This week I realized that I’ve spent the last 11 years transforming my body.
I’ve lost 50 pounds of fat twice, built muscle, and got myself fit.
All after being a stressed out, overweight, short order cook with average genetics.
I was the fat kid my whole life.
Now, I want to share with you a few lessons about fat loss that I’ve learned over the past decade..
Not only through working with my own body, but also after coaching hundreds of clients to help them get fit, too.
The results you’re after are behind the work you’re avoiding
Everyone has a blind spot in some way or another with this fitness game when they first get started.
You might have been an athlete earlier in life.
You might love being active and lifting weights.
That’s awesome.
But you’re never really going to get as much out of your body as you possibly could until you figure out the nutrition side of things.
You already know you’ve got a blind spot that you’re avoiding.
There’s friction there.
You know that you’re going to have to learn some things, and change some behaviors.
And that’s painful. It’s uncomfortable and it sucks to suck at things.
But as you unlock these new skills, you open up a whole new possibility for your body.
Once you learn about conditioning, your work capacity will go through the roof.
When you learn about training for muscle growth, you’ll get way more jacked, you’ll be able to fill out shirts, your biceps will get bigger, you’ll look better.
When you learn how to run a successful fat loss diet, you open up a whole new range of body fat percentages that your body would have never otherwise seen if you didn’t learn how.
I cover both of these in Body Recomp 101, my free guide to losing fat while building muscle.
The treasure you’re seeking is in the cave you fear to enter – Joseph Campbell
A lot of guys just fear trying these new things because they know it’s uncomfortable.
You have to change things.
You’re a beginner and being a beginner is painful.
But when you accept that you’re a beginner at something, you enter the growth mindset.
You get to now reap all the rewards that come along with the learning process.
Here’s a great exercise I heard from Tim Ferriss that he calls fear setting.
He does this before big decisions in his life, like quitting a job, starting a business, leaving a relationship, or moving house.
He has a few questions that he asks himself.
If you are on the fence of taking your fitness journey more seriously, you’ve got a bunch of weight that you’ve been meaning to lose for a long time…
I encourage you to ask yourself these questions:
- What is the worst that could happen if I go into this thing?
- what could you do to get back to where you are if it doesn’t work out?
- what are the likely benefits or potential upsides to you succeeding?
- what is the cost of postponing action?
- what are you waiting for?
Only you can answer these.
Being lean is great, being LEAN sucks
Getting to a healthy body fat percentage, if you are overweight or obese, is life changing.
It’s amazing not feeling out of breath going up and down stairs.
Not feeling hot all the time, not having your back and your knees ache all day.
It’s literally night and day.
You sleep better. Everything’s better.
But going from a healthy body weight to shredded doesn’t really make your life any better.
It’s just a hobby at that point, and it might even have some drawbacks.
You don’t necessarily need to know exactly how lean you want to get in order to start losing weight.
You should probably just get started, and you’re not going to get too lean by accident.
You just keep going, and keep asking yourself if you’re lean enough yet.
If you’ve seen my videos before, you know about the cleaning out the river analogy that I talk about.
Let’s say a river is full of garbage and trash.
And the citizens say – okay, we want to clean up this river.
So they get a crane in to pull out all the major debris.
A bunch of cars and scrap metal.
Now the river is 80 percent clean.
That project costed $100k.
People say – the river is much cleaner, but we still want it to be cleaner.
Going from 80% to 90% clean…
Now we’re installing a filtration system, a stormwater runoff pond, maybe some kind of a mesh.
That’s gonna cost a million dollars.
Now the river only went from 80 percent to 90 percent clean.
But nobody actually really noticed all that much of a difference.
After 90 percent clean, you’re installing a chemical filtration plant, and all kinds of crazy interventions.
It costs a billion dollars, and the river looks the same as when it did when it was 80% clean.
Same thing with getting lean.
It gets harder and harder as you get leaner and leaner, and the trade offs get greater and greater.
Where should you end up, body weight wise and body fat percentage wise?
I don’t know.
The only way to figure it out for sure is to start heading there, and you’ll figure it out along the way.
You can easily get too fat by accident, but you’re never going to get too lean by accident.
This third lesson is probably one of the most painful lessons for me because I think I wasted the most time on this one.
This one has stung me the most.
If I could go back in time and give myself some advice, it would be about this:
Don’t get muscle FOMO
That stands for fear of missing out.
A lot of guys who get into fitness and start lifting weights because they want more muscle.
They want to be stronger, they want to fill out shirts, they want to look like they lift.
But somewhere along the way through men’s health and blog posts online, they talk themselves out of it.
- I don’t want to get too big or bulky.
- I want to look like a swimmer.
- I want to be functionally fit.
When in reality, those concerns are completely irrelevant and unrealistic.
So you talk yourself out of training like a bodybuilder and lifting weights hard to grow new muscle.
