30 Day Calorie Deficit Diet Transformation (Copy Me)
In this 30‑minute YouTube walkthrough, fitness coach Eric Roberts explains how he lost 12 lb in a month while preserving muscle and maintaining a sustainable lifestyle. He begins by critiquing common calorie‑deficit mistakes and introduces his own approach: a personalized calorie target of 2,600‑2,800 kcal per day paired with at least 200 g of protein, derived from a calculator in his proprietary app. He then details a typical day’s meals—high‑protein, high‑fiber breakfast; a pre‑workout protein‑shake‑cereal combo; a convenient meal‑prep post‑workout entrée; and a flexible fourth meal that can include salads, carbs, and even ice‑cream—emphasizing moderation, tracking only what matters, and avoiding over‑restriction. Eric discusses how he handled a week of holiday indulgence without quitting, urging viewers to simply return to the plan. His training protocol consists of four weekly strength‑training sessions (upper/lower split) with 5‑12 rep ranges, heavy loads, progressive overload, and adequate rest, countering the myth of “toning.” Cardio is framed as daily movement: 8,000 steps split into short walks and incidental activity, plus one weekly high‑intensity HYROX‑style session, with a warning that excessive cardio can increase hunger. He shares daily weigh‑ins, a weight‑trend graph, and before‑after photos to illustrate the physical changes, stressing the value of progress pictures. Finally, he promotes his app, online coaching program, and a companion video with “29 best cheat codes for weight loss.”
Chapters
I just got done a calorie deficit for the past 30 days and the goal to lose the fat, to keep the muscle, and not to hate my life doing it. Before I show you the results, I want to go through exactly how I did it, the mistakes that I avoided, and how I navigated the holidays and social events without ruining my progress. And first, I want to show you my exact plan that I'm following with my calories, workouts, and cardio. First, for my calories, the mistake that people make when going into their calorie deficit is they try to eat too few calories to either speed up weight loss as fast as possible, or because that's what they think they should do and they just don't know. any better. My approach to this calorie deficit was pretty much the opposite. I am using my calorie calculator that I have inside of my app that I have built. And my calorie goal is about 2,600 to 2,800 calories per day. That is what the calculator gave me. And if you want to use the same calculator that I used, you can click the link in the description below of this video. And the whole goal is eat as many calories as I can and still lose weight. Along, excuse me, with my calorie goal, I also have a protein goal of at least 200 grams of protein per day. This strategy for me personally, I wanted to go into my calorie deficit, not starving, not hungry all the time, not low energy and poor sleep and poor workout performance. I still wanted to feel good. And I thought with that higher calorie deficit approach and a higher protein approach, I would do just that. Now I want to walk you through exactly what a day of eating looks like when I have a normal day. Because trust me, they're not all normal days, which I'll talk about in a second. But I want to start with my breakfast. So I try to have a higher protein, higher fruit and veggie breakfast with lower carbs. So as you can see right here, my breakfast is typically, there we go. I have about 3 whole eggs. I have about 190 grams of egg whites. I have some Greek yogurt, raspberries, blackberries, and I have a scoop of protein to go along with that. For those of you who can't see, that is 645 calories with 81 grams of protein and 10 grams of fiber. So the thought process here is with your high protein and with your high fiber and fruits and veggies, You're starting off the day satisfied so that later in the day you don't have hunger cravings and this crazy, almost like Cookie Monster approach to when you get to 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 PM at night, which is where most people overeat. I wanted to avoid that. And I knew if I didn't get enough food during the day, I was going to be hungry at night. So that breakfast allowed me to do that. And oh, by the way, you may have not seen on here tracking, but I also have a bunch of spinach with my eggs in the morning. And I don't track that. Why? Because nobody ever got fat from eating spinach. It's one less thing I have to track, which is good for me because I don't love tracking. I don't know anybody who loves tracking. And number 2, It's also a way to get more food volume in my breakfast, which helps fill me up for not that many calories. So for you moving forward on your calorie deficit, I'm giving you permission. You don't need to track, especially the green veggies like spinach or broccoli or lettuce. It's just not worth it. If you want to track it to know your fiber intake or something, awesome, but Personally, I don't, and I think my results have been okay, which I'll show you here a bit later in the video. Now, after my breakfast, I will typically have my pre-workout meal. This is my favorite meal of the day. And as you can see right here, I have my protein shake. So I will make a protein shake with my— oh, over my other shoulder— Legion protein right there. I'll make the protein shake. I'll pour it over Rice Krispies cereal. So I basically use it as the milk for the cereal. And along with that, I will have a banana, peanut butter, and honey. And the mistake that a lot of people make when going into their calorie deficit is thinking they have to cut out all