If I Was Losing Weight Again, I’d do this (FULL BLUEPRINT)
(funky music) – This is the full blueprint
to losing weight forever, (graphic nodes chiming) and I’m going to walk you
through the four areas you absolutely must build
to lose weight permanently. The first floor is outcomes, and we’re going to start
with how to not lose weight the wrong way. (thoughtful music) In these after photos of
mine at the same goal weight, I look fluffier on the left, because a third was fat loss, while the rest was lean mass loss. While in the right photo, I got to my goal by almost
entirely losing fat. We all want the right photo, and yet the majority of the
diets and workouts out there cause the left photo. Here’s my co-coach, Lucy, who also fell into the same trap, and it’s not just us. A huge number of people losing weight fall prey to most of their weight loss not being fat loss, and then because muscle
is way harder to put on, it takes double the
time to fix this mistake than it did to lose the
weight in the first place.
But worry not, this blueprint will make sure you end up as the fit, lean, after photos, starting with the second
room on the outcomes floor, Tracking Correctly. (tense classical music) You must have noticed that
if you weigh yourself daily, your weight fluctuates a lot, even by as much as five pounds. If you’re like me, this feels like an
emotional rollercoaster, where I’m thrilled by one
pound dropped one day, and then the next day, inexplicably, it’s up by three pounds. So all the watching my food, and exercise I did yesterday didn’t count.
Or did it count, but not enough? Should I be watching my eating even more, and exercising? The mystery is solved
when we break down weight into fat versus lean mass. (thoughtful music) The fat you have stored doesn’t
fluctuate much day to day, and neither does muscle and bone mass. But the other part of lean mass, water, glycogen, poop weight, et cetera, fluctuates a lot from day to day. This is why you can see
an awesome two-pound drop (toilet flushing) after a good bowel movement. Or why, after having
dinner out last night, you see a sudden increase in weight. It may not be fat gain,
but how can you tell? Three things. One, after this video, uses the calculator linked
in the description below to calculate your fat versus lean mass. Two, stop focusing on your weight number and start focusing on comparing your fat versus lean mass change.
If you’re losing more fat than lean mass, then you’re making progress. And last, expand the window
over which you evaluate fat loss to one week. You can do this by either
checking in once a week or measuring daily by
taking a seven-day average to smooth out the fluctuations. (graphic whooshing) But what if you’re losing
more lean mass than fat? (tense music) If this was happening because I stopped doing the right things, I would feel guilty and
frustrated with myself.
(video pane whooshing) Or if this was happening despite
me doing everything right, then I’d get discouraged. In either case, I knew the
right thing was to keep trying, and yet I’d lose motivation, and quit until the next time I weighed and shocked myself into trying again. It was like I couldn’t help myself. I read books on willpower, and discipline, turns out I was barking up the wrong tree. – And what comes to your mind when you see this little illustration? Head and heart.
(tense music) Head is associated with
our goals and values, and heart is associated
with what we like. We also find that the overlap section is associated with harmony and well-being. But what if the two circles don’t align? Research has shown that
discrepancies between head and heart lead to stress and burnout, and they may make it
harder to reach our goals. Even if you reach your goals that are not supported by your heart, this may not lead to happiness. – [Narrator] This is
why, after five years, people tend to have regained
80% of their weight back.
(video pane whooshing) They lost weight by over-exercising their willpower instead of aligning their actions
with their head and heart. But how do we align our head and heart? – [Presenter] Develop
your vision. – If you’re like me,
(upbeat music) you think you already have this. You want to look and feel great. (video pane whooshing) But the litmus test isn’t what we think, but what we do. After trying many different methods to create my vision, like the Golden Circle by Simon Sinek, Mindvalley’s Life Book, “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy,” the values exercises, and many more, the best approach I found is to harness our brain’s natural
tendency towards paranoia.
