Everyone seems to make the same handful of mistakes when they’re trying to achieve a lean physique.
I’m not even talking about trying to get *shredded* here.
If you even want to hit 15 percent body fat with some barely visible abs, then here are nine things you’ll want to avoid:
The first one is so common for those of us with busy lifestyles, people who work a lot or have families.
Stress / Life Overload
Regular dieting for fat loss is like going on a long road trip – it’s time consuming but not all that crazy.
Every once in a while you have to check the GPS to make sure you’re on track, you’re not running out of gas, and you drink some extra coffee to stay awake.
But high stress and an unstable life environment changes things.
It’s like you’re driving a van full of nitroglycerin down a bumpy highway full of potholes and there’s a live cougar in the passenger seat.
You’re screaming, trying not to die, and if you make one wrong move, there’s an explosion and people are picking up pieces of your gooch 2 miles away.
That’s 3.2 km for the metric folks.
So do your best to manage stress during your fat loss diet:
Read
Go for walks
Deep breathing in the evenings
Hire help around the house if you need it
Don’t be taking on some huge work projects if you can help it.
Last month, my girlfriend and I took a trip we wouldn’t normally take.
It was a tiny blip on the calendar, but it was a much needed breather for us.
Junk food at night
Your evening time Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde episodes are holding you back .
You find yourself on the couch crusted in Cheetos dust and 3 different types of shame glaze.
There’s a holy shit moment where you ask yourself – what just happened?
Then you feel ashamed for having overeaten junk food.
I know because I’ve been there.
There are 4 main problems that lead to this:
Pushing too hard
A big deficit leads to even bigger hunger.
Eating too much too soon
If you’re always hungry in the evenings, go light on breakfast.
Restricting food types too hard
Healthy eating is good, but restriction begets temptation.
You need to chill out
We’ll talk more about this later.
The All-or-Nothing Approach
This was my Achilles heel for years.
I’d have one bad weekend for food and activity.
Then I’d fall off the diet completely for 2 weeks or more.
We’re going to tackle this from a logical standpoint first, then we’ll address the emotional side after.
I find most people are either really good at one the other.
But if you can embrace both, you’ll go further with this whole fitness thing.
If you’re a cold-blooded, logical, accountant type – who knows exactly what calories and macros they need to hit every day to see a specific week over week loss rate, that’s dope.
If you don’t know what that means – read my free guide to body transformation
But if you get overwhelmed, frustrated, neurotic, or insecure when things don’t go perfectly according to plan – then you give up, you’ll lose.
Same thing goes for the person who is highly sensitive and attuned to their emotions and physical sensations.
You always know when you’re feeling anxious or overwhelmed and can bring that back down to zen again… awesome.
But if you don’t know how to get into the brutal mindset where you just show up and smash every single day when you don’t feel the way you normally do, that’s going to be tough.
Giving up on your diet is like slashing your other tires when you got a flat.
Except it’s not just your car.
You got a flat so you slashed all the tires of a fleet of 18-wheelers you own.
For real, it’s that dumb.
And for all my touchy feely folks out there – I know it’s frustrating.
Just breathe. You’ve felt uncomfortable before, and it was fine.
This occasional foray into less than ideal will be no different.
Your dismay will pass, and by the time you do your next workout, or eat your next meal, you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment for having gotten back on track.
Avoiding food seasonings
Eating more basic food can definitely help you stay on track with your fat loss diet because it’s much harder to overeat.
Sauces can add a bunch of calories to your diet while acting as food lube that encourages you to eat faster and more.
BUT that doesn’t mean you need to cut salt out of your diet to lose weight.
You can also still use spices to make things taste better.
Same deal with mustard, soy sauce, no sugar bbq sauce and no sugar ketchup.
And diet soda, halo top, zero sugar jello, or chewing gum.
Suffering doesn’t lead to success.
As long as your total calories are in control, you’ll lose fat.
Whether your food tastes amazing or not.
This is a big part of the Four Point Fat Loss framework I teach – calories, protein, daily steps, and body weight.
Look at those things every day.
