My elders have been kind enough to give me a longer summer preaching break than normal this year. Because of that I won’t be posting anything new on my blog until July 6th (at which time I’ll be back with some great new stuff for you), so that we can rest, recharge and enjoy some time as a family. I’ll also be posting less on social media, but I’ll be posting fun pictures of our adventures on Instagram.

In the meantime, here are some of the most recent top posts on my blog to keep you company until I get back:

Healthy Marriage

• How to Keep Your Marriage Special
• Why Dating is Easy and Marriage is Hard
• How Your Past Affects Your Marriage
• How to Enjoy Your Marriage
• 10 Questions You Should Ask Your Spouse This Summer
• 18 Things Every Husband Should Know About His Wife

Healthy Church

• Church Growth and the Work of God
• Two Overlooked Parts of Church Growth
• How to Build a Healthy Elder Team
• How Leadership Capacity Affects the Growth and Health of a Church
• How to Create a Leadership Growth Plan

Healthy Leadership

• How to Lose Weight as a Leader
• Loving Relationships
• How to Recover from Preaching
• The Weight of Leadership and Leading a Team
• Being a Pastor’s Wife

Healthy Faith

• How to Grow in Holiness
• Family Devotions, Praying Together as a Couple, Train Wrecks, and the Grace to Move Forward
• The God of Psalm 23
• How to Ask God for Help
• How to Trust God When It’s Hard to Trust God
• How God Turns Guilt and Shame into Joy

Healthy Preaching

• When You’re Stuck in Sermon Prep
• 1 Way to Prepare a Sermon
• The Pressure of Preaching
• How to Recover from Preaching

If you’re curious about what I’m reading this summer, here you go (and yes, Katie and I take a suitcase of books on vacation):

For you book worms out there. Here’s what I’m taking on summer vacation (yes @katiereichphotos and I take a suitcase of books on vacation for us and our kids) & what I have left on my book list for the year. We’ll see if I get through them! What are you excited to read this summer? Have you read any of these?

A post shared by Josh Reich (@joshua_reich) on May 22, 2017 at 12:50pm PDT

Have a great summer!

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Every month I hear from a reader of this blog, a fellow pastor or talk to someone who wants to lose weight. I get asked about my weight loss journey on a weekly basis. For most Americans and leaders, weight and health are a struggle. And it gets harder the older you get.

I get two common questions from people, especially leaders, about weight loss. One is from pastors themselves asking me about how I lost weight and how they can, too. The second is from their wives asking me how they can make their husbands lose weight.

How to lose weight as a pastor.
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The first question I can answer. The second one is ground I don’t walk onto.

For me, I got miserable enough to lose weight. I weighed 300 pounds when I got married, had a 42 inch waist and finally at the ripe old age of 29, got fed up with it.

If you are a leader, being healthy and losing weight becomes incredibly difficult. You have a lot of stress, a lot of things to do, a lot of meetings to sit in and a lot of meetings at restaurants. Throw in traveling to conferences and you are looking at a life filled with minimal activity and a lot of temptation when it comes to food.

The journey of losing weight and keeping the weight off is similar.

If you work for a living (or if you don’t), these are some ideas that will help you to lose weight and keep it off:

7 ideas to lose weight and keep it off.
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Know what you’ll eat wherever you go. One of the easiest ways to lose weight when eating out is to not get sucked into the menu. When you go somewhere, you should always know what you are going to eat. This will help to keep you from remorse about your food purchase.

Plan for exercise. Before you travel somewhere, know where you will exercise. I have chosen hotels on trips based off of the gyms they have. Find a gym you can walk to and get a guest pass. Once Katie and I were in LA for four days, and we got 3-day guest passes to a gym.

In your workday, know when you are going to exercise. If you don’t attach a minute to it, it won’t happen. Your day will get away from you, and you will find yourself not exercising.

Order first everywhere. At a meal out, always be the first to order. This is an idea from Tom Rath at Gallup that talks about how the first person to order sets the tone for the table. If the first person orders an appetizer, everyone looks at the appetizer and your meal just added at least 1,000 calories to it.

Drink lots of water. Everyone knows soda is bad for us, and yet we keep drinking it in ridiculous amounts. When you travel and when you sit in meetings, drink lots of water. Especially when you are flying somewhere, this will help you to avoid dehydration and help to keep you more alert.

Go to bed first. Sleep is the secret weapon for every leader. It is the secret weapon to every athlete, and yet we treat this poorly. I watch a lot of pastors when they travel somewhere stay up until 1am hanging out with friends and then running ragged because of it. Turn off Netflix and go to bed.

