The EXACT System To Lose 20lbs In 3 Months

Have you ever wondered if everything you've been told about losing fat is actually wrong and holding you back? Well, I've helped over 17,000 clients lose fat, and most of them struggled until they followed this system. In this video, I'm going to give you the exact blueprint to lose 20 pounds in 3 months without starving yourself, doing endless cardio, or cutting out all of the foods you enjoy. You may be wondering, Eric, this sounds good, but how do I know this is gonna work for me? Well, if you want to lose weight by solving real problems, changing your habits, staying consistent, not falling off track, and building repeatable systems that you can stick with, then this video is for you. But if you're somebody who's looking for a quick fix or a magic pill, then this video is not for you. Alright, so what's the strategy behind the blueprint? Well, I can tell you first what we are not doing. We're not doing keto, we're not doing carnivore, we're not eating 1,200 calories, doing hours of cardio, or following any sort of over-restrictive or fad diet. These methods, when you try to do the intense extremes, often just leads to frustration and burnout. And at some point you say, holy shit, I just want some french fries, fuck it, I'd rather be fat. You can't stick with it, and so you end up going into the yo-yo dieting cycle of losing weight, gaining weight, losing weight, gaining weight. Does this sound familiar? Think about it like this: you don't brush your teeth for 3 hours one day out of the month. You brush your teeth for 2 minutes every single day, or at least I hope you do. Why? Because intensity can't replace consistency. Weight loss is about what you can do consistently, not what you can do dramatically. So instead, the system in this video is going to teach you a sustainable approach to fat loss that can make it easier to stay on track than ever before. And I'm telling you, I know one of our clients, Sandra, she was skeptical at first, but as you can see, she's seen insane results. And if you follow this system, you can see those same results as well. All right, so what's the first step of the blueprint? Step number 1, define your why. Now this may sound cheesy, but the truth is you need a deeper why than just losing weight. The mistake people make is, When, not if, it gets hard and you are not motivated to do the things that you know you need to do, just losing weight isn't going to be a strong enough why to keep you going. For example, this is one of our clients, Vince. He talks about his deeper why was 2 main things. Number one, he had a prediabetes diagnosis that scared him into realizing he needed to change. And number 2, he had to ask for a seatbelt extender on the plane, which he decided he did not want to do that ever again. So for him, on those days it was tough, he had a deeper why to keep going. And as you can see, made tremendous progress. And you need those as well. But how do you find those and really get to those? Well, I have 2 strategies you can use that we use with our clients that we have found helpful. The first is something called the 5 Whys. And this is basically, you want to lose weight. Ask yourself why 5 times. For example, why do you want to lose weight? Because you want to fit better in your clothes. Why do you want to fit better in your clothes? Because you're not very confident right now. Why is that a bad thing? Because your lack of confidence is ruining experiences, memories, vacations with you and your family. Why do you want to change that? Because you saw your mom growing up struggle with her weight, ruin family vacations, And just have a negative experience. And why is that important to you? Because you don't want to have the same thing happen with your kids growing up. And number 2, a question we ask our clients all the time is, what was your lowest moment? Think back. Vince, for him, was his prediabetes diagnosis and asking for that seatbelt extender. And so when you're on the journey, think about those things and use that for fuel to keep you going because you will not be motivated every single day. But that's okay because you can use this as fuel to reach your goals. But what exact goals should you be setting? That'll be in step 2. Step 2, setting goals, outcome versus action-based goals. Most people set goals that look something like this. I'm going to lose 2 pounds every week. This is what we call an outcome-based goal. The only issue with these kind of goals are you can't really control them, meaning your scale might spike up or fluctuate for many reasons outside of your control. For example, you might hold on to some more water weight. You might be a woman on her period holding some water weight. You might have had a really intense workout that left inflammation in your muscles, and the scale would spike up from that. Maybe you had more sodium than usual. There's a million reasons why the scale may fluctuate, so you're not really in control of losing 2 pounds in that week. So what I encourage you to do instead is set something called action-based goals. You want to lose 2 pounds this week? Awesome. What do you have to do to make sure you lose 2 pounds this week? We're going to talk about exactly what those things would look like to lose 20 pounds in 3 months the rest of the video, but it would look something like stick to your diet, get your workouts done, drink your water. Those are actions that lead to outcomes. You can control the actions, you cannot control the outcomes. So focus on setting action-based goals and then focus on setting consistency-based goals with those outcome goals. And what I mean by this is, in the next step, we're going to talk about how to set your calorie goal and what your calorie goal should be. Now that's an action-based goal, and