In this YouTube video, Eric Roberts explains why many people fail to lose weight quickly and how to outperform the results often attributed to Ozempic. He introduces a diagnostic framework that categorizes weight‑loss obstacles into two mutually exclusive constraints: effort‑constrained (inability to stay consistent due to time/energy limits) and strategy‑constrained (following a plan that will never work for the individual’s goals). Using real client examples, he demonstrates how to identify each constraint and apply targeted fixes. Effort‑constrained – Illustrated by client James, a busy father who could not sustain 4‑6 hour‑long workouts per week. Roberts reduced his training to three 30‑minute sessions, introduced pre‑tracking of meals for the next day, and advised “pantry‑stacking” to eliminate trigger foods. These changes increased James’s consistency, motivation, and ultimately led to a 12‑lb loss in eight weeks. Strategy‑constrained – Illustrated by client Lydia, who performed high‑rep HIIT cardio despite wanting fat loss, muscle gain, and strength. Roberts switched her to four‑day strength‑training with 5‑10 rep ranges, reduced cardio, increased protein intake, and eliminated excessive carbs. Within weeks Lydia saw scale drops, better muscle definition, reduced cravings, and higher energy. Mixed/Yo‑Yo dieting – Clients Joey and Erica exemplify a blend of effort and strategy constraints: they followed unsustainable crash diets and excessive cardio, leading to short‑term weight loss followed by relapse. Roberts recommends a modest, sustainable calorie target (e.g., 1,700 kcal daily) and “stacking wins” by tracking daily leading‑indicator actions (calories, protein, steps, workouts) rather than scale weight alone. Roberts concludes with a self‑assessment: (1) Do you have time to stick to a plan? → strategy‑constrained. (2) If you stick, would you make progress? → effort‑constrained. He offers a free personalized transformation roadmap and promotes his one‑on‑one online coaching program, plus a teaser for a follow‑up video on “29 best cheat codes for losing fat.”
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I'm gonna show you how to lose weight faster than if you were to take Ozempic like the rest of the internet is. Maybe you're not shedding pounds as quickly as you'd like to, and it's probably because you're focusing on a problem that might not even be the real issue. Most people trying to lose weight face either one of two problems, and they don't know which one they're dealing with, so they take the wrong plan to try to fix it. So in this video, I'm going to help you figure out exactly which of the 2 problems you have and how to fix it. My name is Eric Roberts. I've coached over 25,000 people on the internet with their fat loss journey in the past 8 years. And when I go to help people lose weight, I ask one question: are you struggling because you're not consistent with your habits, or are you stuck because the plan you're on isn't ever going to work for you? So here's the big idea: you either struggle being effort constrained, or you are strategy constrained, but you're never both at the same time. So let's dive in and figure out which one is holding you back. Scenario 1 is if you are effort constrained, and I want to bring up an example of one of our online coaching clients, James. Now, he was able to lose 12 pounds in 8 weeks between these 2 pictures, but before that, he kind of struggled because James is a father, he works full-time, and he has a pretty active and demanding job. The before picture, he was trying to follow his plan perfectly, but he just couldn't keep up with all of life's demands. So James was effort constrained. He was trying to figure out why he couldn't stay consistent, but it was because he only had so much time and energy to go around. That led him into falling into the all-or-nothing mindset. Well, if he can't work out 4, 5, 6 days a week for an hour each time, why even bother? And then if he wasn't working out, obviously, why would you bother with your nutrition, you might as well say fuck it to everything and keep doing that until you get to a point where you're like, I hate how I look and I feel. You start again, you stop again. That cycle happens forever. Sound familiar? That's when we helped James create a plan around his effort-constrained situation. And by the way, before I show you how we actually fixed James' plan, if you want a free personalized transformation roadmap that shows you where you're at in your journey, what you're stuck with, and how to fix it, Click the link in the description below. There will be a link to get your free personalized transformation roadmap. The first fix we helped James with is instead of trying to work out 4, 5, 6 days a week for at least an hour each time, we switched his plan to do 3 days a week for 30 minutes each time. So that's an hour and a half of workouts over the entire week. And a lot of people hear that and they're like, oh my God, there's no way I would make progress that way. Well, I want to remind you, James lost 12 pounds in 8 weeks, so you can make progress that way. And the reason being because he was effort constrained. He needed a plan that was going to fit his lifestyle more, and he was actually able to be consistent with the 3 times a week, 30-minute workouts. Remember, following an A+ plan with 50% consistency isn't going to produce results, but following a B- plan with 90% consistency—that is where you produce results. So we took his effort-constrained life and used it to build a plan around that. Then to lose fat, of course, we had to also tweak his nutrition, and his nutrition already got better. From the workout plan tweak that we made, because when you're more consistent with workouts, you have more motivation, you feel more momentum, you have more energy, and just feel like you're on track more. That positively bleeds into your nutrition. And when you're only working out 3 times a week for 30 minutes, you have more time to cook, meal prep, and mentally put towards your nutrition. Which is probably the main thing holding you back from losing fat. So that helped, but we did something else, which was James pre-tracked his