention that I'm gonna be sitting down and chatting with the nation. Just a couple of weeks. So So your infamous now Not famous, but yeah, a little bit of both, I guess, Um, show you tell you. Tell me your story. Tell us about how you got to where you are today. Yeah, sure. So I used to weigh £400. I was £200.12 year old. Both of my grandfather suffered from complicat...

ions related obesity. One, unfortunately passed away from a heart attack. The other was blind the last 10 years of his life due to diabetes. My family has dealt with this for three generations. I was a £200.12 year old when I was 19 at a job interview. And when you're that big, when you have a 62 inch waist, you never wear pants. You work sweat, and it's all the time because it's stretchy waistband. So that day I needed a suit for a job interview that Taylor puts his tape measurer on my waist. It's 62 inches, and I said, Hey, I really problem here. I need to do something about it. My father had a gastric bypass, and people said, Hey, you know, maybe you should look into that. You know, I want to try to do something where I'm gonna try to figure it out, and it's taken me 10 years. And between a combination of diet and exercise, no surgeries, no fad diets, no trainers. I was able to lose over £200 through diet exercise. Luckily, I have got a job on Wall Street. I was working over at Goldman Sachs. Things were going great and enough people saying occasion, Go do something in the space, Go try to help other people. And I was even fortunate to be congratulated on my weight loss by birth lady Michelle Obama, she said Cation, You look amazing. You should go go out there and be an inspiration to Americans everywhere. I'm like, OK, yeah, this is all the validation I need. I should definitely be doing something here. So I came across this company, Downsize Fitness, which was founded in 2011. The individual that found it, he was also £340 want to help people. So now it's a national using an international chain of gyms focused on helping people lose 50 plus pounds. So we offer fitness training, nutrition training and weight loss coaching all for the individual with significant way to lose, really, where a long term solution instead of a quick fix, which is what the market is that makes a lot of sense. Focusing on like the goal of losing 50 or £100 can often be really, really difficult. That's Ah, very hard problem solved, and I'd love to know more about your clients when they come there How do they find it? How and wide they choose to use downsize fitness and kind of what other success rates. So I think if you look at a lot of the marketing that's out there in fitness on the weight loss industry, it's very much focused on quick picks, right? Can I lose £14 in seven days? And the answer is yes. You can lose £14 in seven days. Is that going to be a long term sustainable change? No. 1990% of people that lose £30 or more within a month can't back with eso. We take the approach. This is going to take a significantly longer amount of time to put on the people's pounds. Take decades to take it off, take you at least a year. So the client is coming in and first has to have that behavioral focus of what is my wife. What is my single reason in my single driver for getting into this? For most people, it's going to be, uh, I need to look good for bikini season. I'm going on spring break and need to get six pack abs for our clients. It's much more functional, So I want to be able to bend down and touch my toes. I won't be able to bend down and tie my shoe laces. I want to be able to keep up with my kids. I want to be around for my grandkids. Very functional life specific issues. What that teaches you is that one. Why can really propel you over a long enough period of time? Teoh iterated through the difficulties. So think about starting to start up right. There's no clear path you have to be able to wind through and figure out what's really gonna work. Weight loss is no different. Everyone's gonna have a different approach. We don't choose the pre package prescribed diet. We believe that it's necessary for the individual to find things that they're gonna be happy with over time and ultimately create a long lasting. So when someone signs up, what sort of like let's say they come in and they have 100 plus pounds to lose? The thing about downside sentence that I like is that it's it's a community of people who are all in the same situation, so someone is really, really overweight and goes to a regular gym or like a power lifting gym. People will be laughing at them. They might feel uncomfortable, whereas in your case, you say, Let's make it as comfortable as possible for everybody. Everyone is in the same situation. Everyone has the same sort of amount of weight to lose. So when someone arrives, do you start just by just give him a gym access? Or are you teaching them? Are you measuring something? Do you do? What's the first week like for somebody who joins a program? So there is a body composition analysis. There's a bunch of metrics that you can use to define. Suggest in this industry. It could be pounds laws. It could be inches lost. It could be functional fitness metrics. So how many pushups can I do? How long can