Wage War Against Fat

While the long term habits-based approach is great, every now and then you should have a war against fat and really give everything you’ve got for a short time so you can drop a few kilos or body fat percentage.

That’s why we regularly run 28 day Transformation Challenges and the 21 Day Detox.

They give you a short term goal to focus your attention on and allows you to get your head around cutting out sugar or alcohol or whatever for a short time.

These are things that make a massive difference towards fat loss.

Then you need to maintain that drop and those habits you’ve been implementing.

It’s all well and good to do a detox or transformation comp and drop some weight, but if you put it back on again, what have you gained?

Build healthy habits.

Wage war against fat.

Go back and build more healthy habits.

I’ve talked before about creating a ‘new normal’ regarding your eating and exercise, which is a place where your new habits create by replacing old, unsupportive habits.

You should keep striving towards this.

To make it simpler, Precision Nutrition gives us a great guideline in the following image.

If you are a man above 20% body fat or a woman above 30% body fat then you know you’re in the unhealthy range.

To move into the healthy range you need to add habits of the healthy range people including:

• exercising 3-5 times per week
• including 1-2 palms of protein dense food in 1-2 meals per day eating slowly until satisfied at 60% of your meals
• cut down desserts and processed foods
• drink fewer calories

Maybe you get into the healthy range of 15-20% body fat for men or 25-30% body fat for women and are comfortable at this point.

Great. Now you must maintain it.

But to get to the next point may be harder than expected.

It may take more time than you thought.

It may take more commitment than you can manage all the time.

Or it may require you add a little more effort for a short time while you go for it. A war.

So you decide to step it up and go for the next level of 13-15% body fat for men and 23-25% body fat for women.

• Now you eat slowly til satisfied at 75% of your meals.
• You have 1-2 palms of protein at 2-3 meals per day.
• You eat 1-2 fists of veggies at 2-3 meals per day.
• You now exercise 30-45 minutes daily with 1-2 sessions breaking a sweat.
• You get at least 7 hours sleep every night.
• You eat desserts or processed foods only 3-5 times a week, without going overboard.
• And you only drink 3-5 caloric drinks each week.

That’s quite a few new habits you need to adopt at this level.

Maybe you can do it for a short time, but can you do it for a long time?

Try changing those things for the next 21-28 days giving everything you’ve got.

After that time is over, work on adopting those habits in the long term.

It may take another 2-3 months to get those habits owned.

Or you may decide that it’s just too much commitment to put that much time and effort into looking a particular way and that lifestyle is more important.

But you know that you can do it, so when summer rolls around again, you can go for it and have another war against fat.

In summer, you are more active with more daylight and the sun to get out in, so it’s far easier to exercise more.

When it gets colder, your diet becomes even more important if you want to make progress, especially if you plan or don’t plan on training as regularly as you should.

Whatever you decide, that is your choice.

If you don’t make a decision, that is your choice.

I can talk all day about the things that you could or should do to get that Hollywood body, but if I can’t get you to make changes, then there’s no point flashing around a crazy dream.

The habits approach works. Focus most of your attention on that.

When you are ready to step it up, join one of the 21 or 28 day challenges and go for it.