next 1 to 4 days of eating in advance. And let me show you what this looks like. Let's say it's a Saturday for you and you are going to pre-track Sunday's worth of food. So you're going to go in and you're going to write down, okay, for my breakfast I'm going to have a protein shake, I'm going to have some cereal, I'm going to have banana, some peanut butter, then your breakfast for the next day is already tracked. You do the same thing with lunch, do the same thing with dinner, and do the same thing with your snacks. This way, when you wake up the next day, you won't have to sit there and wonder like, what am I gonna have to eat? Am I gonna stay on track? Am I gonna hit my calories? You've already planned everything out in advance so So you know you're gonna hit your calories. And for somebody who is effort constrained, we wanted to make it as easy and streamlined as possible for him to have success. And yes, don't get me wrong, on a Saturday night or Sunday night or Monday night, it'll take 5 to 10 minutes to think out your next day worth of food, but then the entire next day you won't have to think about food. Right. Because you've already pre-tracked it for the next day. And the third thing on top of that, we made sure that James stacked his pantry, his fridge, his house, his cabinets with foods that are going to help him towards his goals, not with foods that are gonna make it harder for him to reach his goals. I mentioned earlier, James is a father, so he has kids and they like, you know, maybe different foods that he likes or that he would eat. But during this period of time, he was very mindful of Not buying trigger foods and keeping those foods in the house. And these trigger foods are like, if you have these foods in the house, you're going to not just eat them, you're going to eat all of them. And we want to try to avoid having those foods in the house so you can make your environment work with you for your goals rather than against it. So the big takeaways if you're effort constrained are, first, find workouts that are going to fit into your lifestyle. I need you to look at your workout plan and say, of course I can do that. This is going to be too easy, because if it's too easy, then guess what? You'll actually be consistent with it. And if you're actually consistent for a long period of time, that's how you see progress. The second, pre-track your day's worth of food for the next day. Yes, it's gonna take you some extra time, but it will save you an entire day of having to think about what you're going to eat. And even if you have to make some adjustments, it's easier to make an adjustment for a meal or a snack rather than trying to come up with the entire thing for the next And number 3, make sure you're not buying trigger foods and keeping foods in the house that are going to make it harder for you to stay on track. So that's the concept of effort constrained. But what if you're like, Eric, I can do the work, but I don't know if the work I'm doing is actually right? Well, don't worry, because now we're going to talk about if you are strategy constrained. Meet one of our online coaching clients, Lydia. Lydia is a beast. Before she started working with us, she was consistently working out 5, 6, sometimes 7 days a week, pushing herself, but struggled to understand why she wasn't seeing visible progress in her body. She wasn't afraid to put in the work. She just didn't know what work she had to do to actually make progress. And that's when we looked over her plan and we realized she was strategy constrained. Her workouts consisted of a lot of HIIT cardio workouts and classes and workouts that were very, very high reps, like 15, 20 reps and very, very high sets, like 4, 5, 6 reps per exercise, which for her goal of losing fat, building muscle and getting stronger were not the best style of workouts for her specific goal. The reason being is those style of workouts are more cardio and endurance focus rather than getting stronger, building more defined muscle, and losing body fat. And the reason they're not that good for losing body fat— because you might be thinking, Eric, those are high intensity, they burn a lot of calories, I sweat a lot— those high-intensity workouts not only not build muscle, but they also typically increase your appetite and your cravings, especially for sweets and junk food, which makes it harder to stick to your diet. And this is exactly what Lydia was when she first came to us for coaching. She found that on the weekends or even a couple nights throughout the week, she was getting almost like a bottomless, ravenous pit of hunger that she just couldn't solve without getting into some junk food or some sweets. And then she would think, well, I just don't have enough willpower, or I'm just not working hard enough. I need to do more cardio. I need to do more workouts, restrict my food even more. And this led her down a vicious cycle of just more restriction, Feeling guilty about herself, trying to just push her way through and white-knuckle her way with willpower, but then it would never work out. She would fall off track and then restart this cycle. And one of the last things we noticed with her plan when looking over, because she was craving such carbs and sweets because of the style of workout she was doing, she was also undereating on her protein, which is also gonna make her not build as much muscle, but then also it wouldn't keep her as full and it would just keep bleeding into this carb-heavy diet she was consuming. And let me be clear, carbs aren't bad, but when you're not eating enough protein, that's when it becomes bad. So to fix this specific scenario of being strategy constrained with Lydia, we did immediately switched over her workouts to 4 days a week strength training focused. Working in a little bit of a lower rep range. So say 5 to 10 reps was the majority of her workouts as opposed to 12, 15, 20 reps. On her rest days, we just encouraged her to make sure she hit her daily steps. She didn't need to go do a ton of high-intensity cardio. And legit, within the first, I'd say, 6 weeks, she not only saw her scale start to go down, but she noticed more muscle definition in her body. than she