We are way better at finding problems than inventing solutions. The simple but powerful way is inversion. It has five steps. Step one, note down
the four areas of life: health, social, leisure, and work. Step two, write down, for each area, what would be your worst nightmare. For example, for leisure,
I love traveling, and so not being able to
explore a city like Lisbon, whose amazing spots are
mostly accessible by foot, would leave me feeling frustrated. This then bleeds into my relationships, where being unable to
share those experiences with friends and family who
can explore and travel would leave me feeling like
I’m standing out of frame, watching others live life. Step three, add how
continuing to be overweight worsens your nightmares. After all, our bodies are the vehicles through which we live life. Step four, take your worst
nightmares and invert them. For example, inverting
my leisure nightmare means I have the body to backpack, travel, and explore the world fully. Step five, reread your answers every
week to refuel your why. (video pane whooshing) Edit your answers when you
have more details to add, or remove scenarios that
don’t resonate anymore.
Who you want to be, and
the life you want to live, is a process of constant discovery, so expect to be working on this
little by little every week. But we’re still missing
a very important piece. – There is a third
component to our motivation. Imagine the following scene. (contemplative music)
The guy’s playing tennis, he seems highly motivated, so head and heart is not an issue here, but he misses the ball. What is this tennis player lacking? Skills and abilities. So we need to add a third
circle to the model, I call it hand. Csikszentmihalyi, the
Hungarian researcher, called this experience flow, and he suggested that flow
is the secret to happiness. – How to achieve flow while losing fat is what the rest of this video covers. (thoughtful music) Starting with floor two of the blueprint, actions you must take to achieve
the body and life outcomes you just said. The actions seem plastered everywhere.
(cursor clicking) Eat smaller portions, cut sugar, maybe cut carbs, exercise
every day, and sleep more. These sounds simple, and yet, if you’re like me, impossible to stick to for six months, let alone the rest of my life. I’d go from drinking
three cans of soda a day, to once a day. From exercising zero times a week, to three times a week. From cooking one meal a day to two. But I kept failing a lot
due to weekend brunches or crazy work weeks. I’d wonder, why can’t I stick to anything? The problem was I was
approaching weight loss, like going from couch
to a 10k run in one day. Just like weight loss, a 10k seems simple, I put one foot after
another and keep going. (video pane whooshing) But no doubt, at the end of it, my body and mind will be wrecked, and I won’t be walking at my normal speed, let alone running a 10k soon after. This is a typical 10k training plan, and there are three principles we can learn from it for weight loss.
(upbeat music) One, it builds over months towards a 10-kilometer or six-mile run. The principle is to start small, smaller than you think you can do, and add to it in small
increments over time. For fat loss, these are stages that map
your body fat percentage. The habits are small when
you’re in the over-fat range, then expand or pick up more
habits as you get leaner. I will be covering what
they are in the next rooms. Two, it doesn’t consist
of only running flat, you cross-train, you run
hills, and you run intervals. The principle is, that you’re training yourself
for all kinds of terrain, which for weight loss means training to stick to your habits
across all kinds of weeks: stressful work weeks, holidays, I’m sore and don’t want to exercise weeks, and so on. Without following Principle 1, this principle is impossible to nail. More details on how to do this
coming in the next two rooms. And third, there are rest days, and there are days where, despite doing a longer
run the previous week, you go back to a shorter run. For weight loss, this
means realizing proactively when you need a mental
break from weight loss, or if you’re about to face a week where sticking to your
full plan is impossible.
Then, before the week even starts, you scale back to an even
smaller, but doable plan. How you do this is
covered in room three. But first, we start with the second room on the floor of the action, nutrition. All the diets out there seem like separate, unrelated approaches, where one of them must be
the truest of them all. Paleo was all the rage
when I was losing weight, so I decided to try that. I lost weight, but a month later, the holidays were upon me, and saying no to
gingerbread, turkey, and cake felt like punishment because I wanted to eat with my family. Is that a crime? I could have jumped back onto
paleo after the holidays, but I kept thinking, “What would be different
next time I’m on holiday?” I couldn’t come up with an answer that honestly reassured me the
same wouldn’t happen again. And so started the chase of
the one weight loss plan, the truest of them all. I looked into keto next, and just like paleo, since
it slashed carbs by a lot, it would majorly impact
all holidays, vacations, and social eating.