I do a wall sit? But really, everyone's got a different story, and that first hour of customer experience has to be directly tied to what got you here exactly as you said. What is your story from there? It's a manner of getting people involved in the fitness, nutrition and weight loss coaching sessions. I think fundamentally the most important driver in our business is attendance by. I can't control 23 hours out of 24 hours when they're not in our doors. But what I do believe is that if they're coming more often to our facilities, they're engaging more with our different Facebook groups or social media channels. Or they're being involved with other members of the downsize fitness community that focus on long term behavioral change. Your you're not going to focus on eating that doughnut you're gonna focus on, not the next weigh in, but hate. What am I going to do to build a left longer stage lifestyle that's been able to be successful? Yeah, that's Ah, that's reminiscent of like of the research I've seen on Weight Watchers, for example, Weight Watchers is, ah, a program that everybody knows about and it's very effective. As long as the person shows up, As long as the person shows up, they're always gonna lose weight. It's always gonna be successful. I mean, of course, 100% but very, very close to 100% as long as they show up. But the hard part is getting people to continue to show up. So from your perspective, How are you attacking that problem? So as an economic driver, Jim's Jim's make money. When people don't show up right? You look at any membership base model it's all about. Hey, if I've got 5000 members of the location, I don't want 4500 and showed up right the way our economic model work it on its head, you say, Hey, we want you to be actively involved. We wanna have affordable session, no one hour sessions, more than $20 an hour. We want you to be able to come and be engaged. And when you don't come Facebook, you text, you call you. We have other members of the community reach out to you, which is unheard of in the gym in the street, right, because there's a great quote. Great Glassman founder CrossFit He said, My first boss, he came up to me and said, My favorite client is the client who pays his contracting full and never shows up the next day. And you think about how the fitness industry works. A lot of January 1st marketing that gets people when they're vulnerable gets them to pay a high value and hopes that they never come in or a lot of these direct response system, right? A lot of DVDs and complete that law systems that. It's assuming that you're going to read it and your life's gonna change. But you need ongoing support. It's OK that you need a daily reminder for the decisions you're going to make that day. Of what that's that's completely normal to me. What's not normal to me. It's assuming that there is an all encompassing package that's going to change your life in one broad stroke. That's absolutely true. I My background before I started working on Pavlak was to focus on, uh, selling digital courses and and helping other people launched. It was, of course, is and we noticed that, you know, it's not that hard to sell to people, but what's really hard is to get them to open day to and Day three, God forbid, like no one, people will watch Day one. People watched a two, maybe, but by the second week, you can't even get them to respond to texts or or or any sort of reminder email on. So when you focus on a year focusing on you allow people to you, all your members. You create accountability groups. It sounds like to get people to just show up. How often do people tend to show up to your gym at least two times a week? So we want people to be engaged and coming to those sections? Because so insurance, major form of companies, major insurance reimbursement, they've done research. And they say, OK, if you've gone to a gym 100 times in, let's call it a year, you are going to be a lower risk population. Chronic disease, right? So cardiac issues of the city centre cancers. What that means is that if you're growing at least two times a week, the chances of you being you know, having some sort of incidence of obesity or cancer is going to be significantly lower. So I say to myself, he said, have done billions of dollars of research there, and we kind of Robert that with our results, it makes complete sense. If you're doing anything at least twice a week and twice a week, I mean, let's be honest, there's 168 hours a week. That's not very difficult, right? The at least two hours a week, you'll be fine. But I think everyone believes today that attention is becoming more and more of a commodity. I agree with that. The more we can get your attention on weight loss and just making healthier choices in general, not starvation. Not I need to lose £40 by the end of the second week, but just attention on making healthy choices and behaviour modification programmes. I think that's what truly unlocked long term. So my old professor of B. J. Fogg with this interesting article about how he was working under, uh like he did a Weight Watchers test where he went under the scenes and he didn't let them know who he was that he was focusing on a study and he decided to