Transcription
When I first tried to lose body fat, there was a lot nobody told me upfront. I thought eating healthy, hitting the gym, and doing cardio was the secret. But after finally getting six-pack lean, and helping hundreds of men share their experiences on the dad board, there's a lot I wish I knew before I even started. So, I'll give you everything that I learned the hard way that could save you months or even years of frustration.
And let's start with the first one because almost nobody talks about this: I wish someone told me that we don't get to choose where the body fat comes off. Even when the face, the arms, the neck, and the chest can start looking leaner, you might still feel like you have a gut for a much longer period of time. And that's because usually the belly and the love handles can be the last spot to drop off. And it's not stubborn body fat. It's just a sequence that our body follows, meaning that most of the fat we store is around this midsection area. So, it can feel like it's stubborn, but really, it's just about being in the game for a longer period of time. So, just stay patient.
Because this next lesson I learned kept me stuck for much longer than I wanted to be: burning more calories on your fitness tracker doesn't mean you can eat whatever you want. Your Apple Watch might say that you've burnt 600 calories, but that is not equal to 600 calories of food. Because food calories are measured differently. They're measured in a lab by heat energy from burning the food. Workout trackers just estimate based on your heart rate and your daily movement, and they're usually somewhere between 20 to 40% in variance from device to device compared to food calories. So I stopped trying to earn my food by doing activity and instead just monitored my calorie burn and then treated my food calories as separate from my calorie burn. And it's this gap between what I burned and what I ate which determines if I am maintaining, if I'm gaining, or if I'm losing body fat. And doing it this way just made everything a lot more simpler for me to manage with a busy schedule. And I could sustain being in a fat loss mode for a much longer period of time, which enabled me to get below 15%, below 12%, and eventually below 10% body fat all the way to 6% body fat, which I would never recommend to anyone. But from that point, I was able to successfully and safely reverse back up to about 11 to 13%, which I maintain now year-round. And it's very easy and simple to maintain following all these lessons that I'm sharing with you.
So speaking of numbers you shouldn't blindly trust, I'll share with you this next lesson that, again, nobody told me about, which is important to know: BMI doesn't know the difference between fat and muscle. It just uses your height and your weight. So guys who build muscle can end up with a higher BMI even while sitting at a leaner, healthy body fat percentage. And smart scales just send electrical currents through your body which kind of guesstimate what your body fat is amongst other metrics which aren't super accurate. So even changes in your hydration, in your food, or the time of day can throw off these numbers by 5 or 10%, potentially even more. I remember being clearly visibly leaner and stronger. Yet, the scale was telling me that I had dropped muscle. And that's because I could have just dropped a kilo or a couple of pounds due to going to the bathroom or, you know, dehydration, sweating a lot based on the weather, not drinking enough water. It could have been a bunch of different reasons. But whenever I dropped weight, the scale was saying I dropped muscle, which just didn't make sense because visibly I was looking bigger and I was getting stronger in the gym. So, I stopped obsessing over the scale data and instead I focused on these things: taking progress photos every two, three, or worst-case four weeks; improving my numbers in the gym in every single workout I did; and measuring my waist, my chest, my right arm, and my right thigh. And also just how my clothes fit and getting feedback from people on how I was looking, if they were seeing changes, because we see ourselves in the mirror every day, and we can look the same even though we have changed. This is the data that actually matters that will show you the changes even if you can't see them.