I felt I would repeat the
same cycle of weight loss, but fall off afterward. Then I looked into intermittent fasting, which didn’t ask to
cut anything but meals, so I thought, “That’s easy.” I used to eat only a banana for breakfast, so I skipped that but then lost no weight. Some Googling told me it
must be the biggest meal that I cut for intermittent
fasting to work, which, for me, was dinner. But that would again cause
my paleo/keto problem, so I skipped lunch instead. Weight loss begins, again. But then after three
weeks of skipping lunch, I felt lethargic and less productive, which made me stressed
about the work piling up because I was slower now. This meant I’d end up eating
pizza and sleeping late as I tried to cram in on time before work stress started again tomorrow. At this point, I started
looking at macros but then remembered tracking
one number of calories was tedious and difficult to stick to, let alone trying to track three numbers and thread the needle through all three. All right, final score. (ponderous music) All caused weight loss
when I stuck to them, but none I could stick
to for a whole year.
Feeling confused and helpless, and being a science nerd, I turned to textbooks to
understand what to do. The science made me realize there isn’t one weight loss
plan truest of them all, but rather each diet can be
thought of like a building. Their shapes look different, but the science behind them is identical, which is why they all work
when we can stick to them. Let’s start with the science. Here’s Dr. Peter Attia, explaining the three main
diet types to lose weight. – You can directly restrict the number of calories you’re eating. You can start to restrict macronutrients, that’s what most diets are doing, I’m not eating sugar, I’m not eating carbs, I’m not eating fat. And then you have a time restriction, what people call intermittent fasting. – [Richa] So all diets
work because of one reason, you’re consuming fewer calories. But what about a diet like keto, which doesn’t restrict calories, and tells you to eat more fat, which is nine calories per gram, while telling you to reduce carbs, which is four calories per gram? This should, on the net, cause you
to eat more calories, right? Here’s Dr.
Peter Attia again explains why that doesn’t happen. (thoughtful music) – Are all calories created equal from an energy balance standpoint? Sure, if I give you 1,000
calories of Coca-Cola versus a thousand calories of steak, it will have the same impact
on your energy balance, but it won’t have the same
impact on your appetite, and your ability to subsequently eat. – Meaning after the 1000
calories of Coca-Cola, or 1,000 calories of fries, you are going to be hungry again way sooner than after
1,000 calories of steak. This difference adds up over the day, where the fries day is likely
to be an over-calorie day, while steak day is an under-calorie day. But since keto slashes
carbs like fries, junk, sweets, bread, and nearly
all processed foods, which are low-satiety, and
thus we tend to overeat while stacking our kitchens with only foods we tend
to eat just enough of them because we get full on them more easily, you end up indirectly having
more under-calorie days on keto even if you’re eating more fat because you eat more
infrequently and just enough.
This is how all low-carb diets, and even how the WeiThe watchercher point system works. But what about the effects
of hormones on weight loss? Hormones, alongside stress,
digestion, sleep, et cetera, affect the calories out
part of the equation. It’s not just exercise
that affects calories, and I’ll cover the other
factors in floor three. But for now, know that hormonal conditions like menopause, PCOS, et cetera, can lower how many calories you burn, which is why the same calorie amount that causes weight loss for a person without a hormonal condition may not work for you.
So, ultimately, it still boils down to figuring out your calorie balance, AKA, maintenance calories, and creating a slight deficit from that. Now that I understood the science, I realized I could design my building, one in which I could live
and stick to forever. (upbeat music) Step one, after this video, use the calorie calculator
linked in the description below to know your maintenance calorie, and start with an 11 to 15% deficit. You want to average this over a week, each day doesn’t matter. Having coached over 700 people, I have found this deficit to
be sufficient for fat loss with near zero lean mass loss, and sustainable to the degree
of principles one and two.