I want you to set a consistency-based goal of completing that action-based goal at least 80% of the time. So if there are 31 days in a month, you need to hit your calorie goal at least 25 out of 31 days. That is what I want you to aim for, not 31 out of 31 days, because we're not shooting for perfection. We're shooting for consistency. This prevents against the all-or-nothing mentality and the yo-yo dieting that we spoke about earlier that causes most people to struggle with their weight their entire life. It's not about perfection. It's about consistency. So set goals around that. And when you're not perfect, it's okay. Now let's talk about those action-based goals of what you need to do to lose 20 pounds in 3 months right now. Step 3, set your calorie goal. You've probably heard before you need to be in a calorie deficit to lose weight. And this is true. But what does that look like to ensure you can lose 20 pounds in 3 months? Well, a lot of people make the mistake of taking their calories lower than they actually have to, thinking if I eat as little as possible, I will be able to lose weight as quickly as possible. In theory, this could work, but in reality, you end up burnt out, over-restricted, and on the yo-yo dieting cycle you've been on this entire time. So instead, what I recommend you do is create roughly a 500 calorie deficit per day. This means however many calories you would need to maintain your weight, you subtract that by 500, and that's how many calories you would eat per day. Now, this exact number is going to be different for everybody, and if you want to know what your calorie deficit goal should be, there will be a totally free calorie calculator in the description of this video you can use. But with this 500 calorie deficit and not trying to eat 1,200 calories per day, we will create a more moderate approach that might be slower in the beginning, but in the long run it will actually be faster because you'll be able to stick with it. Combined with some of the other steps we're going to lay out in this blueprint, like your cardio goals for example, you will still be able to lose a significant amount of weight without having to starve yourself. Plus you can work on building sustainable habits that you will be able to keep up with forever with your nutrition. Remember, like I said earlier, this blueprint is not for somebody who's looking for quick fixes. This blueprint is for somebody who's looking to create sustainable, long-lasting fat loss. We aren't just here to lose the weight, we're here to keep it off forever. Now the next step is a calorie deficit's best friend: your protein goal. Step 4: Hit your protein goal. A calorie deficit can be really hard to stick to, especially if you aren't eating enough protein. Protein is the nutrient that keeps you full for the longest amount of time, and it's the only nutrient to help you build lean muscle. So we want to make sure we're setting and hitting a protein goal per day. But the mistake I see so many people make is setting the wrong protein goal. You may have heard before you need to be eating 1 gram of protein per pound of your body weight to lose fat, and that is just not true. We'll have women come to us for coaching who are 180 or 200 pounds and And they want to weigh 130, 140, and they're trying to eat 200 grams of protein per day. That's absurd. I promise you do not have to do that. To find your protein goal, here's what you will do. Take your goal body weight in pounds— for all of my people outside of the US— and multiply that by 0.7. So if you want to weigh 150 pounds, the minimum protein per day you should be trying to hit is 105 grams per day. Now, if you end up eating a little bit more than that, that's awesome, but the minimum is your goal body weight in pounds times 0.7. Now, this is key because again, to sustainably follow this system and blueprint, trying to eat 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight is 1 million percent going to leave you saying, screw it, I'd rather be fat. It'll also leave you feeling like a failure If you can't hit it every single day, and it'll leave you feeling over-restricted, like you can't eat other foods. All you have to do is eat protein all day, which would make you want to quit. So avoid that. Set the right goal from the beginning, and it can make your fat loss easier than ever before. What can also make your fat loss easier than ever before is step number 5. Step 5, meal timing and meal frequency. Now, I'm always going to be honest with you. Out of all of the steps, this is the one you can be a little bit flexible with, but stick with me to let me explain. What we see with a lot of our clients and the mistakes that they are making when they first come to us is they're only eating 1 or 2 real meals a day and they're going too long without eating. What this is doing is on the back end of that, they're not able to get their protein goal because they're only eating twice per day, which means they have to eat like— 2 70 grams of protein at each meal. And that also leads to number 2. We find a lot of people struggle with overeating at night because they're not eating a lot of food during the day. And this leads into this negative cycle of you feel like you're doing good throughout the day and you're eating clean and healthy, but you're blowing it at night and overeating and you're not making any progress. So what we like to do with a lot of our clients is something called the 3-meal and 2-snack approach. This means you eat 3 meals per day— breakfast, lunch, dinner— and then in between those meals you have 2 snacks. Usually the snacks are either between breakfast and lunch and lunch and dinner, or between lunch and dinner and then after dinner as a dessert. We found this to be helpful for clients because you never let