10 fat loss rules have been going round again this week.
They’re mostly right. They’re in the wrong order.
The two that decide everything sit at the bottom where nobody gets to. I’ve put them first.
Everyone says it the other way round. Lose the fat and I’ll feel better.
Flip it. Fix the sleep, the stress, the food, and the fat comes off far easier.
There’s a trial that shows why. Ten adults, average age 41, ran the same moderate calorie deficit twice. Once on 8.5 hours in bed, once on 5.5.
Fat loss dropped by 55% on the short sleep. Loss of fat-free mass went up 60%. Hunger rose, and the body shifted toward burning less fat. ResearchGate
Nedeltcheva et al., Annals of Internal Medicine 2010
Same diet. Same deficit. Half the result.
The month you were disciplined and nothing moved was probably the month nobody slept.
Ten people, fourteen days, one lab. Small. Effects vary. But you’ve lived this one.
Set the goal at “train every day” and you’re finished by the first missed day.
You miss Tuesday, feel like you blew it, and stop. I’ve watched it happen to hundreds of people and it has nothing to do with character.
Pick the version you can still hit on your worst week. Then build from there.
Five minutes on a bad Tuesday beats forty minutes you didn’t do.
You burn far less in a session than the machine claims. That’s the easy half.
Here’s the harder half. A 2016 study measured total energy expenditure against activity levels and found it plateaus above moderate activity rather than climbing in a line — the body appears to adapt and hold total burn inside a narrow band. Brookbush Institute
Pontzer et al., Current Biology 2016
Your body doesn’t add the workout on top. It quietly takes some of it back elsewhere.
Train anyway. Just stop expecting the session to pay for dinner.
You’ll hate it. Do it once and never again.
Researchers took people who swore they were eating 1,200 calories and getting nowhere, then measured it properly over 14 days. Reported: around 1,028 a day. Actual: 2,081. Metabolism came back within 5% of predicted. Semantic Scholar
When the same group was fed a controlled meal and asked to recall it a day later, they remembered roughly 20% less than they ate — while their portion estimates were accurate. Frontiers
It was memory. Not lying, not weakness.
Most people find they’re eating far more fat and carbs than they thought, and almost no protein.
Ten people in that group, mostly women. Small study. The pattern has held up since.
Eat less energy than you burn. Keto, fasting and low-carb are all different roads to that same place.
A 12-month trial put 609 adults on healthy low-fat or healthy low-carb and found no significant difference in weight change. It also checked whether genotype or insulin secretion predicted who’d do better on which. Neither did.
Participants were 18 to 50, so half of you weren’t in that room.
Pick the road you can still be walking in month nine.
Bakers need the rules. Weigh it, log it, follow the numbers.
Cooks need two loose habits and an eyeball. Give a cook a food scale and they quit in nine days.
Neither one is better. Pick wrong and you’re done by week two, and you’ll blame yourself instead of the method.
You already know which you are. You’ve known since school.
Every rule above is true on average. How much lands in your body depends on numbers nobody has measured.
Thyroid. Iron. Vitamin D. Fasting glucose. Inflammation markers. Those decide how much of a deficit turns into fat loss and how much just makes you tired at 4pm.
That’s what I do differently. I read your blood test first, then build your nutrition around what it actually shows.
Not a template with your name at the top. Your numbers.
A generic plan is a guess in a nice font. It might fit you. Nobody checked.
You send your results, we get on a call, I build the plan and review it every month as your life changes.
No recent test? You still start. I call you, ask what matters, build from your answers, and rebuild it when your results land.
20 person is what I can carry, because I read every result and write every plan myself.
I’m a coach, not a doctor. I don’t diagnose or treat anything, and your results should go to your GP too.
Which of these six have you already tried and abandoned? Tell me in the comments and I’ll tell you which one you gave up on too early.
Because the people who lose it and keep it off are the ones who kept training.
The largest dataset on long-term maintenance is a registry tracking thousands of people who lost weight and held it. High physical activity shows up as one of the consistent behaviours in that group. Around 90% report exercising roughly an hour a day.
A ten-year follow-up found most of the loss stayed off, and that drops in activity and self-monitoring tracked with regain.
Thomas et al., ten-year NWCR follow-up
People volunteer for that registry after they’ve already succeeded, so it’s observational and self-selected. It can’t prove training causes maintenance.
What it does tell you: almost nobody who kept it off did it without moving.
The food takes it off. The training keeps it gone.
You’ve been going three or four times a week for months and nothing changed.
You have no plan. With no structure you lift the same weight every week, and the same weight asks your body for nothing new.
Adding a little each week is the whole mechanism. That’s it.
→ Write down what you lift. Two lines on your phone
→ Start at 6 reps, add one a week until you reach 8
→ At 8, go heavier and drop back to 6
→ Repeat
That’s progression. It’s not complicated and almost nobody does it.
You don’t need six or seven. Your total work across the week matters more than how many days you spread it over.
And the fix most people miss is rest between sets.
Twenty-one trained men were assigned to short or long rest intervals for eight weeks. The longer rests produced greater gains in both strength and muscle size. SCIRP
Schoenfeld et al., J Strength Cond Res 2016
Twenty-one young trained men. Narrow sample, and I won’t oversell it.
The practical read is safe though. Ninety seconds to two minutes gives you a harder second set, and the second set is where the work happens.
Rushing between sets makes you breathless. It doesn’t make you stronger.
Active five days. Structured exercise four. Three of those sweaty. Strength train two. One session where you push hard.
It’s a good formula. It’s also the reason this list is dangerous if you read it top to bottom.
Look at rule 2 again. Pick a goal you can hit on a bad week.
Now look at this one. Near-daily structured training, for someone with ten minutes and a kid who wakes at five.
Rule 2 was written for your life. This one was written for someone who’s never had to leave a session because a toddler threw up.
So scale it. Active five days means walking, not sessions. Strength train two. Everything else is a bonus you take when the week gives it to you.
That version survives a bad month. The full version doesn’t.
I film short clips on Substack Notes most days — home workouts, mobility, the same ones I send my private clients. The two-minute rest thing is up there this week because nearly everyone gets it wrong.
Rule 4 gives you the strategy. You’re not eating badly. You’re eating more than you remember, mostly in the gaps.
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