And if you are stressing about the fluctuations on the scale that can happen day-to-day or week to week, this next lesson will explain why they can happen and will happen to everyone and why it's not always your fault. You can train hard, you can eat perfectly, do cardio, and still wake up heavier the next day. Most of the time, it's just water, food, or waste that is still in your system that has accumulated for a period of time. Could be high sodium, more carbs, poor sleep, even a tough workout causing inflammation and water retention in the body, muscle damage, sunburn. And here's the thing: when you eat carbs, for every 1 g of glycogen that you get from carbohydrates that gets stored in the muscles temporarily, your body is going to hold an extra 3 to 4 grams of water along with that gram of glycogen. So, if you reintroduce carbs and/or salt after cutting them out for a period of time, boom, the scale can just jack up overnight. And this is a big shock to a lot of people who think they're doing everything right and the scale goes bang and they think, "Ah, I'm just not cut out for this, or there's some genetic problem, or my metabolism is too slow." No, it could just be that there's a fluctuation in different substances within your body. And it's not fat gain. That's the most important point. Yet, many guys still panic and feel disappointed and frustrated because the scale keeps bouncing. But you got to zoom out and see the longer-term trend because it's totally normal that you can, you know, start up here in your weight and it's going to drop down and spike up and then it'll drop lower, spike up again, drop lower, and it's this zigzagging downward pattern that we're looking for. It is never a straight line. So instead, here's what you can focus on: weighing yourself daily, but only really paying attention to the weekly average trends because from Monday to Sunday, a lot can change; comparing your week to week and month to month and not getting caught up in the day-to-day fluctuations. This way, you will stay on track for much longer and you will care less about the little bumps along the way that are going to happen to everybody.
And you're going to need this shift in your mindset, especially for this next lesson that I'm about to share: Once you start getting leaner, people are going to notice, but not everyone is going to like it. At first, they will cheer you on. "Hey man, you're looking good. Are you on a diet? Have you been hitting the gym?" But eventually, it might shift to, "Oh, come on, man. Just one more beer won't hurt." Or, "You got to let your hair down and live a little. You're looking too thin. You're looking sick. You're looking gaunt. You train too much. You're becoming obsessed." And it's friends, it's family, it's colleagues, people that you love and respect and want to care for who may unintentionally try to pull you down or pull you back because your progression is exposing their lack of effort or discipline in their own routine. And unfortunately, it just makes a lot of people uncomfortable when they see someone who's gone from being overweight for many years to looking really fit and healthy. They think, "Oh, why aren't I doing this? There must be something special. There's something wrong with me," blah blah blah blah blah. And then this plays out in comments and criticism that we don't always want to hear. I'm not saying you need to cut people out or ignore everyone. That's not the way either. It just means you need to have this quiet inner strength and trust and faith in yourself to stick to the goal that you have set for yourself. And this usually includes setting clear boundaries, making choices without preaching to other people, like just quietly minding your own business, sticking to your own diet and not imposing it on others, and letting your physical results do the talking and not trying to convince everyone that what you're doing is right or it's better than such and so's or this this diet's wrong. Like just dip it and stick to your lane and let the physical results do the talking.
So ultimately, staying lean, first of all, getting lean and then staying lean means you're going to have to put up with some social discomfort here and there, but it's really nothing. Like it it just comes and it goes. Everyone forgets about it. I mean, no one remembers what Trump did last week. They're eating the dog. So, who's going to care about you getting a six-pack, right? No one's going to remember. But it can hurt in the moment. But if you cave in every time someone offers you some chips or a cookie or a beer or an extra slice of pizza or the kids' leftovers, that is going to take you out of a deficit. You're going to stop losing body fat and you'll never get to 15% body fat or below. And that's going to frustrate you and haunt you forever. So, better just to stick to your own lane and do what you need to do regardless of what anyone else says.
