If I Wanted To Lose 20lbs Before Summer, I'd Do This

After coaching over 25,000 clients with their fat loss journey, I'm going to tell you exactly what you need to do to lose 10 to 20 pounds before summer. It comes down to 7 specific things you need to start doing today, and most of them have nothing to do with what you've already heard online. So let's start with thing number 1, the ramp. The biggest mistake I see people make with their fat loss every single springtime is deciding you want to look good by summer. So on Monday morning, you slash your calories in half, throw out all of the junk food or bad food, only eat chicken and broccoli, and then by Wednesday you're miserable. By Friday you're like, fuck this, I'd rather be fat. You go off track on the weekend and have to restart every Monday. Think of it like this: have you ever jumped into a cold pool? What happens? Your body goes into a shock. You start gasping for air, and every part of your body is screaming at you to get out. But if you walked into that same cold pool with just your feet, and then up to your knees, and then up to your waist. Your body gets used to the temperature and it's not freaking out as much. But that's what you're doing with your crash dieting when you slash your calories down to 1,200 per day. You're jumping into the deep end of a cold pool and your body reacts by panicking. Your hunger goes through the roof, your energy crashes, you have a bunch of cravings for junk food. And your brain is starting to tell you it's time to quit. This was happening to one of our clients, Allie, who when she came to us, she would always try to cut her calories as low as possible, but she was never able to stay consistent long enough to see progress. So when she signed up for coaching with us, instead of doing that, we took the ramp approach where you gradually decrease your calories a bit more over time. So start 300 calories below where you are right now. And then in 1 or 2 weeks, once you've gotten used to that, decrease to 400 to 500 calories below. And then if you need to, you decrease a little bit more to 500 to 750 calories below your maintenance. And doing this combined with the other 6 points we'll make in the video will allow you to see pretty rapid fat loss without having your body freak out and want to overeat and binge. And by the way, if you need to know how many calories you should be eating per day, you can click the link in the description below of this video to use my totally free calorie calculator. But here's the thing, the ramp only works if you get the next part right, because even the perfect calorie deficit is going to fall apart if your day has no structure to it. Thing number 2, the anchor meal. A lot of people hear you need to track your food and then get overwhelmed at the thought of tracking every single grain of rice What happens if I go out to eat? Should I track it raw or cooked? And while tracking your food is a great tool, I'm going to be realistic with you. You're probably not going to track every single thing every single time, and that's okay. Because here's what I've noticed after coaching over 25,000 clients. The clients who are the most consistent don't always track everything perfectly, but they do have one meal per day that never changes, and I call it the anchor meal. Think of it like a tent in a windstorm. You only need one stake in the ground to keep the whole tent from flying away. Without that stake, the gust of wind will take the entire tent with it. And that's what happens when you try to do a diet without an anchor meal. So what I want you to do is pick one meal Breakfast, lunch, or dinner, whichever one you have the most control over, and make that the meal you eat the same thing every single day. And you can still eat what you want in this meal, but it's got to be high protein and it's got to be the same thing every day. This way, that is your anchor. No matter what else happens in the day, this meal, the guesswork is taken out. You know how many calories it is. You know how much protein it is, and it can help anchor the rest of your day. Losing weight can be really overwhelming, but the less you have to think about it, the more you're going to stay consistent and the more results you're going to see. But here's the thing, even with the anchor meal, there's one window of time that ruins more progress than anything else, which is thing number 3, the weekend leap. Now on this one, I'm going to call you out a little bit, but it's out of love. Most people don't ruin their diet on Tuesday. It's Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday during the day. That Friday night to Sunday, I have seen more people throw out their progress for the week than anything else. And I want you to think of your weekly calorie deficit like filling up a bathtub. Monday through Thursday, you're slowly running the faucet, filling up the bathtub, doing everything right, hitting your calories, getting your workouts. And then Friday night hits and someone pulls the drain plug. A couple of drinks at dinner, maybe some