You start losing some weight.
And all of a sudden you think – man, I just don’t look the way I thought I was going to when I lost this weight.
Guys tell me all the time..
I don’t want to get too light. I don’t want to lose muscle when I lose the weight.
The reality is, there’s just no muscle underneath there in the first place.
That’s what’s happening when you lose weight.
You’re just revealing the fact that you’re small.
I’m not saying this to hurt your feelings.
I’m saying this to manage our expectations and help you avoid wasting time like I did when I first lost weight.
I went all the way down.
I got as lean as I possibly could by just running, keto-ing, and dieting my face off.
I looked like a prisoner of war. Like a whittled down broom handle.
I was expecting to see something better under there, some kind of muscle at least.
But if you’ve never spent an extended period of time training and eating in a way that supports new muscle growth, then you’re just not going to see it.
Spend the time to build some muscle, you will never regret it.
You’ll look better at literally every body fat percentage, even if you carry a little more fat.
When you do get lean, you’ll look amazing because your muscles will pop through, making you appear more chiseled.
For the six months to a year that you invest training for muscle growth and specifically trying to grow new muscle, you will get outsized returns.
That will be the fastest muscle growth you’ll ever see in your life.
Really more like 1-2 years, because there’s a bit of skill acquisition in that first year that needs to happen.
You’ll have your first five, 10, 15, maybe 20 pounds of muscle.
And you will have that for the rest of your life as long as you go to the gym once or twice a week to maintain it, which is easy.
Food is a lot simpler than we think
It’s so easy to get neurotic and overthink food.
With all the information out there saying you need to be consuming sea moss, or organic berries and fruits.
Your body just does not care about that stuff.
From a health standpoint and from a physique development standpoint, you can get unreal returns by just focusing on mostly whole, minimally processed foods, while keeping your calories and your protein in check.
It is a good idea to eat some fruits and vegetables each day
Unfortunately, keeping track of your calories and your protein intake is the least sexy solution that I can give.
People want to hear about my cool metabolic shred diet.
They want to hear about insulin.
They want to hear about testosterone.
Ain’t nobody want to be hearing that you have to spend 5 or 10 minutes a day just keeping your numbers in check.
Your diet serves the purpose of giving you energy so you can do the things you enjoy, and providing the requisite nutrients to adapt to your training.
In the context of a fat loss diet, the role is basically the same, except the energy is just slightly less than the energy demands that your body has, so we encourage your body to start tapping into your fat cells.
If you’re going to try, go all the way
I heard a definition recently that commitment is about removing alternatives.
It’s about burning the ships and deciding that this is what you want to do. And there’s no turning back.
I love that.
Commitment is about deciding that you’re coming back with your shield or on it.
Getting yourself in shape requires a degree of commitment.
There’s a period of time where you’re working on it and you’re just not going to see much in the way of results.
You’re going to only have the scale and some measurements and maybe some progress pictures to go off of.
But a lot of the time you’re just working in the dark and you have to be committed to the process without relying on outcomes.
When I started my online coaching business five years ago, I had no idea that it would work out.
This was four months before Covid happened.
Frankly, I was scared shitless.
Seriously, in the first month of me running my coaching business, I applied to a bakery right around the corner from my house, where I was going to work night shifts and bake stuff until I had enough clients to support me.
I called my parents to tell them about this, and they said:
Honestly, I think if you’re working overnight at the bakery, don’t you think you’d be too tired during the day to actually go and find clients and, you know, coach people?
And that’s 100 percent true.
If you always leave yourself a back out plan or just dip your toes in the water, you’re not going to see a ton of results from everything you’re trying.
Now you’re missing out on all the motivation that comes along with seeing awesome progress.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Instead, you need to decide to do the thing. No matter what happens.
You need to make time for it and put it in your calendar every week. Otherwise it’s just not going to happen.
If you focus on the process and doing all the things you know you need to be doing to move yourself forward, the score will take care of itself. All those outcomes will start showing up.
Here’s a great way to think about this.
I want you to commit to getting in shape for a year. Just decide that you’re going to give your best effort for a full year, no matter what happens.
You’re going to tackle problems along the way. You’re going to run into roadblocks.
But you’ll overcome them. You’re going to persist.
You will know that you’re committed for a year.
If you stick with this for a year and you do the things you know you need to be doing, it could potentially change the rest of your life.
If only by giving you an awesome boost of motivation and showing you what’s really possible.
Showing you that you can keep your promises to yourself and showing you what your body will give you if you put in the work.
That motivation will carry you for a long time.
Hopefully this helps inspire and motivate you to get started with this.
– Matteo
PS: this upcoming week, I’ll be taking on board my last few 1:1 coaching clients for 2024.
I can help you build muscle faster, remove all the guesswork from workouts / food, and help you drop your first 5-10 lb of fat before Christmas.
If you want to learn more, click here
