Stop focusing only on weight loss (do this instead): 

If you want to go from 30% body fat with your man boobs, love handles, and belly fat, down to a lean and defined 15% body fat with some visible abs, you need to stop focusing on losing weight.

I lost 50 pounds of body fat, built a bunch of muscle naturally, and helped hundreds of people transform their bodies over the last 9 years.

In this post, I’m going to give you a complete system to see faster visual results than 99% of people in the gym:

Weight Loss vs. Body Fat Percentage: What’s the Difference?

The first thing I want to get out of the way is this idea of losing weight versus dropping your body fat percentage.

Of course everyone has different goals, but in this case I’m going to assume you’re carrying more fat than you’d like in your problem areas, and even though you have no desire to be an enormous, ripped, juiced 250 pound bodybuilder, you want to have more muscle to be stronger, sexier, and harder to kill.

You really have 3 options to drop your body fat percentage:

Option 1: Build Muscle First

If you ADD 10 pounds of muscle, without losing any fat, you’re now 23% body fat but more muscular. Which is cool because you won’t have to lose any weight, and most people I’ve worked with actually enjoy lifting some weights. Being consistent with nutrition is the tough part.

If you’re not carrying a bunch of extra fat, focusing on building more muscle is definitely going to be your best option – like my 1:1 coaching client, John:

The problem: 6 months from now, you’re still carrying a ton of extra body fat around that you could have been losing a pound of every 3 or 4 days from day 1.

The muscle you built isn’t as visible AND your body is not as healthy as it could be. Testosterone levels take a hit, blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar aren’t great.

Also, excess body fat is STRONGLY related to sexual dysfunction in the scientific literature, so I’ll let your imagination do the rest on that one.

If you’re struggling to:

• build muscle in your workouts
• know whether your technique is right
• be sure you’re pushing hard enough in the gym

Click here for my Free Muscle Growth Workbook – so you can notice visible muscle changes in 30 days.

Option 2: Lose Fat First

If you have 150 pounds of muscle, and 50 pounds of fat – cutting your fat in half would take you from 25% body fat to just under 15% body fat.

This is more intriguing because there’s a saying that goes: the fastest way to look like you built 10 pounds of muscle is to lose 10 pounds of fat.

The issue: This is something we’re seeing everywhere right now with the explosion of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic. Have you heard of Ozempic face and Ozempic butt? Where people are losing huge amounts of fat, but also a huge amount of muscle along the way, so they end up frail and just looking like a deflated sack of meat?

That has less to do with the drug itself, and more to do with the well-documented scientific fact that fast weight loss – especially without lifting weights and protein= is a recipe for muscle loss.

I personally blasted a bunch of cardio and dieted myself down, only to end up looking like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, but with more hair, which is somehow worse?

Option 3: Lose Fat While Building Muscle

Adding 10 pounds of muscle, while losing 20 pounds of fat also drops you from 25% body fat to 15% body fat.

You’ll see the fastest visual results by working on both sides of the equation, and the end result 45, 90, or 365 days from now will be dramatically better.

You’ll end up stronger, leaner, healthier, AND most importantly, you’ll be most likely to stick with it because there’s nothing more motivating than seeing early results.

Check out our 1:1 coaching client, Lawrence doing exactly that: 

How to Set Up Your Fat Loss Plan

Now when you hear fat loss and nutrition, you probably start thinking about macros, organic food, fasting, blood sugar, and all these types of buzzwords you see in headlines nowadays.

I’m here to tell you that is all worth ignoring at this stage in the game.

Because the only way anyone has ever lost fat (outside of having it chopped off on an operating table) was by eating fewer calories than they burn each day—that’s it.

None of that other stuff really matters. It usually just makes this whole process feel more complicated and more difficult to actually stick with.

Your Two Nutrition Priorities

Priority #1: Calories

Your PRIMARY focus when it comes to losing fat is working on changing the behaviors and building the habits that help you reduce your calorie intake.

What about carbs and fat ratios?

What about eating late at night?

What about this supplement?

What about hydration? Micronutrients?

Stop it.

You have no business worrying about ANY of that right now. You’re putting a spoiler on a car that has no wheels.

You have a limited amount of time, energy, and effort you can put into fitness because you have family, work obligations, and a life. If you waste that precious bit of energy on low priority things that don’t move the needle, you’ll give up.

Priority #2: Protein
If you eat a high protein diet, you’ll feel MUCH more satisfied in between meals, which is especially important when you’re trying to reduce your calorie intake AND you’ll make it much more likely that you’ll build muscle while you lose the fat.