In the fourth area, the stairwell, I will cover how to
tune this target weekly to be closer to your body’s
actual calorie balance. If you’re someone who gets hungry earlier than four hours
after your last meal, add on a greater than-protein target of 17% of your calorie target, and split the total
protein you need to eat across all of your meals. Step two, after this video, use the body fat calculator
linked in the description below to know your body fat percentage, and therefore your body fat stage. At each stage, there’s 20% effort that will yield 80% of results. This is a universal principle
called the Pareto principle, which has been found
to apply to everything, from agriculture to waste management.
After this 20% point,
diminishing returns strike, where every extra unit of effort yields less and fewer additional results. But for weight loss, I’d
argue it’s negative returns, because of how unsustainable
the plan becomes, failing Principle 2 entirely, which means regaining your lost weight and perpetually yo-yoing. If you’re in the unhealthy stage, your 20% effort must be focused on trimming down junk and sweets, but just enough to meet
your calorie target. Look at where in your day or week you consume the most junk and sweets and only focus on reducing
that episode by 15%. The rest of the time, you
can eat as you do now. By the time you get to
the acceptable range, you will have built a habit of reduced junk and sweets eating and thus feed up brain space to work on creating the habit of having one to two whole food high-nutrition meals per day on average.
Then in the good range, it extends to two to three
whole-food high-nutrition meals per day on average. Now, what about exercise? – I think exercise is
the single most important longevity drug we have. Bar none. – Most weight loss plans
(thoughtful music) told me exercising three
times a week was minimal. I started with group
fitness classes at my gym, which went great the first few days, but I noticed I was also
hungrier than normal throughout the week. I will power my way into ignoring my hunger
during the weekdays, but things always go
sideways during the weekend. I thought to myself, “Well, I’ll just exercise
extra this coming week.” But then when I exercised
extra, I was also extra hungry, which created a vicious
reward-punishment cycle between exercise and food. It also didn’t help that, deep down, I knew I wouldn’t be doing these workouts if it weren’t for weight loss.
The problem is how
exercise is defined for us. Listen. – You’d have to put an hour of that into steady-state aerobic training. Zone two, you’d have to put an
hour into strength training. You’d probably wanna put
20 minutes, or 30 minutes, into high-intensity aerobic training. And then the remainder of that time into some of the stability training. – If you’re like me,
you hear this and think, “Let me break out my heart rate
monitor, notebook, and pen, and design this precise,
super-optimized exercise plan.” What’s missing from this
lab-generated exercise plan? Fun,
(word sparkling) (upbeat music) is the most important ingredient
for sticking to exercise consistently for the rest of your life. And the surprising thing is the clinical explanation
does not exclude fun. Steady State Aerobic Training Zone 2. This could just be walking with some hills, or stairs, and route.
Biking, kayaking, dancing, and any sport that has you
moving constantly fit into this. High-intensity aerobic training. While you could bang out a hit session, it may be more fun to
play tennis, pickleball, row, kickbox, or any sport
that causes bursts of activity with periods of low intensity. While this may not be lab-perfect, I’d look forward to these regardless of weight loss benefits. And ultimately, consistency
beats lab perfect, but infrequent sessions, every single time. Stability. These don’t need to be physical
therapy-type exercises, Yoga and Tai Chi are more fun examples. Strength training. Studies have shown that, for
general health and fitness, two full-body 30 to 50-minute workouts give 84% of total benefits. Also, some, not all, of these
sessions can be sports, like bouldering, climbing, and wrestling. Don’t think, “Exercise,” think, “Play.” Go back to your life goal outcome, and start on the activities
you listed there. But doing all of this at once is a lot, it violates principles one and two.