Stand and walk as much as possible. If a lunch meeting is less than a mile from your office or a meeting, try to walk. Just move. Get up out of your seat at least every hour and move around.

Don’t eat dessert. No one ever eats dessert and is glad they did. In fact, if you eat an entire dessert at a restaurant there’s a good chance you will hate yourself after the fact. Share one if you are going to get one, but I’d encourage you to fill up on some real food.

While this isn’t a complete list, these are just a few ideas that might help you get started on your weight loss journey or keep moving.

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Statistically, most Americans will make resolutions and goals in January and not keep them.

They will range from quitting smoking, losing weight, getting out of debt, changing jobs, and the list goes on and on.

Some years it might be the same thing because you are not as far along as you want.

What if you don’t do this?

You’ll be like most other people. You’ll get to the end of next year and look back longingly at what could’ve been.

Think for a minute. Let’s say your plan should be around getting healthy, getting out of debt or working on your marriage. What if you could move the needle just a little bit? What if next year, instead of $10,000 in debt it was $2,000 or none? What if your marriage took three baby steps in the next year? Wouldn’t thinking about this and being proactive be worth it?

If you’re still with me, here are some questions to help you think through a growth plan for the coming year:

How to create a growth plan for the new year.
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1. What do you want to change in your life?
2. What things did you learn in the past year that you want to build on?
3. What is one thing that, if you grew in it, would move you, your career, your relationships, further and faster?
4. What book(s) of the Bible was convicting to you in the past year? What was most convicting and why?
5. What area of your heart and past hurt have you put off dealing with?
6. Who do you know that is further than you are in something that you can learn from?

Then ask those closest to you some of these questions. Yes, that is scary but so is living life and missing out because we didn’t grow and make changes.

The answers to these questions then help you to formulate a plan of what you will grow in for the coming year.

You can’t do it all.

How to accomplish your biggest goals this year.
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When I lost 130 pounds in 18 months, that was my thing. I was solely focused on that and the heart issues surrounding that.

In other years, it has been preaching, prayer, adoption.

What I read, podcasts I listen to, blogs I follow, classes I take and people I talk to are around those ideas.

Make no mistake, the people who will get further in the coming year are the people who have decided what they will get further on. It will not just happen.

How to create a growth plan for the new year you’ll stick to.
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Do you know where you’re going next year? Do you know what you hope to accomplish?

It’s that time of year when people sit and make New Year’s Resolutions, dream up possibilities for the coming year, or pick a word or a verse for the year that will guide their way.

Sadly, most of the resolutions and dreams made right now will be over and done with by February. It doesn’t have to be that way. It is possible to think through the coming year and accomplish them.

Before jumping into the next year, though, it is important to look back. In his book The Catalyst Leader, Brad Lomenick has some helpful questions to review your year:

8 questions to ask yourself at the end of the year.
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1. What are the 2-3 themes that personally define me?
2. What people, books, accomplishments, or special moments created highlights for me recently?
3. Give yourself a grade from 1-10 in the following areas of focus: vocationally, spiritually, family, relationally, emotionally, financially, physically, recreationally.
4. What am I working on that is BIG for the next year and beyond?
5. As I move into this next season or year, is a majority of my energy being spent on things that drain me or things that energize me?
6. How am I preparing for 10 years from now? 20 years from now?
7. What 2-3 things have I been putting off that I need to execute on before the end of the year?
8. Is my family closer than a year ago? Am I a better friend than a year ago? If not, what needs to change immediately?

8 questions to ask yourself at the end of the year.
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Here are six ways to set goals, keep them and accomplish them.

6 ways to set goals, keep them and accomplish them.
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1. Be realistic. If your goal is to lose weight, losing 20 pounds in two weeks isn’t likely or realistic. It’s possible if you just stop eating, but that sounds miserable. The excitement of what could be is easy to get caught up in, but the reality that you will all of a sudden get up at 5am four days a week when you have been struggling to get up by 7am isn’t realistic.

2. Set goals you want to keep. I have had friends set a goal, and they are miserable. Now, sometimes our goals will have some pain. When I lost 130 pounds, it wasn’t fun to change my eating habits, but the short term pain was worth it. The same goes for debt. It will require some pain to get out of debt. You have to walk a fine line here. If it is too painful, you will not want to keep it. This is why our goals are often more of a process than a quick fix.