go in and try to lose weight. And one of the most interesting things that he said in his post. His post hoc description of what happened was that he ended up succeeding. He lost a lot of weight, and he said that so Weight watchers will give you like something like 20 points a day that you're allowed to you or something like that. And he said, one of his biggest takeaways was that a lot of days he would come home and he would have eaten 14 points and you know he was ready to go to sleep or whatever he was like. But he said that the biggest take away was that when he got to that point where he had 14 points, he would go out and actually ETM or to get himself up to points or 20 points because he said that the slower it takes to t get your results, the longer that those results will last. So I'm wondering what you think about that. Do you think that your people, the people in your program who have like there I'm sure that there's some people who have very slow results and some very fast results? Have you ever seen a difference between the to do? They tend to last longer and eat a variety, so you hit on a point that is very, very important, right? And the problem with KP eye tracking here is people lose weight at different levels and their measurements change of different levels. Right? So we're dealing with populations that are way have, ah for not for profit charity of five on C three that's dedicated childhood obesity. And they're 13 or 18. They lose weight at different rates from some of our geriatric clients overseas right on And then also, there's there's women issues, and there's also certain people have thyroid issues or their bariatric surgery patients. It's all across the map. I think you conduce, um, data testing in terms of when people are being most successful. And generally you'll see attendant start to rise because their own volition to come and visit our facility is higher at that point. But I've realized that I don't want to be in the business of giving someone the, you know, 150 page book and saying, Follow this program to the tea because I think it's human nature to be able to bypass systems and try to find the most efficient way to get to get to a long gold. But it is a journey, not not a. It's absolutely a journey and not a quick fix. I know personally, I've always I was overweight as a child. I was at a lot of trouble, like I like keeping myself healthy. I always over eight in my like I mean, I grew up with life. The my parents always taught me finish everything on your plate, no matter what right and like get the best value for your food. So, like if you go to a buffet, you know, make sure you get the but the most heavy items and eat as much as you can of it. And it's such a bad habit to implicate and Children child. And when I started to, like, start losing weight, I would lose for a goal. So, you know, lose £20 or do doing extreme diet, and I can't imagine how oft like, if you look at my chart, it's up and down and up and down and the only time it's ever really changed. There were two big changes that have helped me keep pretty healthy for a longer period time than ever before. The first change was to focus on the process and not the whole. So it's not about going to the gym for 30 minutes and working out hard. It's about walking in and swiping my card. Once I'm in the gym, I'm likely to work out. If I don't, it's not that bad because I kept the habit up of actually walking to the gym and swiped my card. The second thing, which was a big revelation recently, was focusing on muscle instead of cardio are focusing on on building because, uh, because muscle helps you burn fat for a period of time, whereas cardio helps you burn fat for a period time. That's very short. And then you're hungry right after. So those two things were really interested in me. I'm wondering you have had any results on people. Oh, if you have any anything insightful but that so I think what we've seen in terms of dealing with these clientele, they generally tend to have a larger amount of muscle mass, which is a good thing, right, But on the scale, it's going to be a little bit challenging to discern the difference between Germany pounds lost in a week. So we have body fat human systems. Right where you have a digital scale on provides you with a lean body mass by body, part right foot print. Out of that, we choose to Onley do that twice a month, right, because that progress point of weighing yourself everyday is a self defeating Michael. I do believe that what you are doing in the gym, just the idea of showing up and having a trainer walking through. I thought about this because I had my family actually come out and visit our Chicago location. And so yeah, my brother say, I'm going to the gym right three times a week. My dad would say that. Okay, what do you actually doing there? And if you don't grow up the culture where you were in varsity athletics or you did all of this stuff as a kid and you've been, you know, in an athletic system for a decade, it's very hard to actually know what you're supposed to do in there. There's a ton of machines. How do you use them? What's most effective, what how should be focusing on form and injury prevention to just having having