So if you’re someone who is doing little to no play right now, and doesn’t have any movement
you enjoy for yourself, this is the minimum dose for fat loss, in the unhealthy range, all you need is 6,000 minimum
steps a day on average. This won’t get you hungry and perpetuate the
reward-punishment cycle, and yet is sufficient
to aid your fat loss. In the acceptable range, aim for 10,000 steps a day, and one to two sessions of a
sport or movement you enjoy and aligns with your life goal outcome. Notice the slow progression, where you’re in lockstep
leveling up your eating habits with your movement habits.
This counters slipping into
the reward-punishment cycle. In the good range, add one to two full body strength
training sessions a week, and one to two sessions
of stability training, which could be Yoga, Tai Chi, or if you like, physical
therapy-style exercises. (tense music) But what about holidays
and high-stress weeks where even these simple
actions become difficult? I’d start off meeting my
calorie target perfectly and doing my workouts, but then, inevitably,
(notification chiming) a work deadline would drop
that had me working late and my late-night cravings on high.
I’d also skipped tracking a day, and the next day felt it
was too much to catch up, so I would fall off the wagon. On holidays, I tried to
track everything I was eating, but honestly, I don’t know
what’s accurate tracking for all these new foods. Not to mention sticking
to my target is hard when faced with tempting new foods to try that I don’t get at home. This is where Principle 3
swoops in to save the day. You have an on-ramp plan,
(thoughtful music) but what you also need is a low ramp and an off-ramp plan. On days where you feel
drawn to skip things, but can see yourself do a quick thing, select the low ramp plan.
For eating, this is hitting
your maintenance target, and forgetting about
protein or whole food meals for that day. For workouts in the unhealthy range, it’s walking in your home, even if it’s just two minutes. In an acceptable range, slash it down to 6,000 steps. In the good range, do the 6,000 steps, and
just one set of exercises, so you’re done in 15 minutes. And on days you aren’t confident you can do even a quick thing, select the off-ramp plan. For food, skip tracking, and pick a speed bump that
slows your eating down. Pick one for before eating, like drinking one glass of water first before having each meal, and pick one for during eating, like using a small bowl, and sitting at least three feet away from the big containers of food so you have to get up
to get more servings, allowing you time to
connect with your satiety.
Workouts, you can skip them altogether. Anything you do here is
a bonus on an off-ramp day. Now we’re onto the third floor, reactions, without which you will not succeed, no matter how perfect
your outcomes and actions are. (classical piano music) The first category is your body’s reactions, hunger being a big one. When I was losing weight, I was under the impression
that being hungry was bad, and if I got hungry, I would eat just enough
to stave off the hunger for a few more hours. I often noticed that when
I started most diets, I didn’t get hungry much, it was only after weeks that
suddenly I’d be ravenous. Instead of fighting hunger, I should have been working with my body, because hunger is an important indication that my body is about to
start getting rid of muscle instead of fat. (gentle music) If I was getting hungry
about three and a half hours after my previous meal, then that is normal and desired.
If I’m getting hungry earlier than that, then I didn’t eat a
nutritious enough meal, and I need to fix that by adding 10 to 20 grams
of protein to that meal. And if I’m not hungry
even after four hours, I probably overate, and I should ideally only eat again if I feel discomfort in my
abdomen, which I can point to. I should also reduce the
frequency of such big meals. I also didn’t know that
hunger is cumulative, it’s like building debt, which all of us collect
while losing weight. But just like you don’t wanna
pick a mortgage interest you can’t pay off every month,
and end up in foreclosure, you also don’t want to accrue
calorie debt so quickly that your body freaks
out and slams the breaks on your calories out,
AKA, your metabolism.
The 11 to 15% deficit we
talked about prevents this, but it was based on a calculator, your actual maintenance
calories may be higher, which we have found to be the case for 10 to 15% of our clients. In this case, you’ll find that, despite having nutritious
high-protein meals, you’ll still be hungry sooner
than three and a half hours after a meal. If so, you want to ignore
what the calculator says, and instead adjust incrementally. I’ll cover how in the staircase
part of the blueprint. The second big factor is energy or stress. (tense music)
Just like my energy fell off a cliff during
intermittent fasting, big drops in energy from your normal is possibly a symptom of eating not enough or exercising too much. Possibly, because low energy can appear due to factors like higher stress days, and have nothing to do with
your new fat loss habits.
