The BEST Fat Loss Strategy

Looking for the best fat loss strategy that you can use to get long term sustainable results?

You’re in the right place!

We actually don’t have a weight loss problem. Everyone’s lost weight before. Instead, we have a weight regain problem. People can’t sustain their initial results.

Today, I’m gonna show you the best fat loss strategy to finally get out of the yo-yo dieting, weight loss and regain rollercoaster ride once and for all.

The Best Fat Loss Strategy

The mental aspect of weight loss

The mental aspect of weight loss is easily the most challenging part of someone’s weight loss journey. That’s why I firmly believe these days that weight loss is all in your head. Assuming that you’re following the right fat loss strategy.  

The average person comes to me wanting to lose a ton of weight. The average person in North America is overweight.

Once I get them going with the program, sometimes it’s hard for people to make the connection that they’re actually making a ton of progress. Especially when they’re not seeing a lot of movement on the scale.

This is why it’s so important to think long term. Unless your goal is super short term, like you wanna look a certain way and you don’t care what happens afterwards. You don’t care if you gain it back. 

You sometimes see that with females wanting to look a certain way for their wedding, or whatever. It makes sense. Those wedding pictures are gonna be immortalized forever.

But if you do care about getting to a particular goal AND you also wanna keep it forever. Then there’s definitely a fat loss strategy that works better.

Change your fat loss paradigm

When I do my first coaching call with a client, one of the main things I establish is I shift their paradigm right away. I tell people these days that we’re not gonna focus so much on losing weight. 

Instead, we’re gonna focus on building strength. To get people fit and strong. Even if they say they wanna lose body fat. 

Oddly enough, when you prioritize building strength, the weight loss part almost always takes care of itself. This is just what I’ve seen from coaching people by proxy over the past decade. It’s a much better approach.

There are many reasons why that fat loss strategy works better. For starters, you get a way better body composition. 

I’ve never met anyone who didn’t want tight glutes, or nice looking arms and legs, for example. Or a nicely defined chest which mostly applies to dudes. 

Building strength also results in a metabolism that burns more calories. Even if it’s just an extra 50 calories a day. That’s still a lot. Which then makes the weight loss part a lot easier to come by later on. 

Because muscle is the mechanism of health. It determines everything about your body composition. It makes whatever result you get more permanent. You actually get to keep off the fat this time and maintain it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon’s muscle centric approach to medicine is really leading the charge with this paradigm change. Big props to her. She’s really opened my eyes with her unique approach which I’ve now adapted to my practice.

According to her, we’ve been focusing on the wrong tissue all this time. That’s why it hasn’t worked. It’s not about being over-fat. It really is, from a metabolic perspective, about being under muscled. Listen to that again.

Muscle is the answer. We need to get stronger as a society. Muscle will take care of the fat loss. 

Daily diet fat loss strategy

Next, let’s talk about your daily diet. I’m not a fan of obsessively tracking daily calories. It’s too tedious.

But it definitely helps just to get some baseline numbers when you’re just starting out. Especially if you’re eating mostly the same food every day. You just need to be in the ball park.

These days, I actually tell people to keep their calories the same when they’re just starting out. I used to make the mistake of throwing the kitchen sink and changing everything right away. People just get overwhelmed.

Instead, we’re just gonna focus on increasing your general every day activity. We’re gonna start doing some resistance training and we’re gonna start walking more. That’s it.

You should check out my other videos about how much exercise you need to do to lose weight.

Next, very important, if you want a more reliable and accurate way to measuring progress, you need to take weekly progress pictures and measurements instead of just relying on the scale. 

If you have an extra couple of bucks, you can check your local area for a place that does dexa scans.

But the simple low tech method of taking weekly measurements and pictures works really well and is a crucial part of gauging progress. 

Because I’ve often had clients where the scale doesn’t move much, after the initial drop, but their body composition is actually still changing.

Numbers don’t lie. If you take weekly measurements and you see that you’ve dropped 2 inches off your waist, half an inch off your arms, 3 inches off your hips, and an inch off your thighs over the last month. That’s over 6 inches off your body. 

And then you look at your weekly progress pictures and see a noticeable difference on the problematic areas around your body, who cares what the scale says?

