Introduction

A tripod is a stand with the unique design of needing 3 legs to keep upright. In my opinion, fat loss is the same; it cannot be sustained without the following 3:

• Nutrition
• Fitness
• Mental

First, an important side note to explain before getting to our main topic. Fat loss is not the same as weight loss. Here’s a little math formula to explain.

Weight = (Water + Bones + Organs + Muscle) + Fat

This is obviously an oversimplification as we have many things under the skin that make up our weight. If you want to lose 20 pounds fast, we can just chop off a leg and call it a day; however, I imagine that is not the kind of weight you want to lose on the scale, right?

Scientifically speaking, fat takes up more space inside your body relative to its weight. This means by reducing your fat, your body will shrink faster than the number on your scale, so who cares what the number on the scale says if you’re able to fit into smaller and better fitting clothing?

Please keep this in mind that today’s main topic is targeting fat loss and not weight loss.

Main Subject

Nutrition

I want to use the word nutrition because ‘diet’ not only has the term ‘die’ in it, but it gives the feeling of sacrificing food that we enjoy. On my fitness journey, I still enjoy burgers, pizza, and homemade cakes baked by my wife. As food is a part of our life (literally without it we die) we shouldn’t need to make this a daily hassle. Since fat loss is 80% a patience game, feeling stressed about what you can’t eat is definitely not a healthy mindset to carry.
This is especially important since the more fat to lose requires more time. It cannot be rushed.

In future posts, I will dive deeper into nutrition. Here is what you need to know regarding fat loss.

• Eat in a calorie deficit
• (Please do this as protein keeps you full. I’ll touch on this in future posts).

That is it! Simple, right? Though it’s simple, it does not mean it’s easy. All foods that we eat contain a certain number of calories that fuel our bodies. If we eat more calories than what we need in the day, calories get stored as fat. On the other hand, if we eat less calories than we need in the day, our body eats our fat and/or muscle tissue to get enough energy.

To target fat loss, we just need to eat in a very small calorie deficit and eat enough protein. This prevents our body from consuming important muscles and organs and focuses on consuming fat to make up for that deficit.

As an example, person A needs about 2,500 calories a day. What would happen if they ate more than that every day for a week? They will gain weight. What if they eat less than 2,500 calories every day for a week? They will lose weight. Some people say to lose 1lbs of body weight, you will need a 3,500 weekly calorie deficit (500 calorie daily deficit or consume 2,000 total calories a day for the week).

If you have tried diets in the past, this information might not be new. In fact, you probably already know this. What I want to do is challenge you. Why not try a 100 or 200 calorie daily deficit?

This brings me to how nutrition is not a stand-alone topic, but heavily influences the other 2 legs of our fat loss tripod: fitness and mental.

By not eating enough calories, our body will change our hormone profile to feel extra tired and have uncontrollable cravings. What does that mean regarding our fitness and mental? Simply, not eating enough will have us feel lazy, tired, and make us horn dogs to cheat on our diets. I’ve personally tried calorie deficits ranging from 500 calories a day to eating nothing on a water fast. Though successful temporarily, I gained all the weight back. It’s hard to workout (or to live generally) when your stomach says you’re in starvation mode.

Eating in a 50, 100, 200, or even 250-calorie deficit, you can have enough energy to train your fitness and prevent yourself from cheating on your diet. This brings me to my philosophy: slow weight loss makes fast fat loss.

Fitness

This next section is pretty short because nutrition will contribute to 80% of your fat loss. (I like saying 80% because it sounds fancier than saying ‘most’). Sometimes people feel stressed when they hear the word exercise. Instead, we’re going to use the word fitness because it relates more to training and strengthening your body. For busy people and office workers, the biggest bang for your buck, in terms of improving your fitness, is resistance training.

Note that I said resistance training instead of weightlifting. This means whatever you choose to train, you need to focus on getting stronger. If you can only do 2 push-ups on your knees, aim for doing 10 strict pushups. If you can’t do a pull up, work on holding your weight at the top of a pull up for 50 seconds. It might take a long time to accomplish this, but when you do, it means you are progressively overloading your exercises (or getting stronger).
Why is this important for fat loss? Remember how I mentioned previously, “On the other hand, if we eat less calories than what we need in the day, our body eats our fat and/or muscle tissue to get enough energy”? When we resistance train our whole body (importantly near failure), a muscle building signal is sent telling the body to preserve your muscle tissue instead of consuming it for energy, so what’s left for your body to use for energy? Body fat. This is really important if we’re going to stay in a calorie deficit for an extended period of time.

Again, fitness is not a stand along topic. It also affects the other 2 legs of the tripod of fat loss: nutrition and mental.

How does fitness factor into our nutrition? When we progressively overload, our bodies need carbohydrates to give us the energy to push through our workouts, and protein heal and grow muscles. Without eating carbs (like bread, rice, potatoes, etc.) we won’t have the energy to push our body to failure for that muscle building signal. Without protein (such as meats, lentils, etc.) our bodies won’t build muscles to get stronger. Focusing on getting stronger revolves around what we eat showing fitness and nutrition go hand in hand.