And that's why this next lesson was really important because it helped me make staying lean feel automatic. You've probably heard, "Just get 10,000 steps per day and you'll be healthy and live an extra 100 years of your life," or whatever some other crap is. But not all steps are equal. You know, a slow putter around the house for 10,000 steps is going to burn less than someone who is, you know, power walking or potentially slow jogging to get those 10,000 steps. And standing up often, taking the stairs, avoiding the escalators, parking further away, you know, taking the dog for a walk—the 10,000 steps from that person is going to burn more calories. This is where people get confused because they hit 10,000 steps and they think, "Well, I've done all my steps for the day. Why aren't I losing body fat?" And it's because your steps are kind of like a proxy for your total daily movement, energy burn from midnight to midnight. So what really matters is your total daily calorie burn from midnight to midnight. That includes sleeping, waking up, everything you're doing throughout the day and then going to bed and sleeping till midnight. That total burn is the most important thing, not just your steps. And this includes your resting metabolism, also known as your BMR, basal metabolic rate. This includes your NEAT, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis, which just means all the movements that you're doing that is not a deliberate workout. This includes the burn that you are doing within a workout and to a smaller degree the food you eat. Because if you eat foods that are higher in protein that are natural ingredients that are not touched by a machine, the body has to work a little bit harder to digest them. So, you're kind of getting a little bit of a discount on the food you eat, but that's not a major point. So, this is why I recommend using a fitness tracker like an Oura Ring or an Apple Watch or a Fitbit. They all pretty much do the same thing, but making sure it shows you your total daily calorie burn, not just active calories or exercise calories. We want the total, the full day. So, this means you have to wear it to bed. If it bothers you during sleep, well, you will get used to it. If there's flashing lights or that and you can turn them off or cover it with a bit of sticky tape, or if it's vibrating, turn it off. Turn off notifications. Like this is why I love the Oura ring because it does nothing. Um, there is a little light in there, but I never see it when I'm asleep cuz my hand is in the bed, not up to my eyeball. So, you do have to wear it to get your full total daily calorie burn. At least do it for like a couple of weeks or a month. If you can't stand wearing it to bed, because at least you you have a trend line and you'll know, well, if I do this much movement from from waking up to going to bed and it's consistent, then that number should be consistent even if you don't wear your fitness tracker to bed. And the fact is, I often hit my calorie burn goal with less steps than what I thought I had to hit because the steps that I did were intense enough to get my my calorie burn target to where it needs to be for the day. Even if that's less than 10,000. And this is how I stay lean because I know what this target is. And as long as I hit this calorie burn target based on the food that I normally eat, I'm I'm okay. I'm all good. I enjoy what I eat. It's enough food. My workouts are performing well enough. And then I burn this amount of calories. I stay lean. And it's maintaining this calorie burn while keeping your nutrition in check that's going to gradually burn off more and more and more body fat and belly fat over the long term. And it's all just kind of happening in the background while you're living your life. You know, you're eating food, doing your work, spending time with family, you know, sports, fun, whatever it is. And this is just happening as part of your routine.
And speaking of routine, workouts are an important part of that. And this next lesson explains why lifting weights alone isn't going to get you lean. So working out with weights or heavier weights is definitely powerful and I highly recommend it, but it is not a magic fat burner that most people think it is. You know, a tough 45-minute strength session might burn somewhere between 150 to 300 calories maximum. That's like one muffin or two cookies. So if your goal is fat loss, workouts alone aren't going to cut it because lifting in a gym for, you know, 30, 45, even 60 minutes doesn't burn a lot of calories in that one moment. However, doing this over time, you're going to elevate your muscle mass, which increases your BMR and to a degree kind of like raises your metabolic engine. And this is crucial because when you're maintaining your muscle while in a fat loss phase, your body is going to look more firm, more defined, and more athletic overall instead of just shrinking along with the body fat and ending up looking like skinny fat with, you know, when guys have skinny arms, skinny legs, a kind of flat chest, maybe even a jawline, but then they're still carrying this like pot belly there. And that's because their muscle-to-fat ratio just isn't optimized. So, this is why I coach all my clients—from my own experience being a personal trainer in the gym for many years and then doing coaching men online for the last eight years—all of their workout programs are designed to stimulate more strength and muscle week after week while they're losing body fat. And losing the body fat is driven by having a realistic and sustainable smart nutrition strategy that is flexible to adapt to life. So we can still enjoy dinners with the family, business lunches, networking drinks if it's required, or travel to different locations and destinations, which a lot of my clients have to do every single month. So if you're lifting like four or five times a week, but you're not getting leaner, then the issue is not the actual workouts that you're doing, it's everything around the workouts. And personally, once I reduced the workouts I was doing, cuz at one point it was like five to six a week. Once I reduced that back to like three or four, more streamlined, efficient workouts, I made much more progress with more energy, better recovery. I was in a better mood, and my body didn't feel beat up and burnt out all the time.