Pictures and measurements are invaluable tools to show that your body is progressing. To me, that’s way more valuable.

As a society, we’ve become obsessed with whatever number it shows on the scale. But it’s not everything. 

Best fat loss strategy: How to measure progress

To me, the hierarchy of gauging process is:

1. How do you feel? Tell me a more important metric than how you feel. I’ll wait.
2. Measurements. Real hard tangible numbers don’t lie. Especially if you’re losing inches in the places.
3. Pictures. You could weigh exactly the same but if you’ve lowered your body fat percentage, you’re gonna look drastically different because you’re leaner. Muscle takes up something like 1/3 less space than fat.
4. Non scale victories. Do you have chronic pain in your body that’s now gone because you’ve made the proper lifestyle changes? Now, you can operate your days pain free. You can’t put a dollar amount on that feeling. Or maybe you can now lift weights you never thought you could. Which is so important when it comes to having quality of life as we age. You don’t wanna end up in a nursing home because you can’t take care of yourself. Because the higher the muscle mass, the better the protection against all cause mortality. I hate to go off on this tangent. But this is why telling the aging population to stop eating meat because of this growing plant based moment is one of the worst pieces of advice you could ever give to the elderly. Because you’re taking away the highest quality and most bioavailable source of protein. I’m talking specifically about the essential amino acids. You’re taking that away from their diet. Those are hard facts that can’t be disputed. Plant protein and animal protein are not the same. Not even close. Anybody who argues otherwise does not know what they’re talking about. There’s a lot of charlatans out there.
5. Lastly, whatever number it says on the scale. It comes last in the hierarchy of measuring progress.

Are you starting to see the bigger picture here? That’s why it’s so important to have the right expectations and to think long term.

Building the proper weight loss foundation

Think about it this way. Let’s say you’re building a house. You can technically build one in a few months. But you’re probably gonna have to skip on building a proper foundation because that takes the longest. 

You gotta break ground, pour concrete, let it settle, lay out some beams, and all the other stuff that ensures a solid base for the house.

You can probably buy one from Ikea and just slap it together and call it a day. That house is probably not gonna last very long. It’s gonna fall apart sooner than later. It’s nothing but a house of cards.

But if you take the time to build the house properly. You lay out the proper foundation brick by brick. That house is gonna last you for a long time. If you take care of it and do proper maintenance, it could last you a lifetime.

It’s the exact same thing with your fat loss strategy. If your goal is to just lose weight and you don’t care about anything else, that’s super easy.

Just do cardio until you feel like your legs are about to fall off, and then do it again the next day. Then combine it with a crash diet, a juice cleans, or a tea detox. Cut your calories by 500 or 1000 calories. And, voila! Weight loss. 

You could technically cut off one of your limbs and claim that you’ve lost weight.

BUT, you’re gonna be in a bad position sooner rather than later. And it ain’t pretty. 

This is when you start fluctuating in bodyweight. And worse, to maintain whatever you’ve lost is gonna be all but impossible. You have to keep cutting calories.

I’ve had coaching clients come to my program where they’re eating 1000 calories, their hormones and metabolism are completely tanked because of it, and they’re not losing weight.

I’ve also had people previously work with a nutritionist before where they were just eating 1500 calories at 240 pounds. That’s no way to live. If that’s you right now, you should ask for your money back.

If you’re interested in joining my coaching program, you can book a free consultation HERE.

The worst part about that calorie cutting crash diet strategy is you’re most likely gonna lose muscle in the process. Which is the reverse of what we’re trying to accomplish. 

Because muscle is a very energy expensive tissue to build and maintain. 

The ugly adaptation by doing too much cardio for example is the loss of muscle mass. Cardio is catabolic.

That’s why you see a lot of runners with that all too familiar skinny fat pear shaped body look. 

Bless their heart, but if you look at the starting line of a marathon, it’s not uncommon to see overweight individuals. Which makes no sense.

These people presumably trained hundreds of hours to get ready for a 42 km race. Yet they’re still sporting excess body fat. 

If we take take the ‘eat less and move more’ strategy in the most literal definition, these marathoners should have zero body fat. 

That’s a bad return on their time investment.