of the foods that they enjoy. I love eating Rice Krispies cereal. If I cut it out, Eric will hate his life. And I said in the beginning, my goal was to not hate my life with this. So I can work that in into a pre-workout meal. And quite frankly, it's a good pre-workout meal because it's a quick source of carbs, which will then get used for my workout that I'm about to do in the next 30 to 90 minutes, depending on my schedule. On top of that, I like peanut butter. I like the banana. I like honey. So I can use all of that to then be able to still work in my favorite foods in moderation while still hitting my protein goal because I use the protein shake as the milk for the cereal. So that is number 2. It's the second meal I normally have. Once I get home, my post-workout meal, right now I am actually using a meal prep service company. They have a bunch of different meals, whether it's pork chop or whether it's ground beef or whether it's tacos. And so for this particular day, I had a pork chop meal, which as you can see, was about 550 calories with 52 grams of protein. And I love doing that because all I have to do, put it in the microwave, heat it up for 2 minutes, eat it, and move on with my day. I'm somebody who, I run a business. I do a lot of this content every single day. So I'm quite busy. I didn't want to spend 2, 3 hours a day cooking. So this has been incredibly helpful for me personally. So that's my 3rd meal of the day. And my 4th meal of the day, I will show you right here, is typically I will have one of those pre-made salad bags, as you can see, is the top one here. Then I will have some sort of either ground chicken— I'm sorry, ground beef or chicken thigh. I'll have sweet potatoes or French fries. And if I have room, I will make a Ninja creamy ice cream. By the way, if you love ice cream and you don't have one of those, you are missing out completely. I would strongly encourage you— I'm not sponsored by them, but I would strongly encourage you to get one because they're really good. And again, I love ice cream, so I want to work in my favorite foods in moderation and ways I can work in my favorite foods but still hit my goals. So with that day of eating, that came out to about 2,700 calories for the day with about 250 grams of protein. I would say that is the majority of the time, but to be honest with you, over these 30 days, I've not been perfect. In fact, I was off of my meal plan or my calorie deficit for a full week. And let me explain why. December 19th, I took a trip. to Florida for a couple of days. And then when I got back, it was Christmas Eve and Christmas. So basically for that one week span, I was off of my diet. I was eating out. I was enjoying some good food. I still tried to be mindful. I didn't just like binge fest completely. Still tried to eat high protein, still try to get my workouts and my cardio, which we're going to cover next. But I know I wasn't on my calorie deficit. And the problem with this is when this happens to you, you normally quit because you think, oh, well, if I'm not perfect, then what's the point? I might as well just binge. I might as well just keep overeating and just restart on Monday. I didn't do that. I did the best that I could. I knew I wasn't going to be perfect, but then December 26th, I got right back on track. I didn't do a bunch of cardio to make up for it. I didn't fast for a couple of days. I didn't only eat clean. I just, just got back to what I just showed you. That's it. That's all I did. And I think my results have been pretty good thus far, which I'll show you in a second. But the next time this happens to you and you don't be perfect with your diet, please stop quitting. Just get back on track because if you do, you're going to be able to see the results that I have seen thus far as well, which is exactly what I want for you. Now, right before I show you the results, let's continue to talk about my plan with workouts and cardio. And the problem, the mistake that most people make when going on a calorie deficit is they think this concept of, I'm going to lift lightweight for high reps to tone the muscle. I got to start doing more cardio, shorter rest times in my workouts. I got to stop lifting heavy. Wrong. Could not be farther from the truth. Toning a muscle doesn't exist. You either just build muscle and you lose fat. The toned look that you're going for is when you have enough muscle mass built up, and then you lose the body fat to be able to then show the lean muscle that you have. It's just, you can't tone. There's no special workout to tone a muscle. And by the way, if anybody tells you that, they're lying to you solely to get your money. So please don't listen to them. So that's why for my workouts, I was still focused on trying to build muscle, even if in a calorie deficit. As an advanced lifter, I might not build that much muscle. I'm still trying to keep as much muscle. Now, if you're a beginner or even intermediate, you can still build muscle. So don't worry about that. You can build muscle in a calorie deficit. So I did 4 days a week of strength training. I followed a lower body, upper body, lower body, upper body workout split. All 4 of those days were different workouts. So I didn't do the same workouts or the same exercises. All 4 of those have been different workouts over the week. And within those, on my lower body days, I typically do 4 to 6 exercises. On my upper body days, I'll do 6 to 10 exercises. For each exercise, I'll do 2 to 3 sets within the 5 to 12 rep range. And I'm trying each set to lift heavy, push myself, go close to failure, because again, we're still trying to build muscle and have the intensity. And