And ironically, the leaner you get, the better you're going to look. And I'm going to explain why in this next lesson: So, when I got leaner, down to like 12% and below, I was actually lighter than ever. But people said I looked bigger. And that's because when body fat drops, your muscle definition starts to pop. So, even a moderate muscle mass can look impressive with a tight waist because it creates that V-taper look. You don't have to be a bodybuilder. You just need to keep the muscle you have or slightly increase it while you're shedding off this body fat over a realistic period of time. And that's because our body fat basically hides our muscle. It like fills the the gaps between all the creases and the points of where our muscles connect and overlap. So, when that belly fat shrinks, it reveals more detail. And so when you break under 15%, you're at a point now where there's a lot less body fat covering your muscle and your whole physique just starts to change in a way that you didn't even think was probably possible or hasn't been possible for maybe 10 or 20 years from when you were, you know, in college or doing sports or doing some professional something athlete-level stuff.
And this leads us to the next lesson because for years I thought that, you know, just eating healthy meals was enough and that would do the trick. But it didn't. I've tried eating super clean every single day, you know, chicken, avocado, oats, smoothies, all clean meals, all natural, direct from the supermarket. But I still stayed stuck because I just assumed that it's healthy and healthy food would never make me fat. What I didn't realize is you can eat 1,000 plus healthy calories without even noticing. For example, a handful of nuts could be 200 calories and you feel like you've eaten barely nothing. An extra tablespoon of olive oil, either in a salad or on meats or in a seasoning or just from sauce, could be an extra 120 calories. A smoothie with banana and oats and peanut butter and coconut flakes and chia seeds could easily be 500, 600, maybe even 700 calories if you're not paying attention to what's going in it. So, what finally made the difference for me was consistently hitting the right portions of food in every meal that I ate for a long enough period of time to keep my body burning more fat while optimizing my meals to include the most amount of food. And to help me do that, I was basically just like using my my phone to pre-track my meals, guesstimate numbers, and these days, you can even use ChatGPT or AI. You just say, "Hey, ChatGPT, here's what I want to eat: one slice of this, one slice of that, you know, tablespoon of this, blah blah blah blah," and then you press submit and it'll give you an approximation on how many calories is in that meal so that you don't have to sit there and work it out manually. Probably saves you like 2 minutes. It's not a big deal, but every minute counts if we want to just find out what the data is and keep on track with our diet. And doing this for long enough, like at least for a month, I became very accurate with what I was eating. And you know, people would say to me, "Oh, I have some. It's just a little bit." And my brain would go, "Eh, no, it's not. It's like 200 calories. You want me to have just a little bit? Yeah, sure." And I've heard people say really silly things like, "Oh, the data and the numbers doesn't fix bad habits." Well, obviously not. A number on a screen doesn't do anything. It just shows you what amount of calories is in in a certain particular type of meal or food. But it's knowing the facts, knowing the truth of what you're going to eat or have eaten that helped me build better habits cuz I was making informed decisions based on the truth, not what I thought was true. "Oh, healthy food won't make me fat." Well, the scale says otherwise. So yes, the data alone won't change you, but it's using the data in a sophisticated and intelligent way that got me leaner and still allows me to go and eat out, to have a Thai curry, to have a Vietnamese soup, or to go to my favorite Greek restaurant or my Japanese place I love to go to. So it gives me the freedom because I know what I can get away with and what I can't get away with. I'm not stressing. I'm just making informed decisions based on data. And there is not one day I will not enjoy some dark chocolate because it's too delicious to not have dark chocolate. And doing all this means I can hit my targets without hitting my emotions.
