If you lose 40 pounds… people in your life are going to say, holy shit, what have you been doing?

Even the most assertive, aggressive, reckless, or downright ridiculous diets cannot make you lean in a week or two weeks. 

You need to give it time in order to actually pull the fat off of your body. 

So if you’re starting into some kind of workout or diet plan that you’re not going to be able to stick to for more than a week or two, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

Tissue changes take time.

Fat tissue takes time to actually mobilize and come off your body. 

You need to give it time. If you come out too hot, you won’t be able to stick to it.  

Secret two

Don’t aim for too much weight loss. 

I know that you may have a big goal. 

50 pounds, 70 pounds, 100 pounds that you want to lose.

And that might be valuable as a long term vision. But don’t get too attached to it in the short or medium term. 

You want a goal that is big enough to be exciting and motivating that urges you to get started and inspires you. 

But not so much that it becomes demotivating to even think about. 

It’s not the same as saying – I’m going to shoot from the moon and land on the stars.

You’re not going to land on the stars. 

You’re going to explode in a spacecraft in outer space. 

And there’s going to be bits of shrapnel falling everywhere.

And you’re going to come crash landing back down to earth. You’re dead. No survivors. 

Set a measurable, meaningful, but approachable goal for the short to medium term, accomplish it, generate some momentum, and move on from there.

Here’s a video of me setting up a fat loss diet – in case you want to see how I do it. 

Secret three

Take breaks. 

Nobody seems to take breaks with their weight loss.

I know you want to lose all this weight in one shot, 100 pounds, 70 pounds, even 40 pounds. 

But here’s the cool part. You don’t have to lose it all at once. 

You can take breaks along the way to make yourself fresh and ready to push again for some more weight loss. 

Today, if you were to start losing fat, you’re highly sensitive to fat loss.

You are primed, so to speak, to lose a ton of fat right now. 

But as you keep losing that fat and losing that fat and losing that fat, you’re going to become less sensitive to it… 

Your energy levels might go down a little bit. You’re going to become hungrier. You might become moodier. You might experience some sleep disturbances.

And as you start getting into that territory, this is where most people just say, fuck it. 

And the wheels fall off and they give up and end up gaining all the weight back. 

At that point, it’s better to take a strategic break. 

Allow yourself to recover from the fat loss process, get fresh and get sensitive again before you push into another fat loss phase.

So you lose more fat and less muscle, and the whole process is easier to stick to and more enjoyable. 

 Secret four

Use easy meals. 

I’m talking about simple, repeatable meals that you can shop for and prepare every single week and set yourself up for a daily win. 

Make it so unreasonably simple that it would be ridiculous for you not to succeed.

Every week, my girlfriend and I set out six Tupperware containers for each of us.

Into each of those, I put 150 grams of Greek yogurt. 

I put one scoop of whey protein into each of them. 

I mix them all up. 

And then I add 250 grams of frozen berries on top. 

I lid all those and put them all in the fridge.

Every single day, we have a high protein breakfast that is ready to go in the fridge.

And I instantly know that I’m moving myself in the right direction right away that day. 

It’s a guaranteed win and it takes me a matter of minutes to prepare all six of them for both of us.  

Think of yourself as a zookeeper.

You are creating a little environment for yourself. 

How can you create the environment so it’s actually helpful to you, the creature, in order to lose this fat? 

Those simple repeatable meals are what I call Marra Meals.

And I use them with a lot of my clients so that they can lose fat in under 10 minutes per day of cooking. 

 Secret five

Daily activity. 

A lot of guys will get into this fat loss thing and they’ll just start driving their food down and try and starve themselves.

They end up eating like a baby bird or some kind of Barbie doll. 

When in reality, that’s not always the best play. 

Yes, getting your nutrition in check is super helpful, but at a certain point, it pays to stop reducing your food.

Sometimes, it’s better to start increasing your activity, whether that’s through some daily walking or lifting weights – ideally both. 

Stop only reducing the food and start to burn a little bit more energy. 

That new energy you’re burning means you’ve created a buffer.

Having that extra buffer now means that even on days where you don’t eat perfectly… you’ll still lose fat. 

That buffer prevents you from not losing any fat that day. 

And on days where you eat perfectly, that extra buffer you have… that energy needs to come from somewhere, and that energy is coming directly from body fat, so it’s a straight up win either way.  

Secret six

Track your progress. 

There is nothing more motivating than results.

Smart people leverage that fact to help them get in shape faster. 

I call it the Awareness Advantage.

Just imagine looking in the mirror and seeing all the fat that you want gone. 

You’re lean, you’re defined, you’re ripped, whatever your goal is. 

How awesome would that feel? Fucking awesome, right? 

The confidence that comes along with that, the sense of accomplishment, that’s amazing. 

And you can actually tap into a mini version of that greater win.

Daily and regularly on a weekly basis by measuring your progress along the way, tracking your important metrics and numbers and variables to be sure that you are moving in the right direction. 

You get this psychological affirmation that exactly what you’re doing is working. 

Keep on doing it. That’s so motivating.

And that just encourages you to further stick to the plan and adhere to it, which means you’re getting better results. 

And if you keep witnessing those better results, it just keeps fueling this machine in a positive feedback loop. 

Not to mention, when you track your progress, it’s an early detection or alarm system that’s letting you know if anything isn’t working along the way.

So you don’t just set some vague goal like, I’m going to eat healthy, and then six weeks into it, you’re like, why haven’t I lost any weight? How come things aren’t working? 

Track your progress, make sure you’re on the right track. 

Secret seven

Lastly, is flexibility. 

I’m not talking about stretching here, but I’m talking about having a plan that allows you to eat the foods you enjoy without it being some kind of big catastrophe. 

If you decide you’re only going to eat clean chicken, rice, and broccoli, and beef, that’s amazing and that’s great and good for your health, but how long are you actually going to be able to stick to that? 

And what about when real life comes up and you have, a family member make you dinner, and you don’t know what’s in there..?

You’re not going to ask them how many calories is in it or whatever. 

It’s just unreasonable for most of you reading this to weigh and measure every single gram of every food you eat because you’re not a fitness model. 

You don’t get paid to look good shirtless and your life doesn’t revolve around this. 

Man, even I don’t get paid to look good shirtless.

So, you need a plan that allows you to have some flexibility and still stay on track and lose fat without giving up the foods you love.

And when you have a day where you enjoy some of those more fun foods… You don’t just have to throw in the fuck it card and say that all bets are off because you had a slice of pizza. 

Then you end up two weeks down the line, just way behind on all your progress because you went off the rails with it.  

Now stack those 7 principles with each other, and you’re looking at something that will really last. 

Matteo

PS: if you want to lose fat and keep it off, you’ll need the skills to make it happen. 

A system to lose it reliably, in a smart way, that sticks. 

If you want that – check out On-Demand Fat Loss

It’s my step by step guide to losing fat quickly and reliably by using a simplified nutrition approach that you can learn in literally the next 15 minutes.  

• You don’t have to do fasting.
• You don’t have to do cardio. 
• You don’t have to do keto. 
• You don’t have to take any supplements. 

There’s no bullshit. 

I’ll show you how to set up all the things we talked about above.  

I’m even going to show you a simple way you can keep track of how your progress is moving all in one neat and tidy little place. 

 There’s about four videos inside  and a written worksheet that’s going to help you get started, literally, in the next 15 to 20 minutes. 

I think you’ll love it.