after the set, I will rest for at least 90 seconds up to 180 seconds. And with this style of training and with my calorie intake, I've still been able to keep my strength. Progressively overload, which if you don't know what that means, means you're either adding reps or you're adding more weight to what you lifted last week. And that is the whole goal of what we do in our workouts, what we should try to do in our workouts, because that means you're building muscle, you're getting stronger, and you're going to see your physique change. And again, because I didn't go too low in my calories, I've still been able to have Good workout performance and good energy for my workouts, which if you remember at the beginning of the video, that's exactly what I have wanted to do from the start. So I've been really happy on where my workouts have been. And if you're like, Eric, I just have no clue what to do with my workouts. Well, I have my own app where it tells you exactly what to do with your workouts. I'm pulling it up right now. It'll show you all the videos. It has all the sets, all the reps, all the exercises. You can track your workouts right in there. Everything is inside. So if you want to learn more about that, you can click the link in the description below to learn more. Now, I have my workouts covered pretty good, but maybe the most important part of this is my cardio. And the mistake that a lot of people make when going into their calorie deficit, as we talked about earlier, is trying to overdo it on cardio because you think that's going to be the best way to lose fat. Cardio is a great tool, but let me explain how you should use this tool. You may have heard before, when you go into a calorie deficit, your metabolism slightly slows down. And by the way, this is true. Your metabolism does slow down when you go into a calorie deficit. Why? Think of your body like a thermostat. When you start intaking less calories than what you are burning, Your body likes to maintain something called homeostasis, which means just stay the same. Doesn't want to lose weight, doesn't want to gain weight, just wants to stay the same. So your body says, well, shit, we have less calories coming in, which means we need to burn less calories to adapt to that. Now, the most important thing you can try to do in a calorie deficit because you want to lose weight is keep your metabolism high, keep your calorie burn high. How do you do that? Your daily steps take up 15% of your total daily calorie burn. By the way, your workouts only take up like 5% of your daily calorie burn. So if you're trying to keep your metabolism high, it would behoove you— that's a good word, you like that— to set and keep a daily step goal. My daily step goal for my calorie deficit thus far, I can show you because my app tracks my daily steps every single day, has been 8,000 steps per day. As you can see, voilà, right here. Now there's some red there, so I've been like just under. It was like 200 steps under, so don't, don't come at me for that. But more or less, and also I don't wear a watch, I only wear my phone, so I'm trying to like Trying to justify why I'm under my step goal, but that's why. I know I hit it. I'm good. But 8,000 steps per day. And the way that I like to approach this is I don't take one long walk per day. I don't have the time for that. I don't want to do that. So what I do is I'll take a 15 to 20 minute walk in the morning. I'll usually take a 15 to 20 minute walk midday. And then by the nighttime, I hate going outside because it's cold and it's dark and it just makes me mad. So what I'll normally do is just like pace around the middle floor of my house, getting in some extra steps, like maybe while I'm cooking dinner or while I'm like on my phone answering Instagram DMs or replying to YouTube comments. I will try to finish up my steps like that, and that has worked really well for For me personally. Now, if you want to, you know, go for a 2-hour walk to hit your steps, kudos to you. That wouldn't work for me, and for most people that doesn't work. And remember, when we talk about daily steps, it's not just like a dedicated walk. This could be choosing the stairs instead of the escalator. This could be parking farther away at work. This could be walking while you're on phone calls, cleaning your house. Any movement counts because remember, your body is trying to slow down your metabolism. The more you move in any capacity, the higher your metabolism stays. So that's what you should be focusing on as your main form of cardio. And it's quite important that you do that, especially for those of us who sit at a desk all day. That's the first part of my cardio. The second part of my cardio is I do one dedicated cardio day per week because I have signed up for a HYROX race in April. So I have to make sure I am somewhat training for that. I can't just go into it without training at all. So typically one day a week I will do my HYROX, excuse me, style training. Now, what does this look like? As an example, yesterday's workout was I did an 800-meter run. And then an 800-meter rower, 800-meter SkiErg, and 30 wall balls. I did 3 rounds of that total. Took me about 45 minutes to an hour, somewhere around there. And that was a dedicated cardio day for me. I'll do that 1 day per week. And yes, I still try to hit— I don't try, I still hit my daily steps that day, even though I do the extra cardio that day. Now, I'll be honest with you, I only do this one day a week because it makes me fucking starving. When you do higher intensity cardio where your heart rate gets elevated, this tends to increase your appetite, your cravings, and your