Putting it all together.
Congratulations. If you made it this far I know you are serious about your health and fitness journey. This is the final step! Putting it all together and executing the game plan.
Let’s take it day by day:
Day 1: Calculated Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) and estimated how many calories we should eat per day.
It’s important that you understand the value of not under eating. The idea is to eat and train your body to eat as if you were at your ideal weight. If you eat less then you are training your body to eat as if it were at that weight. Understanding this formula should help you realize that when you first start you will lose the most amount of weight because you are at your heaviest. As you lose weight your BMR slows down because you get smaller. Until you reach your ideal weight you should still lose weight. If you wanted to keep the same rate of weight loss throughout you’d have to exercise longer because you must create the same deficit somehow.
In the end, stay within a 500-1000 calorie deficit. Anything greater can put you in starvation mode where your body will crash and you’ll suffer a rebound putting you back to where you started or worse. My recommendation is to mix up your caloric deficits. I’d go for the big deficits 1-2 times per week. 600-700 1-2 times per week. 500 1-2 times per week. And do one maintenance day per week. This is the key to ensure you achieve long term and permanent weight loss.
Day 2: Setting up macros
Of all your macros protein is the one that does not change. It’ll remain close to your ideal body weight at all times. It will only change if you decide to change what type of body you desire. Carbs are important but you can go low carb and it wouldn’t be a problem. If you are borderline diabetic you should be low carbing. Unless you a professional athlete and need fully loaded muscle glycogen stay at about 75% of your maximum need. The less carbs you eat the more fats you can eat. Fats are more satiating so they may help you stay on track a lot more efficiently.
Day 3: Choosing your training program
Training programs should vary and should be changed periodically. My advice is to change up your training program every 4-6 weeks. You don’t have to enter into a powerlifting or olympic lifting program but you should be striving to be stronger.
For example, the first 4 weeks you may do all the workouts with 10-15 pound weights. Maybe a 15 lb kettlebell. The next 4 weeks you should try using 20-25 pound dumbbells and a 25 lb kettlebell. Eventually you’ll find weights that are extremely challenging and you should be much closer to your goal.
The thing about strength training is that you’ll get stronger no matter what without executing a true strength training program the first 12-16 weeks. Eventually you’ll have to enter into a true strength training program if that’s your goal or if your goal is to be athletic muscular or muscular.
Day 4 – Supplementation
Supplementation goes hand in hand with nutrition. You want to eat good wholesome food and not rely on fast food or packaged food. Make the best attempt to eat natural organic foods. This may be very hard for some and is where multivitamins play their biggest role.
What I want you to keep track off is how you feel before you started taking multivitamins vs how you feel a few weeks after you take multivitamins. Things you may realize is that you have more energy, better focus, healthier skin and just overall better mood. Pay close to attention because some you won’t realize unless you are evaluating your well-being on a weekly and monthly basis.
Evaluating and Progress Reports
You should be doing a lot of self evaluating. Take before and after pictures because there’ll come a time when looking at yourself in the mirror won’t yield results (in your mind). You’ll be losing inches of your waist, clothes will fit bigger, and yet you won’t see it. Take tape meaurements of your waist and hips. If those are going down you know for a fact your body is changing. If you can find someone or somewhere to take monthly body fats do it. My advice is that you try to get the same person to provide the test. Human error is unfortunately a very common thing.
The biggest fear anyone can have is hitting a plateau. Plateaus are normal but as long as you keep training hard and keeping track of everything you can surpass any plateau. If you hit a plateau it may be due to something you are missing. Let me give you an example.
Let’s say you start at 250lbs and your goal is to be 150lbs. At first you may have incorrectly set your BMR goal to be for a 200 pound person. This means that you’ll eventually reach the 200 lb mark but you’ll hit a plateau because you are eating towards that BMR. You think that your plan doesn’t work anymore and that you hit a plateau. Many will feel frustrated and give up. In reality, it was a simple miscalculation. As soon as you make the adjustment to eat like a 150lb person you will start losing weight again.
Conclusion:
That’s it! You are done! I am extremely excited for you because I know that you are going to achieve your dream body. You have all the knowledge, tools, and strategies to help you get there. Remember, just because you have a goal to look a certain way today it does not mean you may want to look another way 2 years from now. In that case just re-do the numbers and work towards you new goal.
Once again, thank you so much for putting your trust in my system. I leave you with my quote:
“Execute the game plan, experience the adaptations, repeat.”