yourself get too hungry. And you know this, once you get to a point where you're starving, you don't care what you eat, you just need to eat. And number 2, it's harder to notice your fullness cues and how full you are. And it's easier just to keep eating and eating and eating, almost like your stomach is this bottomless pit where you just can't get full. So if you can set up your day in a way where you prevent this from happening, you just may find it easier and less Painful to stick to a calorie deficit. Now again, not everybody has to set their day up like this. As long as you hit your calorie goal and your protein goal, that is what is most important. We've just found this to help a lot of the clients we have worked with, along with step number 6, which is super underrated. Step 6, whole foods versus processed foods. So we're talking about calories and protein, But within that, there's a mistake that a lot of people make: eating too much processed food or not eating enough whole foods, however you want to look at it. And this is an issue because when you do this, this leads to having higher cravings, especially for sweets and sugary junk foods. You're not getting the proper nutrients to keep you full and satisfied and just overall healthy. And third, you'll have a higher sugar intake than you would probably like, which then leads to low energy. All of these make it harder to stick to a calorie deficit and lose fat. So let's avoid that and make sure we're getting the right ratio of whole foods versus processed foods, because I don't believe that you should be cutting out all processed foods, because again, that is not going to be sustainable over the long run. And I know there's going to be some guy named Peter in the comments saying, oh, you shouldn't eat processed foods at all. Good for you, Peter. You're better than all of us other humans. Take the moral high road and go to another video. For us normal people who want to lose fat in a sustainable way, I recommend you follow something called the 80/20 rule. 80% of your calories should be coming from nutrient-dense, whole, clean, and healthy foods, and then 20% can come from processed foods or treats or things that you enjoy. This does a few things. It ensures you're getting good quality nutrients, which will help you stay full and healthy. It does not label foods good and bad like a typical diet does, nor does it leave you feeling like you can't have something while you're trying to lose fat. Nothing is off limits. In fact, everything is fair game. Remember, this needs to be something you feel like you can stick with over the long haul, and that's why the 80/20 rule is so great. It creates a healthy relationship with food and allows for flexibility and sustainability with your diet. Because I don't know about you, but I'm not cutting out french fries. Fuck off, Peter. And actually, this leads to my next step. Step 7, cheat days. The term cheat days came from bodybuilders who had to be 100% perfect on their diet leading up to their show. And if they went off track, they called it a cheat day. Here's the thing. You're not a bodybuilder getting ready for a bodybuilding show, so you don't have to eat like they do. Not to mention, we just talked about how you can fit these foods into your daily calories guilt-free and still lose fat as long as you hit your calorie goal. So what should you do about cheat days? Don't have them because you don't need them. Not because you can't eat foods that you enjoy, but because you're not cheating or doing anything wrong by having a cheeseburger or some French fries or ice cream. You can eat those foods and still lose fat. And guess what? Even if you have a day where you go over your calorie goal, remember what we talked about in the beginning of the video. You're not trying to be 100% perfect with your calorie goal. You're trying to be 80% or better. So even if you have a couple of days a month where you go over your calories, you're still well within your consistency range. Trust me, I know this is a crazy concept, but this is one of our clients, Melissa, who lost 15 pounds in 8 weeks, and she was not perfect with her diet over those 8 weeks. She had multiple days where she didn't hit her goal, but because she stayed consistent, She still saw great progress, and so can you. And the last thing you'll find when you include these foods more often in moderation and not make them off-limits, you don't feel the need to binge or overeat on them because you haven't restricted yourself from them. It's just food. And speaking of food, we've talked a lot about food thus far, but what about your exercise? That also plays a major part of losing 20 pounds in 3 months, and that's what we're going to talk about in our next step. Step number 8, the most important exercise for fat loss. Now, I'm about to tell you the most effective and the most important form of exercise for losing fat, and it's not gonna be running. It's not gonna be the stair stepper. It's not gonna be the treadmill or doing HIIT classes or humping the ground. That's what I refer to as Burpees. The most effective form of exercise for fat loss is going to be walking. Yes, walking. And no, it doesn't need to be fast-paced. No, it doesn't need to be at an incline. And no, you don't have to do it all at once. Any way you can increase your daily steps and walk more, whether it be parking farther away at the grocery store, whether it be taking the stairs instead of the escalator, whether it's pacing around your work office or home office when you're on Pause. People make the mistake of thinking you have to be sweaty, out of breath, and damn near dead if you're trying to lose body fat when you're doing exercise, and it just couldn't be farther from the truth. And this is why. Here's a chart of your TDEE. This just means