3. Make them measurable. Don’t make a goal to lose weight, get out of debt or read your Bible more. Those aren’t measurable. How much weight? How much debt? How much more will you read your Bible? Make them measurable so you can see how you are doing.

4. Have a plan. Once you have your goal, you need a plan. If it’s weight loss, what will you do? If it’s debt, how will you get there? What are the steps? If it’s Bible reading, what plan are you using? No goal is reached without a plan.

5. Get some accountability. Equally important is accountability. One of the things I did when I weighed 285 pounds and started mountain biking was I bought some bike shorts that were too small and embarrassing to wear. This gave me accountability to keep riding. Your accountability might be a spouse or a friend, but it needs to be someone that can actually push you. Maybe you need to go public with your goal and invite people to help you stay on track.

6. Remove barriers to your goals. Your goals have barriers. That’s why you have to set goals in the first place. It might be waking up, food, credit cards, working too late or wasting time on Facebook. Whatever it is that is going to keep you from accomplishing it, remove it. Get rid of the ice cream and credit cards, and move your alarm clock so you have to get out of bed. Whatever it is, do it. Life is too short to be miserable and not accomplish your goals.

How to create your ideal year.
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Everybody has hopes, dreams and good intentions.

Everyone wants to lose weight, get out of debt, get a degree, start a business, or start a hobby.

Churches want to grow, reach new people, see people start following Jesus, see new givers take that first step, see people get connected into community or serve.

W. Edwards Deming said, “Your system is perfectly designed to give you the results you’re getting.”

Put another way: systems trump hopes and intentions. 

This is true for every system.

The systems you have in place as a church are why you have the number of first time, second time and third time guests that you have. It is why you have as many people giving. Why you have the number of people serving or in community.

None of this is accidental and none of this “just happens.”

For Revolution, this is one reason we transitioned from small groups to missional communities. We found that small groups would give us a certain result and it wasn’t the result we wanted.

Think about it personally. What if you want to lose weight, get out of debt, get a degree or start a business. None of that will just happen. You have to have a system for it. Just hoping to lose weight won’t cut it. You can’t have the intention of getting out of debt without a system for it.

The reality of Deming’s words ring true in our businesses, churches and homes. We are getting the results our systems are designed to give us. It isn’t an issue or hope, wishes, intentions, but of systems and strategy.

At this point, once you realize this, the next step is having the patience for it to take root.

One of the reasons I see people not lose weight or get out of debt is they expect it to happen as quickly as they gained the weight or got into debt. 

That isn’t a reality. In the same way, after 10 years of unhealthy communication in a marriage, it will not change over night. It will take time.

What happens for many people is they put a system in place, that moves slower than they would like, so they give up and settle for the results they don’t want.

And then we are back to square one.

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For anyone wanting to eat healthy, a roadblock is often what they do when they eat out.

You sit down with friends or your spouse, you are thinking in your head, I’ll make a good choice. And then something happens.

You open the menu and see all the choices and see all the pictures and boom. You make a poor choice.

Same goes for dessert.

You know that a dessert at a restaurant could feed a small family in terms of calorie count, but when you see the dessert menu or tray, you are done for.

What do you do? Stop going out to eat? Stop traveling for business or vacation?

In my journey of losing 130 pounds and keeping it off, I’ve learned a couple of things about how to eat out while on business, a date night, lunch meeting or vacation and stay healthy.

1. Eat some protein a couple hours before eating out. Not eating enough protein is one of the reasons you get hungry in the middle of the morning or afternoon. When you eat out, this leads you to ordering an appetizer and then a meal that has way too many calories in it. Before eating out, grab a banana, a protein bar, greek yogurt, a smoothie. Something with protein in it so that you aren’t as hungry when you arrive at a restaurant.
2. Know where you will eat. This is important if you are traveling or are on vacation or having a meeting. When I travel somewhere, I know the options near me that have healthier options. Don’t show up blind to a new city and just guess. That’s a way to make poor choices. I was recently in Orlando with another pastor and I had 3 options for breakfast and told him, “you can pick but it has to be one of these three.” Without this, you pull into the first place you see.
3. Know what you will eat before you arrive. When you open a menu, if you don’t know what you want to eat, you will often order something very bad for you. Restaurants don’t put pictures of the healthiest meals in the menu. Also, things like salads are not always the best thing to order on a menu as they may have low amounts of protein (which will make you hungrier in a couple of hours) and high in sugar (so it tastes better). If you know what you want before you arrive at a restaurant, you are more likely to make a good choice.
4. Order first. This came up in Tom Rath’s book Eat Move Sleep. He said that the person who orders first at a table sets the standard for what others will order. This is often true. If someone orders a healthy option first, others follow suit.
5. Box up half your meal when it arrives. A friend told me this one, but when your meal arrives, ask for a box. Put half your meal in the box and close it. Now eat.