had in the previous 6 months. And she wasn't constantly fatigued and exhausted from her workouts and needing a million energy drinks like this one right here. So once we switched up her workouts, she immediately noticed, like immediately within the first week, noticed she did not have as many cravings. She was not as hungry at night. The weekends were easier to stay on track. So that lended her to allow herself to be consistent with her calorie deficit diet, which meant obviously she started to see the scale. go down quicker. And then from there, because she wasn't craving as much sweets and carbs, she was able to increase her protein intake, which then fueled everything else. She didn't need as many carbs because she was more full. She was recovering from her workouts better, and she was building more muscle than she ever had before. All of this allowed Lydia to get on the right plan for her goals and her body, leading to some pretty insane results. And by the way, if you're interested in getting the right plan built specifically for you, click the link in the description below to check out our one-on-one online coaching program where you can potentially become a client of ours where we work with you one-on-one. Now I gave you 2 scenarios, effort constrained and strategy constrained, and I told you those were the only 2 problems, but what if there is an in-between? What if there's a little bit of both going on? And I know some of you watching might have that. So let's talk about that scenario. If there's a little bit of both going on, the last scenario is what we call yo-yo dieting. I want to give 2 examples of our online coaching clients, Joey and Erica. Both Joey and Erica were consistently doing diets and working out, but they would start something Do it for a little bit and fall off. So they were consistently working and putting in the effort, but they were working on the wrong stuff because what they were doing wasn't sustainable. Doing things like eating 1,200 calories, trying to run 5 miles a day, cutting out all of your carbs, not allowing yourself any junk food. And they were doing these unsustainable plans because They wanted to see quick results. So in my opinion, they were both effort constrained because although they were putting in the work, they weren't thinking about it from a long enough term perspective and they weren't thinking about being consistent long term. It was just very short term thinking. And because of that, they were also strategy constrained because the strategy they were taking wasn't going to ever allow them to be consistent enough to stick with it and see progress. So when we have clients come to us in our program with situations like this, we like to put their effort towards something that is more sustainable. So for example, instead of crash dieting at 1,200 calories, eat 1,700 calories 7 days a week instead. And yes, the weight might come off slower in the beginning initially, but since they will actually stick with it, 3 months will go by and they'll be down 15, 20 pounds, and that weight will stay off forever. As opposed to if they kept doing what they were doing before, they would start something, a couple weeks later fall off, start something, lose some weight, a couple weeks later fall off. And in a 3-month span of time, they would see no progress and potentially even be worse off than they are when they started because they never actually stuck with something consistently. And trust me, I know what you're thinking. You're like, well, Eric, I'll just lose weight fast right now initially, and then I'll learn how to keep it off. I'll do something more sustainable later. I understand that you think that, but you've been trying that. And how has that been working for you thus far? Probably not very fucking good, which is why you're watching this video in the first place. And last, we focus on stacking wins. With people like this. And here's what I mean. A lot of times when people are a yo-yo dieter, they like to see quick wins and they like to see quick progress. So we have our clients track their daily wins, but the daily wins aren't what you typically think when you're thinking about weight loss, because it's not just the number on the scale. What we try to redirect for daily wins is, are we doing the actions that are then going to lead to you losing weight in the long run? Are you hitting your calories? If so, that's a win. Are you hitting your protein goal? If so, that's a win. Are you hitting your steps? Are you getting your workouts? These are leading indicators that if you— can we both agree, if you do these things, you are going to see progress. You might not see it as fast as you want to, but if you do these things long enough, the outcome will happen. So start tracking and thinking about your daily wins, not as If I lost weight today, it was a win or not. Doesn't matter if you lost weight today or not. Did you do all the things you were supposed to do on your plan? So that is a win and it will lead to you seeing progress long term, I promise. So whether you're just starting your weight loss journey or if you've been at it and hit a plateau recently, if you're not seeing the progress you want to see, it's usually one of these 2 constraints. The key is knowing which one so you can have the right fix. To work on it. And if you need any extra help figuring out which constraint you have, just ask yourself these 2 questions. The first, do you feel like you have the time to stick to your plan? And if you stuck to your plan, do you know for a fact you would make progress? If you answered yes to the first question, you are strategy constrained. If you answered yes to the second question, you are effort constrained. If you want a free personalized transformation roadmap to take you from where you are now to where you want to be, click the link in the description of this video. Or if you really want to get serious about taking your progress to the next level and finally figuring this all out, click the link below to apply to work with our team one-on-one for our online coaching program. And in the meantime, if you want my 29 best cheat codes for losing fat, watch this video here coming up next.