3 Habits for Consistent Results

Habit 1: Food Logging

If you can keep track of which foods you eat, and what amounts, fat loss is going to happen every single day.

Of course, this is going to take you a week or so to really get good at, but once you nail it—it is the single most effective way to reduce your body fat.

Because it doesn’t matter if you only ate McDonalds, as long as you’re eating the right amount of calories, you’re going to lose fat.

It’s like a budget—when my fiancée and I paid off a bunch of debt we had, I guess we didn’t NEED to use a budget, but it helped us make sure what we were doing was working. It’s a bit more work yes, but if you’re serious about making progress on something, it’s worth it.

How to get started:

• Download a food logger app (Cronometer, MyFitnessPal, or LoseIt are all free)
• Follow the setup instructions for your calorie goal (likely around 11 times your bodyweight in pounds)
• Bonus: Aim for your height in centimeters as your daily protein target (if you’re 5’9″, that’s 175g of protein per day; add 3g for every extra inch)

There are 3 strategies I want you to try for food logging.

The third one is mandatory. 

> Strategy 1: Track as You Eat
You finish your meal, you open up your app, and you enter exactly what you had straight away. That way you don’t forget what you ate later in the day, and you know BEFORE your next meal how much food you should eat.

> Strategy 2: Pre-Track Your Food
If you want to plan ahead and prepare some meals in advance, this is a super effective way to stay consistent with your calorie targets. If you know you’re going to have 400g of Greek yogurt with one apple, one banana, and some cream in your coffee tomorrow morning, just track it the day before.

That way when it’s time to eat, there’s no guesswork or decision fatigue. You just show up and eat what’s on the plan.

> Strategy 3: Use a Food Scale 
The number of people I’ve heard tell me that food tracking doesn’t work for them… then I ask them how many calories they were eating, and they say something ridiculous like 1500 calories.

I know instantly that person was dramatically underestimating how much they were eating, because they were just eyeballing their portion sizes, or using a cup measure instead of a food scale.

The best 20 dollars you could ever spend on weight loss is a food scale. It makes it so that you know exactly how much you’re eating at every meal so you don’t go 2 or 3 weeks while tracking your food without losing any weight.

Habit 2: Simple Meals 

You are  WAY overcomplicating the whole meal prep thing.

I went to cooking school, and I love food. I’ll cook something special for our friends or family on a Sunday dinner – but I cannot be bothered to be making some 15 ingredient meal prep every week that’s just going to sit in the fridge and get funky for 5 days.

Simplicity is a superpower when it comes to behavior change and staying consistent, especially when you’re relatively new to this, so let’s make it easy.

The Simple Meal Plan:

• Pick 1-2 breakfasts you like that take 5 minutes or less to make (Greek yogurt with fruit, 2 scoop whey protein shake with peanut butter toast – EASY)
• Play around with the serving size so they’re roughly a third of your daily calories and protein
• Do the same thing for lunch and dinner

You don’t get bonus points for making fancy meals.

Turkey deli meat in a tortilla with spring mix and low calorie dressing isn’t sexy. But it gets the job done.

How Fast Should You Lose Weight?

The standard recommendation you’ll hear is 1-2 pounds per week, and that can work fine for a lot of people.

But even better is to shoot for around 1% of your total bodyweight per week, which scales based on how big of a person you are.

So if you’re 200 pounds, you’re going to aim to lose up to 2 pounds per week.

That’s a safe range where you can stick with it for long enough to see visual results, without being so slow that you have to go 6 months without noticing much. 

If you’re not sure – use my Free Weight Loss Calculator to figure out your goals based on your current bodyweight. 

Habit 3: Get Specific 

It’s not enough to just say; 

“Okay I’m gonna lose 2 pounds a week and get in shape.”

Too vague.

Most people are too indecisive to actually lose the weight they want. You read a post like this one and you go

“yeah, cool idea – I’ll save this one for later when I decide to get after it.”

Stop it. Make the decision. Create a specific plan.

You have to let go of the idea that you just have to “start eating healthier” or “go by how you look and feel, not the scale.”

You can’t just skate by and expect big awesome changes.

This is going to take focused effort and planning. It doesn’t happen by accident.

Write it down and make it real.

Your Planning Questions:

• If you lost 1% of your weight each week, how much are you going to weigh 10 weeks from now?
• What are the daily actions you need to take to make that happen?
• How will you know if what you’re doing is working?