If you want to learn how to shrink your waistline, without some BS diet or supplements, over the next 45 days – check out Four Point Fat Loss
Overdoing Cardio
Every trainer out there will tell you that you can’t out work a bad diet.
I don’t think they’re entirely wrong.
But – I learned recently that having sex burns about 420 calories per hour.
So in an effort to lose fat, I started having sex every day.
The only problem is that I am only racking up about 4 minutes per week of total time.
That was a premature ejaculation joke.
Cardio is a huge help to burn extra calories.
But, it has it’s limitations.
Timewise, it’s unrealistic to spend 1 hour per day doing cardio for most people.
(about what it would take to see significant fat loss progress from cardio only)
It also can be quite fatiguing, especially if you’re doing something like the stair climber, that’s going to really beat you up at 1 hour per day.
And ultimately, all this calorie burn isn’t going to help if you aren’t controlling what’s happening with your food on the other side of the energy balance equation.
So you can’t only blindly rely on doing a ton of exercise to lose slabs of fat.
To learn more about that, read The Best Exercise to Lose Belly Fat
Letting hunger get out of hand
Hunger is inevitable when you’re losing weight.
Some people will experience it more severely than others.
But how much hunger you experience is somewhat up to you.
If you’re trying to lose fat too quickly, you’re making poor food choices, or you’re always eating while watching TV – get ready to experience some serious hunger.
And hunger isn’t just uncomfortable physically and psychologically – it can lead to overeating, which means you’re not going to be losing fat as quickly as you could’ve otherwise.
So managing that impulse is worth it.
I’ll be making a more complete guide on hunger soon.
Calorie chaos
If I had to pick 2 mistakes I’ve seen most in people who track their calories, it’s these.
Coming out too hot
Adjusting too much
The weight loss chart above belongs to my client David.
We set his calorie goal at 1900 calories on day 1 and haven’t adjusted it once.
He’s lost 20 lb.
The reason we haven’t adjusted? We haven’t had to.
He’s losing weight, he’s able to hit the goal consistently, and feeling fine from a hunger, mood, and energy standpoint.
As long as you’re doing those three things, you have no reason to fiddle with your goal.
Part of that is because we selected a reasonable calorie target to start with.
Something like 500-700 calories below what he burns each day.
It’s always better to start a little slower, and you can speed it up later if you want to.
Don’t come out too hot, or you’ll just crash and burn.
Scale anxiety
I’ve worked with people who have mini panic attacks when they don’t lose weight in the first 3 days of their diet.
Is it working?
Am I eating too many calories?
Why did my weight go up today?
The reality is that your bodyweight is not always going to decrease linearly.
It might hover and drop every week.
It might pingpong up and down while trending down.
In any case, you’re going to want to look at the average of 1 week of weigh ins, then compare it to the average of the second week.
That’s a better indicator of how your bodyweight is trending.
If you want to save yourself the math and headache – use the app MacroFactor (code MARRA for 2 weeks free) to track your trends.
My complete review of the app is the most read on google, read for details.
Just don’t freak out if things aren’t changing as fast as you want.
Be patient, stay consistent, and let your body do it’s thing – I promise, it will work out.
What you need is focus.
Lack of focus
Here’s one you won’t hear from many other coaches.
Losing a good amount of fat requires focus.
When it’s time to eat a meal, you have to have a certain level of awareness and focus to select the foods that help you hit your goal.
When your friend invites you out for a pub night, there’s a moment where you could either forget entirely about your diet, or make a decision that aligns with your goals.
That requires focus.
When you’ve been losing weight for a week or 2, and it’s starting to get a little boring, you need to hold your goal as a focal point in your mind in order to stick with it.
It’s about stringing together a series of good decisions in order to move yourself in the right direction.
Micro focus – for day to day activities like food prep and hitting your step goal.
Macro focus – for keeping the goal, the goal and staying the course when it gets tough.
Get extremely clear on what you want to accomplish.
Lay out a smart plan for the next 90 days.
Act as if you’re the person who has the things you desire.
Become that person.
Track your results.
Focus.
In any case, I appreciate you reading this.
Hope you have an excellent week.
– Matteo
PS: next week’s letter might make some people a little upset, but it’s a harsh truth about losing weight that so many need to hear.