And when I finally got lean, something surprising happened that nobody warned me about: When I first got six-pack lean, I felt cold, a bit more bony than usual, and my clothes felt
Very loose. I even questioned if I went too far because I was used to having more body fat.
So, here's the thing. Once you drop below 13% body fat, things will start to change that you probably may not be used to. You're going to feel colder, especially during winter. The hunger cues will hit harder if you haven't planned ahead. Especially if you are deliberately eating in a deficit to lose body fat. You're going to feel hungrier a little bit more than someone who's eating a lot of food and is obese. That's obvious. And people will start saying things like, "You look too skinny." Or, "You need to eat more food." Even when you're clearly in great shape and you're feeling good.
But here's the thing. After a few weeks of, you know, getting below 13, 12, 11% body fat, you will adapt. Your energy will come back. Everything will start to feel normal. Your appetite and all that will just, you know, adjust itself if you're eating the right amount of food. You'll still be able to focus and then suddenly being lean just becomes naturally what you look like and who you are. And that's a really important point because you don't want it to feel like some, you know, "I'm just getting lean for a little bit of time so I can rebound back and gain all this weight." That'll be a complete waste of time. So once you do get lean and you acclimatize and you adjust and it starts to feel normal, that's when you can transition into a maintenance phase. And that means you get to eat more food and that's going to fuel your workouts better, help you get a little bit stronger, build more muscle, and because you can eat a little bit more food, your body's going to have more energy. So, you naturally just want to move more and do more things because you're not restricting your diet to lose body fat. Yet, losing body fat is done. You can focus on now shaping your physique, optimizing the food you eat, and just feeling good all the time. This is the best part. That was my favorite part of getting to that super low body fat and then maintaining and and rebuilding, reversing up to about 11 to 13% and just staying in that range all the time.
So, if you are on the path to seeing visible abs, this next lesson is one that most guys miss until it's almost too late. When I set out to get ripped, I had a number in mind like, you know, "I probably need to lose 5 or 6 kilos, which is about 10 to 12 lb." But I was wrong. I had to lose nearly double that to see my abs clearly. Most guys underestimate just how much fat is actually covering their body and particularly their belly. So even after losing like 10 lbs, they still don't look as lean as what they expected. And that's when the doubt starts to kick in. The motivation drops and the disappointment because you thought, "If I just lose 10 lb that's all I need." But it really could be like 20 to get lean enough to look how you want to feel. For example, if you're at 200 lb at 25% body fat and you want to get to 15% body fat, that's a 10% drop. So, most people assume, "I just need to lose 20 lb." But if you do the numbers on this using my body fat goal calculator, which is inside my business body blueprint link in description, um, it's actually a minimum of 23.5 lb of fat. And that doesn't include the water weight and the food weight because most guys quickly drop five pounds just from cutting out carbs, eating cleaner, and reducing inflammation from the food they're eating and just, you know, sleeping better, moving more. So, that's not fat. That extra 5 or 10 pounds that drops off first and fast. And worse, if your training and your diet are not dialed in, you'll also be losing muscle, which makes it even harder to get truly lean. Because losing muscle means you're also losing weight, but you're not losing fat. Because if you're losing muscle, that's muscle weight, not fat weight. So, in that case, the real number could be like 30 lbs to get as lean as what you think and actually see visible abs.
Also, a big important part is on your height. So, people who are like 5'11", 6' plus, they're going to get leaner much quicker because their body is longer, taller, the body fat is spread out across their entire body versus someone who's shorter, you know, around my height or below. We typically have to lose a little bit more fat to see that same level of definition because our limbs are shorter. So our fat kind of grows more outwards than than in length, if that makes sense. So this is again why I stopped fixating on my weight and tracked how my physique was changing, which we've talked about already. The mirror will ultimately become your best friend along with photos.
