Man Skills: Lose fat faster and ditch the fat gut

It would not be a stretch to say the entire concept of the “fitness industry” is built upon and fully centered on fat loss.

To be conservative, 97% of the people who exercise weekly are doing it specifically to lose body fat or keep body fat off. People want to look better, and one of the easiest ways to look better is to get leaner.

This post is a summary of ideas I have recently shared with clients who are working to lose more body fat.

A few things I would like to share before I express these points. First I believe a sustainable model is more important than the fastest model. There are a number of methods which have proven to work very quickly to strip off fat, but many people find themselves getting it all back and more once they shift their eating habits away from it. I do not believe that this is particularly useful.

I will define a sustainable diet as follows: a collection of eating habits which can be continued with for any length of time which are easily employed by the subject allowing them to continue to gain lean mass and lose body fat at a healthy, reasonable rate.

Reality check for some relating to the last three words: Dropping 20-30 lbs in under 30 days is not reasonable. 99.9999% of people who are able to pull it off will gain fat back fast if they are some how forced off their pace.

Weight loss is a 24 hour a day job

Dave and I recently had a conversation about the nature of training people.

If you sell T-Shirts your primary concern is design, production quality, distribution methods, and most importantly marketing. Once the shirt is out the door your transaction is complete.

If you are in the business of fat loss, the clock is ticking 24 hours a day. Providing the client an exceptional 30-45 minute workout means NOTHING if they follow up that workout with a Big Mac and super sized Fry.

What this means to you: If you seek to cut the flab, you need to understand you are playing this game all day, everyday. Rather than touch on ideas of fairness or fantasize about “how things should be” I will just tell you that your body can take in and store enormous amounts of food, and it only burns a little bit each day. You must be aware of what you are eating everyday. Not some days, not some times, not only when you are feeling bad about slacking.

You can’t play catch up, fat loss is not laundry day

If one owns enough pairs of socks, underwear and t-shirts they can avoid the sting of laundry day for many days at a time.  One could accumulate a massive pile of clothing requiring a wash, and with 3 hours of focus make it all go away.

If one seeks to lose body fat, one day of “being at it” per 10 days will equal jack-shit.

There is a key behavior which I wish to target for this bullet.

Someone will be on a program, but something comes up and they miss several days. Maybe it was a vacation or a wedding weekend.  They wake up Tuesday and realize they have not exercised in 8 days, and their diet has been a sugar and alcohol binge over the last week.

What happens next?

Typically its a 24-36 hour frenzy of hard core workout and rigid “catch up” dieting. Which equals a net loss of 0 pounds of body fat. It also yields (in many cases) extreme soreness which costs two or three more days from the gym doing productive movement.

What to take from that: there is no catch up day.

- No short cut is as powerful as habit

We are creatures of habit.

Habits are what you have been conditioned to do.

Who conditioned you? You did, your parents did, your friends, your boss, your favorite musician, that underwear commercial, the Nike advertisement…hey who hasn’t conditioned you?

The game of fitness is basically a game of conditioning yourself to do it. That is a simplification but it is not an inaccurate over simplification.

Exercise; just do it. Find something you can do. That is the start.

Diet; find a plan that you will do. Add and subtract only that which you will stick with.

Then….just do that over and over.

There are 365 days in one year. That gives you 365 tries to get this going.

Don’t you think you can learn to do something provided 365 tries to learn it?

Now of course there are people who are offering shortcuts to fitness and fat loss. Some of them are POWERFUL too…but they are not as powerful as habit.

My challenge to you- find a way to make this a habit, not a hobby, not something you want to do, not something you are going get started on “next week”.

Hacks can’t beat PR Every Day

People now-a-days are discussing this idea of “hacking the body” and trying out a bunch of little tricks to force things to happen at a speed or degree which they normally do not happen. It’s a cleaver marketing move, and it’s cute to see people jumping all over the place trying to keep pace with the tall tales of their guru’s and their insider knowledge of the body.

• “Gain 28 lbs of rock solid muscle in 9 days with these secrets!”
• “Add over 75 lbs to your bench press in 14 days with these short cuts”

I pulled those lines directly off a “body hackers” copy page.

My view, and the view of The Movement is to follow the bodies design. We have discovered that by following the path of least resistance and working within the bodies limitations we are able to PR everyday and achieve incredible progress, sustainable progress.

Progress can be made everyday, in multiple directions.

The fact that progress is NOT linear is not something which we need to find “too slow”.

If you make progress in any direction you can, every day, things will happen.

This idea of “PR Every Day” is not just marketing, and it transcends the gym.

Tell me, what would happen if you made progress on various facets of your diet and eating habits every day?

What happens when you make progress on your stress management every day?

What happens when you are able to progress on your psychology and state management every day?

You lose more fat faster.

I see it everyday. With a huge sample of people. Young and old. Fit and fat.

- Accountability; no one to blame besides yourself

You are too fat because you eat too much.

You are too fat because you have allowed yourself to go.

You can tell yourself it’s sugars fault, or McDonald’s fault, or the Republican parties fault, or Barrack Obamas fault….but its your fault.

Getting better and losing fat will be a lot harder if you want to continue to demonize and blame everything and everyone else for your weight problems. There are many people in the world who want to help you, but they can’t do it for you.

Specific to accountability there is a great starting point: write down every single thing you put in your mouth. Fat loss expert Brad Nelson spoke on this in Grip & Rip 2.1 as one of the most important moves a person can take for sustainable weight loss. At Movement Minneapolis we have learned that keeping a food log improves results by 100%…as in 100% of the people who account for all food they eat lose fat.

Write it down, lose more. Could it be that simple?

Yes, it could.

Success and failure is decided in many ways on how you measure

In warfare, in sport, in business there is something called “conditions of victory” or simply put “how you win”

In fat loss, there are many ways you can win.

How you track and how you define success is a major part of how much success you will have.

With my clients we use 5 metrics for fat loss:

• Scale weight, which in many ways is the least useful tool
• Body fat percentage
• Measurements from head to toe with a tape measure
• Before and after photographs
• How clothing fits

Are you examining these 5 areas? All of them? If not I must encourage you to do that.

What to try next?

I want you to read this article, Man Skills How to Lose Your Fat Gut. It details a lot of things I have learned during my travels and during my person ups and downs over the years.

From there I want you to check out Grip and Rip 2.1. We are offering it right now at a 50% discount.

Next I want you to contact me if you are ready to begin my distance coaching program. In it I will teach you how to smash PRs, how to cut the fat, and how to build a diet plan for YOUR lifestyle that is 100% sustainable which will take off fat and add lean muscle, without supplements!