How do you tell the two apart? Your body will reveal if it’s likely not to your fat loss plan by gaining fat while dropping lean mass for two weekly check-ins straight. This is such a bizarre trend that, first, you want to check the
batteries in your scale and tape measurer and make sure the tape has
not lost its elasticity. If all that looks good, then your body’s in a catabolic state, and you need to back off on everything. (upbeat music) Crank up your calories for maintenance, reduce exercise to just walking
at a low-intensity pace, prioritize at least eight
hours of sleep every night, and take action to reduce stress. If your body is not in a catabolic state, then up your calories by 7% for next week and see if that helps. If not, up your protein
by 7% for the week after. Throughout these weeks, focus on getting at least eight
hours of high-quality sleep. Another factor is period, and even men seem to go
through a monthly pattern where the same actions cause
stalled or slow fat loss for a week. I have no idea what is the cause, but the pattern is present
all across the data.
(video pane whooshing) The thing to do is track fat loss alongside where in the month you are, and observe when it causes wonky results. So on those weeks, you know not to take the
numbers as seriously, and wait for results over two weeks before drawing any conclusions. Speaking of wonky results, you must have noticed big
weight gain after eating out or having soup the day before. Or sometimes you eat out, the next day there’s a big weight loss. It seems random, and it made me question if
I knew what I was doing. If you’re tracking correctly, you’ll see that the big
weight loss or weight gain is mainly lean mass fluctuation. Your fat mass will correspond to your meeting or not your
calorie target for the week, but you may
see a change in fat mass that’s the opposite of what you’d expect given your calorie average for the week. If you do, and if you had a big carb
or sodium or calorie day the day before, consider these wonky results,
and persist till next week before concluding.
Going deeper into the effects of eating, digestive issues are a cause
for lowered calories, because it causes chronic inflammation. This in turn not only causes bloating, and even skin conditions but also increases the chances of storing fat. Digestive health is out
of my area of expertise, so I can only advise
keeping a food journal with digestion and skin
symptoms annotated. Identify your most likely
inflammatory foods, and experiment with replacing
them with other foods, ideally ones you already
know don’t cause problems. And lastly, sleep has a massive
impact on your calories. Here’s a graph of my co-coach, Lucy, where two weeks of bad sleep required a whole week of recovery before she could start losing fat again. This is because if you sleep poorly, your hunger and cravings double, the portions you eat also double, and after 14 days of poor sleep, I would be 30% more likely
to store them as fat.
Combine all of this, and you’ve made fat loss
500% harder on yourself just by not sleeping well. I’ve tried at least 33 different
sleep hacks in the past. I used to go straight
from work to TV, or phone, to trying to meditate myself to sleep. This never worked, because that’s like treating my brain like an on-off switch when it’s a dimmer.
What I found to work best is
to empty my mind from work, then fill my attention towards my body by doing an activity I enjoy, like dancing or walking with friends, and then drain my physical energy by stacking the minimal set
of mindful practices I enjoy, leading to bedtime. With that, we move on to the most ignored, but make-or-break category of reactions, our mind. (classical music) It is the source of willpower,
motivation, and belief, and without it being on our side, no perfect outcomes, actions,
and body reactions will win. Cravings are a great example of how I can be tracked correctly, doing actions that feel stupid lazy, have all my body reactions in check, and yet an insatiable desire
for ice cream after dinner can wreck the whole day. Or I’m at a restaurant, and I must order wine to
feel like I’m truly relaxed. If I meet friends, it must be over food, because that’s how I feel
connections are made. As author James Clear says in his New York Times bestselling
book, “Atomic Habits,” cravings happen because
we associate feelings we want to achieve, relaxation, relief from stress, celebrating a good day, connecting with people, with specific foods.