And just like having to lose more body fat than what I expected and what most men expect, the time frame was also longer than I expected. I thought it would take 12 weeks, but really it took like 18 to 24, done properly without rushing, without starving myself, and while still living a normal life. So, if you're really busy like most of my clients are who have a business or a full-time professional career with kids and a wife and investments and trips and travel and events, conferences, and all the stuff that, you know, all the the modern men do these days, it's going to be much more realistic for you to stick to half a kilo of fat loss, which is about one pound per week, than trying to outdo that and do it even quicker. Every time I see someone say, "I want to lose a kilo or two pounds of fat every single week," they might do it for one or two weeks and then they stall because it was too hard and then they have to get back in the rhythm to bring it to that half a kilo, one pound per week, which is much more sustainable if you would have just done it from week one.
And speaking of time frames, this last lesson saved me from experiencing constant frustration in my journey to getting ripped. If I could go back and save myself years of confusion, I would stop listening to everyone who looked the same year after year. Random guys in the gym, influencers pushing trashy supplements on social media, co-workers giving tips while ordering McDonald's, someone who heard a little piece of advice on a podcast yet never did it themselves. Most advice is either too extreme or it's too generic and doesn't relate to you. So, it can be flat-out wrong for most people. It's the stuff like, "You got to eat five times a day to build muscle." "You got to train six days a week like Annie." "You need to drink one liter of milk post-workout." "Peanut butter bulks you up." "Take two scoops of pre-workout every day." "Carbs will make you fat." "Wake up at 2:00 a.m. to drink a protein shake." "Do fasted cardio every morning." And this list of [ __ ] just goes on and on and on and on and all sounds correct, but it doesn't mean that it's going to be right for you. And a lot of that did not work for me. It just made things harder because when I tried to follow like 10 pieces of different advice all at the same time, I was second-guessing everything I was doing, I wasn't committed or convicted in what I was doing. And I was like playing hopscotch between doing this and doing that and doing and trying to like have this bolt-on package of what I think would going to was going to work. Yet, I'd never actually achieved the result. So, I wasted months and I wasted years just never actually changing my physique thinking that I knew better because I was arrogant. So, don't be arrogant. Just do what works based on the person who has the body and the physique and the lifestyle that is what you want to achieve. Not from the person who lives and looks how you don't want to.
And so when I finally got lean with more muscle, it's when I did this: I filtered out like 99% of all the noise and the [ __ ] I focused on exactly what works for me using data to confirm that based on getting enough repetitions and the results I was getting. And I only listened to people who had actually done exactly what I wanted to achieve and stayed lean beyond it. Not people who had lost 100 pounds and regained 85. I mean people who had completely changed and now they had become that person. That is when progress became consistent and sustainable. So if you have been struggling to lose fat or even stay lean or just figure out what the hell actually is going to work for you, you don't need another hack. You don't need another shortcut. You just need a system that is built for men like you with real responsibilities, no time to waste, and still want to live a enjoyable lifestyle and enjoy the food they eat without sacrificing everything just to try and get ripped. And that is why I built my business body blueprint routine, which is the exact framework that I used for the last decade. And I coach my clients through and customize it for them with just two or three strength workouts per week, even from home, eating flexible meals depending on their schedule or if they got date night or a birthday or a trip or a business lunch. Like we factor all these things in and we drive the results using BOF feedback data that we prove ourselves so we know exactly what works. So all my frameworks, my templates, my systems and the full step-by-step routine to get you lean without feeling starved or burning yourself out in the gym every day. It's all available in the routine. Tap the link just below this video to get more information. Doesn't hurt to take a look. And if you are still stuck above 20% body fat, go watch this video next to see exactly what I would do if I had to get to 15% body fat again and exactly where I would start. This is going to show you everything I would do right.