Q&A: Improving Dietary Discipline

Question: Have you ever had clients that wanted to lose fat and benefited from the strength gains and global conditioning of a HIT program, but weren’t disciplined enough to follow a modest caloric deficit and therefore did not reach their aesthetic goals? If so, how did you get them to snap out of it, if at all?

The reason I ask this, is because it seems the majority of people that I train, (and even others who undergo a training regimen) have little success with fat loss. They are dedicated and train hard, but it always comes down to the same thing: they don’t watch what they eat and how much they eat.

Answer: This is what I tell people who want me to train them for fat loss:

The biggest factor in losing fat is your diet. A proper exercise program will help you lose fat by maintaining or increasing your lean body mass and metabolic rate, but exercise alone isn’t enough. You have to restrict your calorie intake and you have to eat adequate protein and appropriate amounts of carbs and fat for your body, preferably from high quality food sources. If you are willing to follow the guidelines I give you consistently for as long as it takes you will lose fat. I can guarantee the guidelines work because everybody else I’ve trained who has followed them has been successful. I can not, however, guarantee that you will be successful because although I can make sure you have effective workouts while you are here with me I can not follow you around the rest of the time controlling what you do or don’t eat. As hard as the workouts are, for many people sticking to a diet is even harder. So, if you want to know whether you are going to be successful you just need to ask yourself how badly you want it and how hard you are willing to work for it.

I will teach you tactics and strategies to help you follow your diet, to simplify it, to make it a little easier and a little faster, but it will never be easy or fast. Losing fat takes hard work, consistency, and time. There are no secrets, no tricks, no shortcuts, and no easy or quick ways to lose fat.

Hard Work + Consistency + Time = Results

Some people fail because they don’t want to make the hard choices or do the work required to achieve their goals. They want the results, but aren’t willing to do what is necessary to earn them. Some people fail because they have an unrealistic expectation of how fast they can lose fat and become frustrated and quit when the fat doesn’t come off as quickly as they hoped. If you want to be successful you need to understand and accept two things right now; first, you are going to have to make hard choices, and second, depending on how much fat you want to lose it may take you a long time. Also, once you lose the fat and build the body you want you have to keep working to keep it. You don’t ever get to go back to eating the way you did that caused you to gain too much fat to begin with unless you want to gain it back, and after all the work you put into losing it I hope you don’t ever do that. If you want to continue to look like someone who eats healthy and exercises you have keep eating healthy and exercising.

Ultimately this comes down to motivation, and what motivates you depends on your priorities. You have to understand what  your long term end goals are, the reasons you want to lose fat, build muscle, get fit, etc. Specifically, you have to ask yourself what it is about your life that will be better as a result of being more physically fit and attractive (I could give you a lot of reasons, but they have to be yours). So, I want you to do three things.

First, think about why you want to lose fat, improve your physical appearance and fitness, etc. Write down every reason you can think of. Then, look over all of the reasons you’ve written and for each one of those write down all the ways those things will improve your life. These ends goals are your motivation, the things you want to think about when having to make hard choices or when you become frustrated with the process.

Second, take these goals and use them to create a mission statement for yourself that includes what you want to accomplish, why it is important to you, and how you’re going to do it. Write it down.

Last, makes copies of your mission statement. Post one somewhere you will see it every day as a reminder. Give one to me so I can better understand your goals and help motivate you and keep you on track. Give copies to your family and friends and ask that they help by providing encouragement on support. If you’re having a hard time talk with me or one of these people about it so we can help.

Understand it will take hard work and time, but that you can do it, the effort is worth it, and that you can count on your trainer, family, and friends for support.

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  • Steven Turner May 11, 2016 @ 16:31

    Hi Drew,

    I am glad that you said lose “fat” and not just lose weight. I think that to some extent losing weight can be fairly easy. But losing fat should be the main goal not just losing weight.

    Most of the fad diets industry only mentions losing weight and you have to use some magical powder that they are selling. Many people will lose weight quickly but these types of weight loss programs are unsustainable with people putting the weight back on just as quickly once they can’t maintain the diet.

    The other problem people find is that using the increase physical activity (cardio/aerobics) when you ask people how they feel after the physical activity session most will say that they are feeling ravishingly hungry. Because of the hunger feeling most will eat some type of fast food. In effect actually increasing their calorie intake.

    HIT training is the most effective and efficient way to increase muscle mass and lose fat. From my experiences with HIT I don’t have that hunger feeling after my HIT workout.

    I think that when it comes to losing weight many people are totally confused by all the misinformation of the food and diet industry. The confusion can make it very hard for the everyday person to know what to actually do to lose fat.

  • Thierry May 13, 2016 @ 9:21

    Hey Drew,
    I’ve snatched up and read some of The Fat Loss Breakthrough by Dr Darden. According to him Negative emphasised reps are superior for training, when it comes to both fat loss and muscle gain. I’ve read your articles on negatives too, was wondering on your thoughts on Negative emphasised reps at present, has it changed, and if it’s that good of a technique/style of training, would you recommend it for every trainee, assuming it delivers superior results.

    • Drew Baye May 17, 2016 @ 12:12

      Hey Thierry,

      I wrote about negative emphasized reps and Darden’s 30/30/30 reps in Very Slow Versus Normal Negative-Emphasized Repetitions and my thoughts haven’t changed much since then. Of the few studies that have been performed comparing positive emphasized and negative emphasized reps most show an advantage to emphasizing the negative and I’ve had good results with it when I’ve used it with myself and clients, but I haven’t seen a huge difference between these and normal reps.

      • Thierry May 19, 2016 @ 7:09

        Hey thanks a lot for your reply! Yeah I actually read the posts, all three of them, was just wondering if your thoughts have changed. Just swapped to a 3/6 cadence to mix things up and see how I respond.

        On a side note, is elements of form coming out soon?

        • Drew Baye May 23, 2016 @ 16:39

          Hey Thierry,

          You’re welcome, and Elements of Form will be out soon.

  • Ahmed May 31, 2016 @ 23:26

    It is easy for mesomorphs to say that fat loss is easy etc. Their body type is such that they can gain muscle and lose fat easily. For other body types, this is not so. A pure endo or even someone with a little endo traits will find it impossible to shed fat. The body will cling to it despite dieting etc. It is not a matter of will, it is a matter of genetics. It is similar to how ectos find it hard to gain muscle despite rigorous training. It is all about body types at the end of the day.

    • Drew Baye Jun 6, 2016 @ 12:42

      Hey Ahmed,

      Genetic factors influence how easily a person can gain or lose fat, but the same rules still apply to everyone and even someone who has great difficulty losing fat can do so if they eat properly.