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I got to share my story over the weekend at a health seminar. It was awesome to see the amount of people putting in the time and effort to live a healthy lifestyle.

If you don’t know my story, I used to weight almost 300 pounds and have a 42 inch waist. Over the course of 18 months, I lose 130 pounds and have kept it off for the last 5 years. It feels incredible. In that time, I’ve learned a lot about what does work and what doesn’t work to lose weight, keep it off, pass on healthy habits to your kids and enjoy life.

So, I put together all the blog posts I’ve ever written on the topic.

Being free from bad eating habits, a food addiction (and other addictions that lead to an unhealthy lifestyle) and poor body image:

1. What to do on “Fat Days”
2. Food, Weight, and Stop Being the Victim
3. How to Examine Your Heart/Motives
4. When Eating Becomes a Sin
5. Why We Aren’t Healthy
6. Women and the Cycle of Defeat
7. Two Ideas that Should Change how We Think about our Bodies, Weight Loss & Food
8. Finally Free: Fighting for Purity with the Power of Grace

How to lose weight:

1. My Journey of Losing Weight
2. How I got to where I am 
3. The idol of food (the spiritual side of weight loss)
4. Have a plan
5. It’s for the rest of your life
6. The effects
7. Do your homework
8. The idol of exercise & staying in shape

Staying healthy (eating well, avoiding burnout, etc.):

1. Every Time You Say Yes to Something You Say No to Something Else
2. What I Wish I’d Known About Energy, Family & Mistakes
3. Making Room for What Matters
4. How I Structure my Week
5. How to Know You’re Too Busy
6. How to do Crossfit on Your Own
7. 6 Ways to Stay Motivated to be Healthy
8. Thoughts on Burnout, Sleep, Adrenaline, Stress, and Eating

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Since we’re now at the end of January and the luster of New Years Resolutions has begun to wear off, I felt like its time to share some ideas on how to set goals and keep them.

Resolutions are just that, goals. They are hopes for the future. In December we look at our lives, the things we don’t like about them and set a goal to change that specific area of our lives.

No one makes a resolution to get into more debt or add 30 pounds (at least not that I have met).

Here are 6 ways to set goals, keep them and accomplish them.

1. Be realistic. If your goal is to lose weight, losing 20 pounds in 2 weeks isn’t likely or realistic. Possible if you just stop eating but that sounds miserable. The excitement of what could be is easy to get caught up in, but the reality that you will all of a sudden get up at 5am 4 days a week when you have been struggling to get up by 7am isn’t realistic.
2. Set goals you want to keep. I have had friends set a goal and they are miserable. Now, sometimes our goals will have some pain. When I lost 130 pounds, it wasn’t fun to change my eating habits, but the short term pain was worth it. The same goes for debt. It will require some pain to get out of debt. You have to walk a fine line here. If it is too painful, you will not want to keep it. This is why our goals are often more of a process than a quick fix.
3. Make them measurable. Don’t make a goal: to lose weight, get out of debt or read my bible more. Those aren’t measurable. How much weight? How much debt? How much more will you read your bible? Make them measurable so you can see how you are doing.
4. Have a plan. Once you have your goal, you need a plan. If its weight loss, what will you do? If its debt, how will you get there? What are the steps? If its bible reading, what plan are you using? No goal is reached without a plan.
5. Get some accountability. Equally important is accountability. One of the things I did when I weighed 285 pounds and started mountain biking was I bought some bike shorts that were too small and embarrassing to wear. This gave me accountability to keep riding. Your accountability might be a spouse or a friend, but it needs to be someone that can actually push you. Maybe you need to go public with your goal and invite people to help you stay on track.
6. Remove barriers to your goals. Your goals have barriers, that’s why you have to set goals in the first place. It might be waking up, food, credit cards, working too late or wasting time on Facebook. Whatever it is that is going to keep you from accomplishing it, remove it. Get rid of the ice cream, credit cards, move your alarm clock so you have to get out of bed. Whatever it is, do it. Life is too short to be miserable and not accomplish your goals.

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I get asked a lot about how to stay motivated to workout, stick to an eating plan or just to be healthy overall.

