In this instructional video, fitness coach Eric Roberts presents four controversial habits he claims accelerate fat loss, backed by anecdotes from his 25,000+ clients. The first habit flips traditional calorie tracking: log every food item in a tracking app before eating so you can adjust portions or swaps in real time, preventing accidental over‑consumption. The second habit tackles cravings by recommending a cold, carbonated, caffeinated (diet) drink, which fills the stomach, suppresses appetite via caffeine, and provides a distraction, allowing the craving wave to subside. The third habit re‑thinks workout warm‑ups: discard lengthy static stretching/foam‑rolling routines and instead perform 2‑3 light warm‑up sets of the upcoming lift, then add 10‑minute low‑intensity treadmill walks before and after each session to burn extra calories and aid recovery. The fourth habit distinguishes “treats” from “trigger” foods; rather than eliminating all indulgences, temporarily remove foods that consistently cause loss of control for 60‑90 days, then re‑introduce them once moderation skills are built. Throughout, Roberts cites client successes (Natalie, Zion), offers a free calorie‑deficit calculator in the description, promotes his 8‑week fat‑loss challenge, and cross‑links to a video on expected belly‑fat loss timelines.
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You will lose fat faster if you do these 4 controversial habits. And even though some people may disagree, I've seen them work for over 25,000 clients, myself included. And if you give me a chance to explain all 4, this might be one of the most helpful videos you watch this year. The first habit is the one that almost everybody gets backwards, And it takes 10 seconds to fix. If you're somebody who's tracking your calories, what do you normally do? You normally eat the food and then you go into your calorie tracking app and you track the food. Except in my opinion, this is the wrong way to track your food. Because why are we tracking the food in the first place? We want to make sure we're hitting our calorie deficit. But if you track the food after you already ate it, there's nothing you can do about it. And now you realize you went over in calories, you ate too many calories for lunch, and now you don't have enough left for dinner. You feel guilty, you feel like you're gonna ruin all your progress, the day is already screwed. Think about how you spend money. Tracking your food after you eat it is like saying, I'm gonna stick to my budget, after you've already spent all of your money. Whereas tracking Tracking your food before you eat it is like looking at the price tag before you actually purchase it. We have a client named Natalie. She lost 10 pounds in her first 8 weeks, and this is exactly what she does. She doesn't track the food she eats. She eats the food that she tracks. So she will put everything into her calorie tracking app first. Because then you can see how many calories you're about to consume, and then you can either decide the calories may not be worth it, you can decide to have a smaller portion size, you can decide to swap out certain foods. Also, you have more control over hitting your calorie goal. This helps you start eating with a purpose. You will automatically become more consistent, and you won't waste any more time going over your calories, Or ruining your diet. So for the next 3 days, track everything before you eat it. And trust me, you'll make more progress than you ever have before. And by the way, if you need to know what your calorie deficit number should be, I have a free calorie calculator in the description of this video. It's the same one that I use with our online coaching clients. You can use it for free. So that habit fixed the math in the kitchen before you eat, but the next habit fixes the thing that makes you cave in the first place. And it's also something that people have told you is bad for you. Here's the moment that wrecks most people's diets. It's 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon, or maybe it's a little bit later after dinner, and you're not actually starving, but you just want something to eat. And that craving gets so loud, you start bargaining with yourself. You tell yourself, I'll just have a little something of this, a little handful of that. And then 10 minutes later, you've consumed 700 extra calories of random snacks, and you've completely blown your deficit out of the water. But here's what nobody tells you about cravings and hunger. You don't have to kill that craving. You just have to outlast it. Hunger isn't a steady line that stays on until you feed it, often it comes in waves. So it rises, it peaks, and if you don't give in, that craving will actually go down on its own. The problem is it's hard not to give in as it's rising and at the peak. This is where people eat the 700 calories of snacks. Think of this like a wave at the beach. When a wave is coming towards you, You just have to find a way to stay on your feet until it passes. And the one habit that can help you stay on your feet is having a cold carbonated caffeinated drink. The carbonation in these drinks will literally fill up your stomach, which makes you