cortisol, which all lead to you being hungrier and then making it harder to stick to your calorie deficit. Thus overeating and not losing weight. Because remember, you can never outrun a bad diet. Doesn't matter how much cardio you do. If you go and overeat, you're never going to end up sticking with your calorie deficit. So I cap this to 1 day per week. And truthfully, that's what I would encourage you to do as well. Make the majority of your exercise lifting and daily steps, maybe 1 day a week of higher intensity cardio if you enjoy it. And then let your nutrition take care of your fat loss. Now, now that you know everything I'm doing, let's go ahead and talk about the results. I started this calorie deficit at 254 pounds, and I can tell you that because I've weighed in every single day on my calorie deficit. So this is December 1st, 254.6 pounds. Now, I want you to keep in mind, There was a week where I didn't hit my calorie deficit. I had to get back on track. I had to make sure I was still doing all my things, right? That being said, even with a week of me basically being off of my calorie deficit, I want to show you my weigh-in today. Are you ready? Awesome. My weigh-in today was 242.7 pounds. That would mean that is 12 pounds in 30 days while not being 100% perfect. Now, before you're like, wow, that's crazy. Oh my God, you must have just been losing a bunch of weight. Hold on. I want to show you something as well. As you'll see inside of my Clubhouse app, here's my weight for the month of December. Now, yes, I have lost 12 pounds in a month, But do you see how the weight trend, it's not just one straight line down? Look again at this graph. There are times when my weight spiked up. There was a time over that Christmas period where my weight kind of stalled out. But because I didn't quit and because I just stuck with it and got back on track, the overall trend is trending down. And now, as you can see, I have hit a new low on the scale in the month of January because I just kept going. And that's the mistake that you probably make when you have a week that's off track, or you have a couple of days where your weight doesn't go down, or a day when your weight spikes up. You think, oh, well, this isn't working. It's not going fast enough. Like, I'm not going to see progress. You probably heard that I lost 12 pounds In a month, you're like, wow, that's really fast. And you look at that graph and it's like, well, wait a minute. He had days where he had a whole week where he didn't lose weight. Yeah, that goes to show if you just stick with it and stay consistent, you're going to see progress too. It's just most people don't do that. They quit when the weight spikes. They quit when the weight stalls out. If you just stop doing that heading into 2026, I promise you're going to see great progress. And not only Have I lost 12 pounds on the scale? But I want to show you my starting progress pictures to my current progress pictures. Now you can look here and see these. So the left, I think, right? The left for you, maybe right for you. Left is when I started, right is when I am here now. And you can tell like my stomach is a little bit leaner. My shoulders, my arms are getting a little bit leaner. My midsection's leaner. My stomach is closer into my body. And also you can tell from kind of this picture here that my stomach is closer into my body. My arms are starting to get more defined. My stomach is more defined. And I think you can really tell from this back picture as well. You see like underneath of my back, kind of like my waist and my love handle area, that is starting to go away as well. And this is the importance of taking progress pictures because Losing 12 pounds is one thing, but actually seeing these physical changes in your body is a whole nother thing, which is why inside of our coaching, we always have our clients take progress pictures every 4 weeks so they can put those side by side and they can see, okay, cool, maybe I've lost 4 pounds, I've lost 8 pounds, I've lost 2 pounds, but man, my progress pictures look way different. And that's what I would encourage you to do as well, because you want to be able to visually see the progress. When you look in the mirror and you see yourself every single day, you're not going to notice a ton of change. But when you put your progress pictures side by side, that's when you'll be able to notice, oh shit, my stomach is looking like this, my love handles are getting a little bit lower, I can tell my face is leaning out and kind of slimming down a bit more. So take those progress pictures and remember, please just stay consistent. A lot of you will watch this in the month of January. Who knows? Maybe you're watching this in August of 2027. Who knows? But most of you will watch this in January and you want to change your body. The only way you're going to do that is by sticking with it. You can follow the exact same plan that I laid out here in this video. And speaking of, usually the hardest part is not like having a plan. A lot of people can know their calories or know they should work out, but it's consistently sticking with it. And if you want some help consistently sticking with your diet, your workouts, and staying on track, that's exactly what we do in our online coaching program. We coach thousands of people every single month. So if you want to learn more about my online coaching, you can click the link in the description below of this video, and it'll tell you some more information about how you potentially work with myself and my team. And after you do that, if you want to have my 29 best cheat codes for weight loss, you can watch this video here.