Example Action Plan:

• Daily calorie tracking: 2100 calories, 150g protein
• Weekly grocery delivery on Sundays, buying xyz foods
• Stepping on the scale every morning, post-bathroom, no food, no water, tracking how the weekly average is moving week to week
• Taking a selfie style progress video in the bathroom every 2 weeks to check for visual changes

If fat loss, nutrition, and working out feels overwhelming, check out 1:1 Coaching

Doing it alone is playing on hard mode.

We’ll get you a specific action plan for what to do each day and week. 

Then support you through it with weekly accountability check-ins and guidance. 

If you can grab this whole thing by the balls and stop being afraid to actually try hard at it for once, it will change how you show up on a day-to-day basis to hammer your plan.

The results show up WAY faster, and the momentum will carry you to stick with it because you see it working.

You can either put in a 4/10 effort and get 2/10 results. Or you can put in an 8/10 effort and get 8/10 results.

3 Workout Rules To Build Muscle While You Lose Fat

Do you ever see those people at the gym who are there all the time, but they look the exact same for years?

I know the gym has health benefits outside of improving your physique, but I’m bringing that up because you need to know that it’s entirely possible to spend an hour in the gym daily and not notice much difference a year from now.

But it’s also possible to lift for 30 minutes to an hour, 3 days per week, and see INSANE progress over the next year.

The difference is that most people don’t understand that working out for general fitness, and training to grow muscle are not the same.

Rule 1: Follow a Program

If you aren’t following a workout plan while you’re in the gym, you’re just making shit up.

It’s like if I asked you to bake me some chocolate chip cookies—would you just start pouring flour, eggs, sugar, and chocolate into a bowl and mix it up? No. That would end up as a big sloppy mess, and I would be sad. You would look up a recipe, right?

Same thing goes for your time in the gym. If you’re doing a bunch of random exercises, you’re not going to build very much muscle.

Following a program:

• You get a higher return on investment for every minute you spend in the gym
• You waste less time
• It’s ONE less thing to think about when it’s time to actually get up and go to the gym
• If you never repeat workouts week to week – how can you possibly know if what you’re doing is working?

Rule 2: Make Progress Over Time

Look down at your arms – would you like them to be stronger and more muscular?

The answer is always yes.

Let’s imagine your arms are currently capable of doing biceps curls with 20 pounds for 10 reps.

The MOST reliable way to get your arms to the next level is to get those curls to 30 pounds for 10 reps.

Just take a look at how my strength on preacher curls and the size of my biceps are suspiciously related over the course of a year: 

Progressive overload explained:

• Show up to the gym consistently, repeat your workouts week to week
• Use that same 20 pound (or whatever) dumbbell, aiming to at LEAST match the reps you did from last week
• If you can, add a rep
• Keep fighting week after week to add a rep here and there
• Once you can do 15 reps with the 20 pounders, you’ll go to 25s
• You can only do 8 reps with the 25s
• Work your way up to 12, then 15, and THEN go to the 30s and repeat
• By the time you get there, your arms will look VERY different

This process takes time, but it’s the number one indicator that your training is working.

Keep track of the reps you do in the gym along with how much weight you use.

Rule 3: Push Close to Failure

Your muscles don’t count reps.

They don’t care if you did a set of 8 or a set of 12. They only speak the language of tension. They have to physically squeeze and pull the weight up on your bicep curls.

When they get pushed to the point where they can barely squeeze the weight all the way up, something magical happens.

The muscle sends out a message: “Hey – it’s time for us to grow. We need to change if we want to keep up with all this work.”

For all your sets in the gym, you need to get your muscles to that point where it’s slowing down despite you pushing as hard as you can to get it up.

I’m not saying get sloppy and swing your hips back and forth to get the dumbbells up. But keep a good, high quality technique and keep pulling those curls until you literally can’t finish the rep.

For other exercises where you don’t want to fail for fear something might fall on you (like a bench press or leg press), just go until you have 1 good rep left in the tank – which by the way is STILL super hard training.

When you train like this, you will notice that your workouts tire you out a LOT, the muscles will burn, feel tired, you’ll strain and make silly faces, and you will be more sore than ever.

But your muscles will start growing noticeably faster than ever before.

How to set Up Your Workouts

• Lifting 2-3x per week? Do full body workouts so each body part gets hit at least twice per week
• Lifting 4x per week? Do 2 upper body days and 2 lower body days

Here’s what a workout plan might look like: 

The 3 Challenges You’ll Face

I’m not gonna blow smoke up your ass here and tell you that you’re going to lose 20 pounds and build 10 pounds of muscle in 6 months without any effort.

There will be challenges and setbacks along the way—and how you deal with them will determine whether you continue to fizzle out after a couple weeks, or if you get a kickass body transformation that all your friends and family comment on.