The WORST fat loss strategy

And if you combine that inefficient and ineffective exercise strategy with just cutting calories, a lot of the weight you lose is muscle. 

Some studies even show that if you just cut calories, or if you cut calories and just do cardio with no resistance training which is what a lot of people do. As much as half of the weight you lose is muscle. That puts you in a bad spot long term.

That’s one of the reasons why the people that follow that strategy have a slower metabolism, their hormones are messed up, and they can’t lose weight on 1000 calories.

But if you do it properly and you don’t severely cut calories. Instead, you just focus on cutting out the ultra processed foods and replacing it with more animal protein, and I made a video about that exact strategy recently, the results are gonna be night and day. 

The BEST diet strategy

For example, ditch the fake orange juice, toast with jam, oatmeal, or cereal for breakfast. Instead, replace it with an extra egg or two if you’re already having eggs and some bacon. 

Making that switch will make you more satiated and you get to skip the blood sugar crash that’s guaranteed to happen after a couple of hours from your high sugar and seed oil laced breakfast. 

I used to work at an office and I always saw my co-workers go for their Starbucks coffee break mid-morning without fail, because they’re already crashing. They look like zombies.

But just start with that simple dietary strategy. Less ultra processed foods and more animal protein. This does not have to be complicated. 

This evens out as well in terms of your budget because you’re virtually eliminating snacking. 

Oddly enough, you almost automatically put yourself on a calorie deficit by eating that way. Because you’re eliminating most of the calorie dense but nutrient deficient foods in your diet.

According to an NIH study from 2018, if you revolve your diet around whole foods, you eat 300 calories less. There’s your daily calorie deficit to lose weight without even trying. 

If you eat these highly palatable, seed oil laced, ultra processed foods, you eat 500 calories more. That’s an 800 calorie swing right there. 

If you extrapolate that eating behaviour over time, that’ll determine whether you’re moving towards your fat loss goals or away from it.

The BEST exercise strategy

Next, combine that diet strategy with resistance training. When you do resistance training, you’re sending the strongest muscle building signal to your body. 

Because you’re eating more animal protein, you get to maximize it’s anabolic effects because you’re getting the essential amino acids to trigger muscle protein synthesis. 

That’s why 99% of plant based protein powders are garbage by the way. Because it doesn’t have a complete amino acid profile.

No, you don’t need to do resistance training every day. A couple of times a week is enough to get you benefits. So you don’t need to go to the gym every day. 

Instead, focus on increasing general every day movement. Go for regular walks. You should already know how I feel about walking if you’ve been following my channel.

You’re sending your body two signals here. You’re building and maintaining muscle while being on a slight calorie deficit.

That ultra simple strategy will make you lose all your unwanted body fat. At the same time, you get to hold on to your precious muscle. You’re gonna be a completely different looking person if you give it enough time.

But again, the hardest part about this is the mental aspect. Which brings us full circle. If you do it properly, it’s doesn’t translate to something like a crash diet or juice cleanse where you lose 10 pounds in 10 days. 

It’s more like 1-2 pounds a week if you’re measuring on the scale. And again, that’s not even the most accurate representation of your progress.

That’s why pictures and measurements is the way to go.

If you’re looking at yourself every day, it’s hard to see that big noticeable change. 

But when you can pull out weekly pictures going back to 12 weeks, let’s say. You can have this unquestionable perspective where you can really see the difference body composition-wise.

I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve heard from my coaching clients where they go to a family event. Or they have family visit for the holidays or vice versa, and I’ve been coaching them for 3 months. 

The scale hasn’t really moved a whole lot since the initial drop. Maybe they’ve only lost a few pounds the past few weeks

But then they come back from the event and they tell me how everyone was complimenting them about the way they looked. People are asking them how much weight they’ve lost even though the scale hasn’t moved much. It’s because their body composition has changed. 

I’ve also had other coaching clients comment how they haven’t lost much weight on the scale but their knee arthritis is gone that’s been bugging them for years. 

Or, they have more energy and their mood is better. That’s priceless. Oftentimes, it’s not about the weight you lose but about the life you gain.

As always, if this was helpful, share it with a friend who could benefit from it as well!

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