It feels like we don’t know
how to achieve that feeling without the right foods. The good news is, that by having a clear and
compelling life outcome and doing the right actions
for your body fat stage, you’ll find that your cravings have already slashed to a
fraction of what they tend to be. And if you do have cravings, expand the time between feeling it and eating your craving food. Speed bumps like drinking a glass of water before going for the crave food, or saying out loud, “I’m about to eat food out of
cravings,” before doing it, reduces eating out of cravings.
The goal isn’t to eat out
of cravings zero times, it’s to eat at least twice more
out of hunger than cravings while meeting your nutrition target. (anxious classical music) A big trigger for cravings can
be self-sabotaging thoughts. There are three main buckets of this. The first is justification, this includes moral licensing like, “I have been so good, I
deserve some ice cream.” Another is avoiding discomfort
by doing fat loss habits you find easier, like eating
whole foods or exercising, while ignoring the actual
habit that will cause fat loss, meeting your calorie target.
This leads to the dangerous belief of, “I eat so healthy,” or, “I’m doing so much,
and yet don’t lose weight. My body must be broken,” when the real reason is you’re
just not doing the needful. The last happens
during procrastination or times of boredom, where you say, “Eating is important to fuel
me for this big project,” so you go eat food as a way
to delay facing the discomfort of starting on the big project. The second bucket is lacking self-esteem. It includes not feeling like
you deserve to lose weight, with thoughts like, “I’m
getting what I deserve,” “It’s too hard,” and “What’s the point?” Another is fear of failure,
where thoughts like, “What if I don’t succeed,” make you not fully commit to the plan, so you half do the actions, which of course causes failure,
and reconfirms the belief that you were going to fail anyway.
Fear of failure can go hand
in hand with fear of judgment. Like, “My friends will roll their eyes when they hear of my yet
another weight loss attempt,” or “What if I’m not fun anymore?” And the last bucket is identity loss. Here, staying overweight
is a positive thing. This could be because of safety, where you fear the attention
you’ll get from losing weight. Another is if you have family or friends who are similarly overweight, and your size is part of
what makes you fit in.
And lastly, you may
fear losing the ability to point to being overweight as the reason undesirable
events happen to you. Like I don’t go on dates
because I’m overweight, or I didn’t get that promotion
because I’m overweight. When these thoughts reach their peak, you will find cravings to be unstoppable, binge, and then fall off
the wagon for months, and keep repeating the cycle, wondering what you’re doing wrong. (thoughtful music) Tracking in your check-ins which bucket and specific self-sabotage
script you’re falling prey to will slash these
instances by half or more.
And then you’ll need to
play devil’s advocate to your thought pattern. For example, if you have a belief like, “I’ve been so good, I deserve ice cream,” then the counter question would be, “How does eating ice cream not serve me?” Take a minute to record a
voice note on your phone with your answer, and then go for the craving
if you still want to. Do this consistently, and you’ll find it all boils
down to three to five scripts that run in your head automatically. You’ll start thinking, “Ah, another one of those is happening,” which will start detaching
rational you from irrational you, and make reprogramming
your actions easier. But what about when you lose motivation? Is that self-sabotage? If you’re like me, you’ve thought it is. I hired a personal trainer, and coach, and even recruited a
friend at different times to hold me accountable. Yet after a big brunch, or
during high work-stress weeks, I fall off anyway, and my accountability buddies would start feeling more
irritating than motivating.
I even signed up for
an accountability site, where my money goes to a
charity I don’t believe in if I don’t do my habits. And after the first time it happened, I stopped using the site altogether. My mistake wasn’t thinking
external accountability and internal accountability,
or what we call motivation, have the same natural pattern. Forcing my motivation to
match external accountability is understandable, but unnatural. Instead, I need to work with
the natural ebbs and flows of my motivation.