have way less cravings and hunger. And the caffeine quietly turns down your appetite. And last, it gives you something to focus on other than the cravings you're having. So now you're not white-knuckling your way through, you're just buying yourself time for that wave to pass. And before I get Joe in the comments being like, this guy's a piece of shit, he's recommending diet soda. Uh, yeah, diet soda is zero calories and you would have to drink 30 of these a day to even have anything relatively bad happen to you. So if this helps you stick to your calorie deficit, trust me, it is fine to drink. So those 2 habits were in the kitchen, but this 3rd habit has to do with your workouts, and it's gonna sound like I'm telling you to be lazy. When most people do their workouts, they spend before their workout and after their workout stretching, foam rolling, warming up, but For fat loss, it does almost nothing, and it could be a complete waste of your time. Think of that stretching, foam rolling, warming up like a screensaver on your computer. The screen is lit up, things are moving, it looks like the computer is hard at work, but when you open it up, nothing is actually going on and getting done. That is your warm-up routine, stretching routine that you're currently doing. So here's the controversial part. Skip the warmups, skip the stretching before the workout, and instead do warmup sets of the exercise that you are about to do. So if you're going to go do squats, you don't need a 30-minute warmup routine. Do 2 to 3 warmup sets where you're doing lightweight for 3 to 5 reps just to warm up your body, get used to the exercise that you're about to do. do, and then go lift your heavy weights. And then after your workout, you don't need to spend time stretching because the reason you would stretch is to get your nervous system calmed down to be able to recover from the workout. But there's something else you can do both before and after your workout that would accomplish that and help you lose more fat. And that is hopping on the treadmill for a 10 minute walk to get in extra steps, burn extra calories. And if it's low intensity where you don't need to get your heart rate up, you'll still be able to warm up for the workout and recover from the workout while helping your fat loss. And it may not seem like much, but if you do 10 minutes before and 10 minutes after and you work out 3 to 4 times a week, that's hundreds of extra calories burned just by making the time you're already spending more efficient. And I know some people are going to disagree in the comments section, but this last habit you really might push back on me for because it's the exact opposite of what you hear most people telling you to do, including myself. And you've probably heard this in all videos: you can eat anything you want as long as you're in a calorie deficit. There's no bad food, there's no off-limit food. You could eat McDonald's every day and still lose weight. And technically, from a science standpoint, that is true. But sometimes you don't need to be talked to from a science standpoint. You need to be talked to from a realistic standpoint. Because here's the thing you need to understand: there's a difference between having a treat and having a trigger. A treat is something you can portion out, work into your calories, and stop. A trigger is something that sets you off. You can't stop once you start, and one bite turns into the whole thing every single time. So I'm not telling you to cut out treats, but I am telling you to remove triggers. Because here's the thing that nobody will tell you: having moderation is something that is a skill that a lot of people don't start out with. Think about teaching a kid to ride a bike. You don't hand them the bike And just say, oh, just balance, you'll be fine, you got this. You put the training wheels on, not forever, just until they can balance on their own, and then you take the training wheels off on purpose. So for these trigger foods that you know you can't control yourself with, cut them out for the first 60 to 90 days. It's not forever, but it's the support that you need upfront to learn how to ride the bike. One of our clients, Zion, did this. And he's now been able to lose over 50 pounds and have more moderation with his diet, but he had to learn that by cutting this out first. So for you, don't cut out treats, cut out triggers, and then slowly work them back in after you have a foundational base and you've built these good habits that you've worked on for the last 2 to 3 months. And speaking of the next couple of months, the tricky part about these habits isn't knowing them, it's actually implementing them into your lifestyle and staying consistent with them. So if you want to make sure over the next 8 weeks you have a plan that's built for you and you actually stay consistent, that's what we do in my 8-week fat loss challenge. You can click the link below to learn more and see if it's a good fit for you. And I already know your next question. These are great, Eric, but realistically, how long is it going to take me to drop fat, especially in my belly? Don't worry, I made an entire video on that right here. Click this link next to watch.