your total daily energy expenditure, and this just means how many calories your body burns in a day. There's something called your NEAT, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis, And that's just a fancy saying for how many calories you burn that is not a dedicated workout. You can see this takes up 15% of your daily calorie burn, and that's where your daily steps falls. So if walking takes up 15% of your daily calorie burn, and a calorie deficit means you are eating less calories than you burn, I think getting more daily steps is going to make a massive positive impact on your fat loss journey. So we encourage our clients to do one of two things with their daily step goal. Number one, if you're not currently tracking your daily steps, I would track your steps for a week, get your baseline average, and then add 2,000 steps per day to that. So if you start tracking and your average is 6,000 steps, try to go to 8,000 steps. And by the way, if you have a watch or even your smartphone tracks your steps for you, or number 2, if you already know and you're tracking steps, shoot for 8,000 to 12,000 steps per day. Now, I promise you this works. This is one of our clients, Nadia. She started off with us walking 2,000 steps per day. That's it. She wasn't tracking calories, she wasn't doing workouts, nothing. And then she went to 4,000 per day, and then 6,000, and then 8,000. And now she's worked her way up to walking 12,000 steps per day, working out 4 times a week, and she's made insane progress. But you start with the walking. So watch the pounds start to drop from getting up and moving more. No high-intensity BS needed. But that's not the only form of exercise that is golden for fat loss. Step number 9, strength train 2 to 4 times a week. You've probably been told that cardio is the best for fat loss, and this is a big mistake people make because especially the more cardio that you do, it can actually backfire and ruin your fat loss progress. Here's why. The more cardio and the more intense cardio that you do, the more hunger you get. The more cravings for sweets and sugar that you get, the higher the stress and cortisol is on your body, and the more burnt out, fatigued, and less willpower you end up having. This backfires and makes it exponentially harder to stick to your calorie deficit. So instead, take a smarter approach and lift weights 2 to 4 times a week like Victor did right here. He came to us primarily with just a running background and had never lifted weights before in his life, and you can see the progress that he's made. Or one of our clients, Natalie, who came to us doing a lot of HIIT boot camp classes. Now she walks and she strength trains 3 to 4 days a week, and you can see her and her belly fat broke up. So you can see this works. Now, when you're lifting weights, there's a few key points I want you to remember. 30 to 60 minutes of lifting weights is more than enough to see progress. Again, we're trying to keep this sustainable. You should be lifting heavy in the 5 to 10 rep range. You want to take at least 90 seconds of rest in between your sets. And 4 to 6, maybe 4 to 8 exercises per workout is more than enough. Your exercise does not need to run you into the ground and leave you exhausted. To make progress, and it shouldn't take up five to eight hours per week. And by the way, if you want an exact workout program to follow, you can check out some of our coaching options below in the description, or I even have a free workout program you could download as well. So with the lifting weights, does that mean you should never do cardio? Well, not so fast. Step ten: Extra cardio. I meant what I said in the previous step. Too much cardio is going to backfire. Both physically with causing more hunger and mentally from burning you out. And in this case, cardio is going to work against your fat loss goals, not with it. But cardio can still be used as an effective tool to help you with your calorie deficit, because remember, a calorie deficit is eating less calories than what you burn. So when done in a smart way, it can help you burn more calories without the negative side effects. And here's how you're going to do that. You want to keep your extra cardio to 1 to 3 days a week max. And when you're doing this cardio, it should be 15 to 45 minutes long max. You want to keep this to low intensity where you have a lower heart rate. And this just means if you're tracking your heart rate, you don't want to get above that 60 to 70% of your max heart rate. Or in even simpler terms, You should be able to hold a conversation when you're doing your cardio. If you're out of breath like this, it's too high intensity. And last, this cardio is usually done after you lift weights or on rest days. This will help increase that calorie expenditure and help you get into a calorie deficit without the negative drawbacks from it. So now we have the nutrition portion down. the exercise portion down, let's talk about how we should be tracking some of our progress. Step 11, tracking progress. To lose 20 pounds in 3 months, obviously you need to track your body weight. Yet the mistake people make with tracking their body weight is twofold. Number one, they're tracking it wrong, and number two, that's all they track. So you may have heard you should weigh yourself Once a week, once every 2 weeks, once a month, every day, or not at all. And what we do with our clients is track their weight every day, and here's why. Imagine you're trying to get the average temperature for the month of May. If you only took one day out of each week of the month, what happens if 2 days were abnormally much lower or much higher. The average would be way off because you only have 4 data points out of the entire month versus what if you took the temperature every single day and then