How about fitness and mental? When I first stepped into the gym, I realized my body was extremely weak. I didn’t have the strength to hang on a bar for 5 seconds, and I couldn’t even do 2 regular push-ups. After 1.5 years I built the physical strength to do a full pull up and able to bench press 225lbs (for the average person, this is a strength milestone in the gym community). Also, I never enjoyed running in my life, so I trained my body to comfortably jog 5km at an easy pace of 34 min (not impressive for runners, but impressive for myself). For someone who was near 300lbs, I felt on top of the world reaching my fitness goals. This became a powerful drive to continue my fat loss journey.

Sometimes when you weigh yourself on a scale and see your number go up, you feel discouraged which can ruin your mental. When we switch our focus to something tangible, not only do we feel proud about our accomplishments and body, but it also gives us the mental energy to continue on our fat loss journey. Remember, fat loss is a patience game, so reaching little milestones along our journey makes us fall in love with the process and makes the journey suck less.

Mental

The mental is the psychological factors which revolve around fat loss. This is the part that can really make or break a successful fat loss journey.

We’ve all been there. It’s Friday night. The weekend is about to start. You’ve been ‘good’ on the nutrition and fitness even though you’ve slipped up on the extra donut or missed that 1 day at the gym. Some progress has been made on the scale, so why not take it easy after a stressful long work week? So what do you order for the family? Pizza. Maybe come Saturday and you’re on the road running errands and don’t want to cook at home. What do you do? Get a Starbucks coffee and maybe a muffin. Maybe you want to go visit family and friends and offer you some wine or prepare an amazing Burger King charcuterie board. You’re not not gonna say no, ya know what I’m saying? After 1 Friday evening of slipping, and a bad day on Saturday, you check the scale, and all your week’s effort is gone! You spend Sunday saying, “I’ve already gone off the rails. Might as well enjoy the day and try again Monday.” Then Monday comes and you’re dialed in and restart this vicious cycle.

This comes from 1 simple mistake. Your fat loss journey has not become a stable lifestyle change. The lifestyle everyone currently has is developed from the habits they accumulated over a long period of time. It’s your homeostasis, your comfortable place that requires no mental energy to sustain. The physical changes for fat loss happen really fast. In reality, it is the mental changes for fat loss that take the longest. This is why I advocate the philosophy of slow weight loss for fast fat loss. We don’t need to make many changes to start a successful fat loss journey. We just need to maximize fat loss by making small behavioral adjustments.

Let me explain how this mental shift of small changes affects the other 2 legs of the fat loss tripod.

About mental and nutrition, we need to make small adjustments in eating behaviors that compound to consistent, lasting, and satisfying victories. Imagine eating what you regularly eat to keep your weight the same. Now imagine eating the same things, but on a weekly basis, your pants fit loser, shirts fit better, and your weight lowers. Wouldn’t you feel more motivated to keep eating the same food with these victories in the second scenario? This can be done by adjusting how you eat. Aim for 100 calorie deficit a day.

To be honest, 100 calories isn’t a lot. This is a good thing. Not only will you feel like you’re in a comfortable place, when changes start taking place on a weekly basis, you can start slowly adding other changes in your eating that will push fat loss even faster. After you start a 100-calorie deficit, you might aim for a 200-calorie deficit and adjust adding more vegetables or adding more filling foods to your diet. You just need to make small changes and keep consistent with them until it becomes a new normal. If it becomes too much, try a 50-calorie deficit. Remember, for fast fat loss we are aiming for slow weight loss. By being in slight a deficit, your body will use stored body fat for energy. Try this approach for a little bit.

About mental and fitness, the same applies. You just want to start increasing activity little by little until it becomes a lifestyle change. Try having a 10-minute walk after having a meal. If climbing stairs is too much of a hassle, at least try taking stairs when you’re going down a building. Making goals for your fitness and trying to accomplish them also is a great motivating factor for hitting the gym like I described previously from my own personal experience. In future posts, we will talk more about the mental and fat loss.

Summary

Fat loss is a long process, especially if you have a lot of fat to lose. Take time to focus on your nutrition, fitness, and mental. These 3 things are closely related, but if we adjust them little by little, we can get to a point where fat will start to melt off your body.

There is no short cut method. If you do, then that’s great for you; however, for myself and maybe for many, we just need to accept that fat loss takes time. The good thing is, it’s not impossible.

To start your fat loss journey, here are some tips for the TL;DR readers.

1. Focus on a slight daily calorie deficit (I wouldn’t recommend more than 250 to start)
2. Focus on improving your fitness by prioritizing getting stronger
3. Focus on accomplishing small, sustainable victories (fat loss is a patience game with long periods of small wins)

There are many things I want to share, but this is a good blueprint for your journey. Hope you enjoy the read and will talk next time!