someone to walk you through That, and one of our key differentiators is that 95% of our staff have weight loss transformations. So having someone that's been through that being able to coach you through that, the difference between an expert right who is a subject matter expert and a coach, right, someone who's going to help you get through That journey, I think, is extremely Yeah, personal trainer is often seen, are very effective, even less about the training and Maura about the act that you actually show up. But on the next step of actually knowing what to do when you train, it's It's very interesting when you see, like somebody new to the gym who shows up and what do they do, They do what's easy or what they've been told to do. So they go on the treadmill. They literally, exactly. I've probably been to call 200 Julien's and 30 countries the amount of times I've seen you know, these client exercising a personal trainer and you're paying $ an hour for that, right? And that personal trainer chooses to put that client on a treadmill right and say, Oh, when you're that big, you just need to move Well, there's about 1000 other factors that contribute to obesity. I don't think it's that easy. It was that easy. Everyone would be doing it and we wouldn't have a problem. Yeah, there was a recent New York Times article about exercise and and appetite. And they've said, basically, if you're doing aerobic activity, the majority of people who do aerobic activity get hungrier and then they end up saying, Oh, well, I ran on a treadmill for 30 minutes. Therefore, I should be allowed to eat these 18 cookies, and it's like or even one cookie. But it's like it doesn't it doesn't measure up. I've noticed. And I'm wondering about your experience on this, too, when I started working on the iron, this is the ironic part about exercise for me when I was working on muscle Growth and I was working on five core lifts, that we're actually going to demo ing a little bit later on in this session. In the segment, um, I was supposed to eat more food afterwards. I have to have ah calorie increase so that I gained muscle right? But of course, as soon as I'm supposed to eat more food, I'm not hungry like I did, I did anaerobic exercise, and then suddenly it's like shovelling food in my face that I don't want. On the other hand, when I was doing aerobic exercise, which you know it's all right to not eat food afterwards, I'm hungry or than I've ever been. You are seeing anything in this in this in this situation. So there's two things there. There's our program, and there's generally what I've seen in terms of user behavior in terms of the user behavior. The hardest thing is, while information has been democratized over the past years, knowing who to trust is extremely difficult, right? So I go on Google and I typed high fat diet. I got 100 10 million results. I type low fat diet, 110 million results. Who do I trust? Especially considering my medical history, Then in terms of what actually did do It's hard, right, because Tim Paris had a great line, which was the good program. You think two is better than the perfect program you don't stick to? I don't believe in this concept of portion control because I've never seen a box of cookies in my house that's not fully eaten. It's a binary, either See a full box of cookies and I've yet to eat or a completely empty box of cookies. I've already eaten and I dug down people. Trash means I don't want to look at right? Absolutely. I don't think there's anything in the middle for me. Andi. There's a number of factors live like scenic index Indiana, propensity of diabetes and sweets like there's a ton of things like that. But generally, a lot of these buzz words that you hear in this industry just don't end up working for me. And I think its function of just learning over time, how to be successful, however, right, giving yourself one month months, six months, 12 months to learn a skill people don't really think about. Think about. I think colleges is an excellent example. I was watching this documentary last night. All the ivory tower and college is a four year exercise, right to put yourself in the structure environment over four years, where someone is forcing you to do something with incentives to continue right? I mean, just by someone forcing you to stay there, you will be a different human being, right? So is that a device like yours right, forces you to be in a pattern of behavior is over a longer specified period of time. That is extremely helpful because I don't think the solution to the obesity crisis is we need to hire $100 in our personal trainers. Nor do I think it is. Figure out the perfect program and put it on paper and think that day one. Here I go, right. It's going to be a program that's going to be 70% 80% effective. That will generate results over the Walter. Great. Well, hey, Thank you so much. Cash on. Can you tell us where can you tell when he's watching right now, where they can find out more about you and how they can ask any questions. They have any after the session? Sure. You can visit downsize fitness dot com and also hit me up on Twitter. I am that at I am Kishan Shaw. Great. Thank you so much. Thanks. You should take her.