took the average for the month? You would have much more accurate data. And the same thing goes for your body weight. You weigh every day to get the data and then figure out the average over the It's not to freak out over it day after day because it doesn't matter what you weighed on Tuesday versus Friday. Just get the data and look at the trends. If you see my body weight chart right here, in this chart I lost 20 pounds over 10 weeks, but you can see I didn't lose weight every single day. There was some ups and downs, but it's just the overall average and the trend. But even beyond body weight, there's more you should be tracking than that, and here's why. A pound of fat weighs the same as a pound of muscle. They're both a pound. Now, muscle is more dense and it's more hard than fat, which means it looks different and it takes up less space on your body, but they both weigh a pound. And so if you lose a pound of fat and gained a pound of muscle, the scale is not going to change But you will look different and your clothes will fit different. So if you only track the scale, you're missing other forms of progress. And this is why for our coaching clients that we have, we take their body weight every day, we do measurements every 2 weeks specifically around their waist measurement, then we will take progress pictures every 4 weeks, and we will track their workout progress— how many sets they're doing, the weight they lifted, those sort of things. And this is the best indicator to know if you're losing fat and building muscle at the same time or not. So now that we know what to track and when, what are the results you can expect to see? Well, that's a great question. Step 12, setting realistic expectations. I know this video has been about losing 20 pounds in 3 months, but you may not necessarily lose 20 pounds in 3 months for various reasons, whether it be the scale fluctuating from water weight, or whether it be from you're building muscle. So the scale might not go down as quickly. Most people just go into their journey with improper expectations, which is a big problem because it causes you to think you're not doing good enough or not seeing progress fast enough, and you end up quitting. I don't want that for you. So what can you expect to see? Well, a sustainable and healthy rate of fat loss progress while also building some muscle at the same time is going to be anywhere from 0.5 to 2 lbs per week on average. So that means somewhere around 6 to 24 lbs in a 3-month time span, of course along with the measurement changes and the progress picture changes we talked about earlier. Now, can you do everything in your power to ensure you lose weight as quick as possible, sure. But like we talked about earlier, is that really what you want? You might be able to lose weight quicker, but is it worth sacrificing doing hours of cardio or cutting out some of your favorite foods or taking your calories even lower and losing weight quicker just to gain it back later? Again, how we coach our clients is focus less on the actual scale number Focus more on your consistency with the action-based goals that we talked about earlier. And if you're doing that, you will see progress. And whether you lose 20 pounds or 15 pounds or 12 or 8, you're going to be feeling better than where you're at right now and making progress, which isn't really that all that matters. And you'll know every pound you lose, you will keep it off forever. So now that you know what to expect, let's talk about one of the most important parts in your journey. Step 13, your environment and accountability. A lot of people make the mistake when they're trying to lose weight with relying on willpower alone. You think you should just white-knuckle your way through, have more discipline, and just stick with it better. Again, in my opinion, that's the old outdated way of losing weight. Yes, you need some discipline and willpower, but I want you to audit your environment and audit the people around you on your journey. For example, when you get home, on your kitchen counter, do you have nothing but chips and pretzels and cookies? Or do you have apples, oranges, and Greek yogurt packets in the fridge you can easily grab and go? Are you going out on Friday night with your friends drinking, going over your calories, and then being hungover on Saturday so you're not getting up and getting your workout? Or are you going out, still staying in your calories, passing on the drinks, and waking up the next day being able to do the things you need to do? Are you taking some time every Sunday to reflect on your journey and check in with your results and hold yourself accountable? Trust me, this fat loss journey is hard enough as it is. It is so important to have your environment set up for success around you and have the people around you holding you accountable In a positive way, because then you won't have to use so much willpower. It will just be easier to stay on track because you only have so much willpower in a given day. It's one of the things that our clients tell us they appreciate the most about our coaching is that we cheer them on, hold them accountable, and we're somebody in their life that makes their journey easier. So ask yourself how much of your environment and the people around around you are making it easier versus harder, and maybe do less of the stuff that's making it harder. Do more of the stuff that's making it easier. Watch how much more progress you will make. And if you want to make your journey easier by getting a laid-out plan you can follow and having an expert coach hold you accountable, you can click the link in the description for our coaching options, or you can watch this video here to learn the best fast food chains that you can go to and still stay in a calorie deficit to lose fat.