It is a challenge.

Here are 6 ways that I’ve learned to stay motivated:

1. Make it the next thing on your schedule. This is crucial. Put working out on your calendar. Currently, I workout 4-5 times a week. I put my workouts into my calendar each week. They are a scheduled appointment like the dentist or a meeting. When the time rolls around (whether that is 6am or 5pm), it is simply the next thing I’m doing. Over time this has helped me to get up and go to the gym. Believe me, I can fill that time with something else, but its a commitment I’ve made. The reality for many people is they aren’t willing to give the time it will take to be healthy.
2. Pick a plan you like and will stick to. I don’t care if you ride a bike, run, do crossfit, zumba or something else. Pick something you will do and stick with. Too often I’ll see people switch plans or programs because they don’t see changes quickly enough. When I started working out, I saw a ton of changes fast. Then I went almost 2 years where I felt like I looked the same, but I stuck with it. Just recently have I started to see more changes.
3. Set a realistic, attainable goal. Set a goal. Specific. With a deadline. Now, is it realistic? If you do nothing right now, working out 4 days a week at 5am probably isn’t the best first step. Maybe 2 times a week at that time and then build up. Get small wins as quickly as possible. If you lift, set
4. Eating well is more important than exercising. This is something most people miss. Eating counts more than working out. Don’t kill yourself at the gym and then go home and eat like a guy living in a frat house. Eat well. Food is fuel. If you exercise regularly, you should drink at least 100 oz. of water a day. Limit dessert and other foods that aren’t great for you. You don’t have to cut out gluten like I do, but eat well. Here are some ideas on what I eat.
5. Weight gain isn’t always a bad thing. If you lift weights, this will be something you need to learn. I stopped weighing myself 3 months ago. Our scale’s battery died and I never replaced it so it wasn’t a conscious choice, but it has been a good thing. Weight gain is not always a litmus for being healthy. If you lift, muscle does weigh a lot. Have a pair of pants that give you a test to see if your waist is growing.
6. Health is a lifestyle switch. Don’t quit. I know this is the topic of this post, but don’t. Being healthy is a long-term choice. Sure working out feels good, but I do it to stay healthy for Katie and my kids, to have energy to lead well. I want to stay in the game well into my 80’s.

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Every Tuesday morning, I review a book that I read recently. If you missed any, you can read past reviews here. This week’s book is Eat Move Sleep: Why Small Choices Make a Big Difference (kindle version) by Tom Rath. I actually read this book back in June, but it releases today, hence the review.

I’ve been fascinated by health and fitness for some time, ever since losing 130 pounds and keeping it off. So, Rath’s book was right up my alley.

Two things that are obvious about this book from the title:

1. Every choice we make matters. They all impact every part of our life. 
2. Tom Rath looks at how to eat, move and sleep so that those choices make the most positive impact in our lives.

As Rath states,

What seem like small or inconsequential moments accumulate rapidly. When your good daily decisions outweigh your poor ones, you boost your chances of growing old in better health.

Now, if you’ve lived a relatively healthy life, watch what you eat, exercise and sleep well, most of what Rath says will simply be a reminder. While I’ve read a lot about weight loss and health, I still found good tidbits I have never heard before and was reminded of some things that are easy to forget.

Here are a few things that stuck out to me as helpful:

• The types of foods you consume influence your health more than your total caloric intake.
• The best performers sleep at least 8.6 hours a day, almost a full hour more than the national average.
• The top performers in every field typically work/practice in focused sessions lasting no longer than 90 minutes.
• Losing 90 minutes of sleep reduces daytime alertness by nearly one-third. If you consider all the things that demand your attention in a day, reducing alertness by one-third is consequential.
• A study of over 80,000 people suggests total intake of fruits and vegetables is a robust predictor of overall happiness.
• When food is served “family style” from large plates, bowls or platters placed in arms’ reach, people simply eat more.
• Anytime someone is hungry and in a hurry, it results in a bad choice.
• The first to order food at a restaurant is an anchor for the rest of the table and sets the tone for what others order.
• We eat based on the size of our plates.
• We are more likely to make a bad food choice when a healthy option is available compared with when no healthy options are available.
• Couples in which one partner has a commute longer than 45 minutes are a whopping 40% more likely to get divorced. 
• The dish you start with serves as an anchor food for your entire meal. Experiments show that people eat nearly 50% greater quantity of the food they eat first.
• People consume 167 additional calories per hour while watching TV.

An overall helpful, quick read.

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