I do check-ins, score your motivation, and when it’s getting low, upfront, opt for the low
ramp or off-ramp plan until your motivation score comes back up. All of this is a lot to keep in check, and doing all of it at
once violates Principle 1. So how do you know what
is the 20% to work on that will produce 80% of your results? The first question
is, do you even have a problem? As your history probably shows, (upbeat music) even when you haven’t had
all of these 100% aligned, you have made progress.
Our bodies don’t need perfection, they need just enough of
the actions and reactions to be right to lose fat. And you’ll be surprised how
few the “just enough” is. Here’s the benchmark. If you’re losing 0.5 to 1%
body weight per week on average over two weeks, or if you’re losing 1 to 3%
body fat per month on average over two months, while losing more fat
overall than lean mass, keep doing exactly what you’re doing. Heads up on two things. One, these are the three
main patterns of weight loss we have seen across our 700+ clients. Don’t be alarmed at these
points, ride it out. This is why all benchmarks are on average, not every week or month, and you have the body fat benchmark to double-check if you’re truly stuck.
Two heads up that
you’re going to feel like you should be doing more. Here’s a post from one of
our clients saying this, other clients replied that
they felt the same, but also that it works. Resist the urge to fix
things that aren’t broken. But what about situations when you’re not meeting benchmarks? (thoughtful music) To diagnose what to do, the best approach is a
systems thinking methodology called the Theory of Constraints. We identify the most
important limiting factor standing in the way of progress, and then systematically
improve that constraint until it no longer stands in the way. In contrast, most weight loss plans will not even look into your reactions, meaning at least a third of
your factors are ignored.
Then for factors they do look at, they will have you nail
three times a week workouts, eat to a tee to a meal plan or macro, and reduce junk and sweets drastically. But maybe your barrier
is not even your actions, but your reactions. Or, if your actions were the problem, cranking it to the max
asks for perfection, which is impossible to
sustain for a month, let alone the rest of your life. (gentle music) Instead, what you want
to do is first identify your most important limiting
factor or bottleneck.
Start with your actions, and see if you met all of your targets. If not, then look into your reactions to diagnose which of them
is the number one culprit for your not meeting the actions. Watch the part of the video
that’s about that reaction, and settle on one thing
to try for the next week to mitigate it. A week later, do this process again. Or if you did meet the actions, but still didn’t see the right outcomes, watch the action section
of this video again, and decide on one action to
change for next week only. Then a week later, do this process again. I’ll be upfront, it will take many experiments
to unblock yourself because the list of
problems can be lengthy.
(contemplative music) There are eight different
body outcomes possible. Your life outcome statement
may not be compelling enough, meaning you keep falling
off despite making progress. Correlating body outcomes with just how much to adjust
your calorie, protein, and workouts takes many iterations. And, of course, navigating your reactions, especially mind reactions, can be a peeling and onion exercise, where each progress reveals
more and more blocks to tackle.
You have two options.
(upbeat music) One, if you want me to help you shortcut through all the trial and error so you can get to your
goal body and life quicker with peace and ease, then watch the five-minute sneak peek into my Baddest Body Boss program in the description and
comments below to gauge fit. This program has worked for
moms with kids and no time, busy professionals constantly
interrupted by work, people with unstoppable cravings, people who fall off the wagon on weekends, and people who couldn’t stick
to weight loss before us. It’s worked for people with menopause, PCOS, thyroid problems, people who have gone into
remission from Type-2 diabetes, and people who have lost weight
so they could get pregnant. If you’re sick and tired of weight loss consuming your thoughts and life and want to put it behind
you once and for all, check out the five-minute sneak peek into my Badass Body Boss program below.
Or two, if you want to DIY it, then you don’t want to ignore this video where I show the five atomic habits that made sticking to my
nutrition plan 10 times easier. I lost 20 pounds and
11% body fat in a year, and I’ve kept it off
for the past nine years. So you don’t wanna miss the complete step-by-step breakdown here. And always remember, you can do it.