appetizers or desserts you didn't plan for, a late-night snack because you're up later than usual. And then Saturday rolls around and you have brunch with your family or friends. You're going out to eat again. You're having drinks again. And by the time Sunday night rolls around, the bathtub is empty. empty because you drained all of the water. So even if you're in a calorie deficit Monday through Friday, if you're not mindful of your calories and making sure you're in the calorie deficit over the weekend, you can be working really hard but never seeing progress, which is probably the most frustrating thing out there. And if you're resonating with this and you want some extra personalized help with your fat loss journey of losing weight before For summer, click the link in the description below of this video to learn more about my online one-on-one coaching program. So here's what you're gonna do to fix it. You don't have to be perfect on the weekends. You just can't eat like an asshole. If you're going out to dinner on Friday night, eat a little bit of a lighter lunch. Don't starve yourself, just have a little bit less calories than what you normally would To save a little bit of calories for Friday night. And if you're going out on Saturday, make sure you pick your indulgence. So you either pick between appetizer, dessert, or alcohol. Pick one of those 3, not all 3. And that brings me to the next point that most people mess up, and it might be the most underrated thing on this list. Thing number 4, the floor. Here's the pattern I see with most people who are failing their diet. They're either at a 10 out of 10 or A 0 out of 10. They're all in or they're all out. The second they go off plan or eat something bad, they completely say, screw it, I've already ruined all of my progress. I might as well keep going and just restart on Monday morning. That is a guaranteed way to never make progress. And this is the real problem. If you have a bad day, the bad day doesn't ruin your progress. It's that your bad day had no floor to catch you. Think of it like a building with no basement. If the ground floor were to collapse, the whole thing falls into the dirt. But if there's a basement underneath, the collapse only goes down one level as opposed to bringing the entire thing down into the ground. The floor is your basement. It's the absolute minimum that you need to do even on a bad day. So here's what my floor looks like. No matter how busy I am, how unmotivated I am, I am going to hit my protein goal for the day, walk at least 5,000 steps for the day, and do my workout even if I don't push myself as hard or I don't lift as heavy. Because what I've learned after coaching over 25,000 clients The difference between people who will lose the 10 to 20 pounds before summer and the people who don't isn't what they do on their best days. It's what they do on their worst ones. So right now I want you to decide what is your floor? What are you going to do on the craziest, busiest days where normally you would completely fall off track? Because I promise you, if you set the minimum floor, And you stick with that, you're going to stay consistent. And those consistent days will add up to you making more progress. And speaking of making more progress, the next thing is going to save you problems you wouldn't even have noticed. Thing number 5, iron insurance. Let me ask you something. If between now and summer you lost 20 pounds, but 8 of those pounds were muscle, what would you look like when you took your shirt off? Are you going to like how you look? Are you Are you going to be toned, leaned, defined? Or are you going to end up as that skinny fat where, yeah, maybe you lost weight, but you lost muscle so you don't look the way you want to look? Think of it like this. Imagine you had a sculpture underneath a bed sheet, a really nice sculpture, but right now it's covered and you can't see any of the detail. The fat on your body is the bed sheet and the muscle underneath is the sculpture. If you diet and lose weight, without lifting weights, you're not just pulling off the bed sheet, you're chipping away at the detailed sculpture underneath. So by the time the sheet is gone, there's nothing impressive to look at. It's just a smaller block of concrete. But if you lift weights while you diet, you will keep all of the details of the sculpture, and by the time you pull the bed sheet off, you will reveal This amazing sculpture that is worth showing. And the best part is you don't need much. Really, all you need for lifting weights is 3 times a week for 30 to 60 minutes following a lower body, upper body, full body workout split. One of our clients, Dan, saw amazing progress doing this. And to be clear, this is strength training workouts. This is not HIIT workouts. It's not Beachbody or Boot Camp or Orangetheory. Nothing inherently against those things. They're just not a real strength training program. And if you're interested in getting a personalized strength training program made specifically for you, you can click the link in the description below