Challenge 1: Getting Started

I’m just gonna be blunt with you here.

You’re scared to get started. It’s keeping you stuck. That sucks. 

I’ve got a friend who’s an amazing gardener that grows beautiful flowers, fruits, and vegetables.

If I wanted to get to her level, just think about all the stupid mistakes I’d have to make. How many plants would have to die? How much time would I have to spend reading online about different kinds of bulbs and climates? 

You’re the same way with fitness. You know you want the outcome. But you’re overwhelmed and scared by the idea of diving headfirst into it. So it becomes this big mental mountain you keep putting off until work is a bit less busy – which by the way will never happen, if you’re anything like me. 

It’s a tough pill to swallow – knowing that fitness is a bit of a grind at the beginning. But once you get to the point where you’re not just killing plants and you get to see the fruit and veggies in the garden – it’s unbelievable.

Here’s an idea for you:

You don’t get to do this forever.

I’m asking you to be grateful for the opportunity to lose this weight and get in shape.

You get 52 weeks per year. Really more like 48 if we count some vacations and sick days. That means EVERY single week is over 2% of your total effort for the year. You only get 48 Monday workouts.

Give yourself twenty Mondays.

6 months of real, focused effort.

Break through that initial hump of difficulty.

See some amazing initial results by going all-in on it.

Until then, you’re going to be the type of person who says “you know what, this has just never really worked for me.”

But at least now you know why.

Challenge 2: Hunger

When you start eating fewer calories than your body burns each day, it’s going to respond by telling you it’s time to eat.

When that appetite creeps up, you might find yourself reaching for snacks in the pantry. Or getting to the point in the evening where you’ve already eaten all your calories for the day. But you still want more.

At that point, you have 2 options:

Option 1: Freak out, throw in the towel, and eat more food. If you do that consistently, you won’t feel as hungry – but you also won’t lose much weight.

Option 2: Accept that hunger. Repeat after me – ‘this is a sign that things are working’. It’s a clue that you’re in a calorie deficit and your body is chewing up your fat cells at that very moment.

There’s another benefit to accepting hunger most people don’t realize.

As you feel a bit hungry, you start to see that it’s not an emergency. It’s just a sensation, a feeling. If you have an extra 30 pounds of fat on your body, you’re not starving to death. You’re going to be fine.

The more you experience that feeling, the less of a panic response there is. You get better at losing more fat in the future, and better at keeping it off, too.

Food choices matter: Make sure you’re getting plenty of protein and produce throughout the day, and choosing foods that make you feel full while keeping calories lower.

Less Burger King chicken sandwich with fries, more home cooked chicken and potato – but you already knew that. 

Challenge 3: Falling Off the Wagon

This is where most people fail at losing fat.

You’ve TRIED doing keto, group exercise classes, workout apps, diets, or personal trainers. And it works for a bit, you lose a bit of weight, but then something comes up and you eventually slide back to a body fat percentage you’re not happy with.

Then you start again.

But every time you decide to start again, you reset from a place with a bit less confidence that you’ll succeed. With a bit more body fat. Instead of picking up where you left off and learning from the mistakes you made.

There will NEVER be a time in your life where everything is lined up perfectly for you to work out and lose fat. Your life is not centered around living like a fitness model.

So I want you to let go of the idea that all these things in your life are happening TO you, and you’re just trying to survive them.

They are happening FOR you.

Examples:

You had a busy week at work?

Okay cool you can either skip all your workouts for the week and be mad about it…

Or you can get into the gym for 1 hard set of everything for a 20 minute workout.

Now you know how to make it work even when life gets busy.

You didn’t have time to pack your usual lunch before work?

You can get upset that your alarm didn’t go off and go buy McDonalds…

Or you can dip into the grocery store, pick up 2 Core Power shakes and 2 apples for 80g of protein and be full for hours.

If you understand that losing fat and being in shape is a skill, it will change how you handle hunger, stress, and being busy with life.

The more challenges you face, the better you’ll be able to achieve and hang on to leanness.

Transform Your Body

Now you have a system to drop your body fat while building muscle at the same time:

• Focus on calories and protein (forget the rest for now)
• Track your food with a scale
• Keep meals simple
• Follow a workout program and push close to failure
• Make progress over time in the gym 
• Embrace the challenges as learning opportunities

You can either put in a 4/10 effort and get 2/10 results, or you can put in an 8/10 effort and get 8/10 results.

The choice is yours.

– Matteo 

PS: if you want a personalized training and nutrition plan built around your goals, check out 1:1 Coaching

It’s the single most impactful thing I’ve ever done on my fitness journey.