of this video to learn more about my one-on-one online coaching. And now that you're lifting weights, the next thing is going to surprise you a little bit because it has nothing to do with how you eat or how you work out, but it might be the reason you can't stop eating at night. Thing number 6, the scroll cut. Now this one might be the most important out of all 7 things. Here's what I want you to do tonight. Put your phone down 30 minutes earlier than what you normally would and go to sleep. That's it. Now before you skip ahead and think this is too simple or I'm not going to do this or this isn't going to make a big difference, let me explain why this is so powerful. When you don't sleep enough, your body increases a hormone called ghrelin. This is your hunger hormone that tells you you are hungrier, you need food, especially sugary junk food. And when you're scrolling on your phone all night before you go to sleep, not only are you missing out on hours of sleep, you're missing out on sleep quality because staring at the screen is increasing your cortisol, which is making your sleep quality worse as well. And so you can think of this like your willpower is a phone battery. You wake up at 100%. And every decision you make throughout the day, not just with your fitness, with your job, with your spouse, with your kids, you drain the battery a little bit. And by the time 8 PM, 9 PM rolls around, your battery is at 8%. And that's when the sugary junk food starts calling your name, and it's very hard to say no. And what most people don't realize is sleep is the charger. So as opposed to getting to 8% at night, If you got more sleep and better quality sleep, you would be at 35% at night, which would make it much easier to say no to the extra snacks you're eating at night, which would make you stay in the calorie deficit and lose fat. So if you're someone who snacks at night and you're getting less than 7 hours of sleep, fix this immediately. I promise it will make a massive difference. And here's the honest truth: you could do all 6 of the things that I just mentioned and still not lose 10 to 20 pounds before summer. And before you get discouraged by that, let me explain the last thing. Thing number 7: the photo rule. The issue is you're probably going to start doing some things right after watching this video. You'll do the ramp, you'll have the anchor meal, you'll start to improve your sleep, and then you're going to look in the mirror a week or 2 later and you're gonna look the exact same. And then Your brain is going to go, this isn't working, I might as well quit. But it is working, you just can't see it yet. And I want you to think of this like a paper towel roll. If I tear off one sheet, and apparently I didn't tear it off correctly, does the roll look any different? No. What about if I tear off 3 sheets? Does the roll look any different? It wouldn't be until you tore off 30, 45, 60 sheets before this roll looked any different. But that doesn't mean that progress isn't happening, even if you can't see it yet. And this is where you have to stick with it long enough to tear enough sheets off of the roll to visually see a difference. And the crazy part, your number on the scale that you weigh can lie to you because you can be tearing sheets off the roll and you can be changing how the roll looks without changing the number on the scale. And this is why it is so critical to take your progress pictures every 4 weeks leading up to summer. Because even when you feel like the scale isn't moving, you will look at your progress pictures side by side and you'll be able to notice a difference in how you look. And this will teach your brain, no, this is working. I'm not going to quit. And I am going to keep going so I can lose the fat I want before summer. And here's the final part. Let's be honest, whether you lose 8 pounds, 12 pounds, or 20 pounds before summer, don't you just want to look better? Don't you just want to feel better? Don't you just want to feel more confident in your bathing suit? It doesn't matter how many pounds you lose on the scale if those things are happening. So don't obsess over the number on the scale. Take your progress pictures, put them side by side every 4 weeks, just like we do with our online coaching clients. And I promise, if you do that with the other 6 things we talked about, you will lose 10 to 20 pounds before summer, feel better and look better, just like what you want. And if you want some extra personalized help to get into the best shape before summer, I actually have an 8-week challenge that is going on right now where we will hold you accountable every week, create a plan for you, make adjustments, and ensure you see progress. You can click the link in the description below of this video. And right after you do that, you're probably wondering, okay, Eric, well, I'm gonna lose 10 to 20 pounds, but how long is it actually going to take me, especially to lose the stubborn belly fat? Well, don't worry, because I made a video covering exactly that. You can watch that right here coming up next.