The Mindset of PERMANENT Fat Loss
The difference between gaining the weight back and staying lean
Happy Monday!
Today at a glance:
Breaking down the mindset of staying lean permanently (not for 12 weeks) using the best analogy I’ve come across.
Fun news: after YEARS of procrastinating and justifying (literally), I have started a YouTube channel.
I’ve uploaded 2 videos that I’m sure I’ll look back on in the future as very awkward.
Here’s to getting better.
My latest one is a vlog outlining my current sad diet I’m using to starve the last bit of fat off of my body.
If you’re curious about an update on my competition prep progress, check that out here:
Here’s a fact you might find surprising:
People actually don’t suck at fat loss.
Most people who set out to fat are successful —
In the short term.
People can lose fat.
They just can’t do it sustainably.
Dr Layne Norton said it best:
We don’t have a fat loss problem.
We have a fat keeping-off problem.
The operating models we use to lose fat temporarily versus sustainably are completely different.
Anyone can power through an ordeal if there’s an end date in sight.
Restrictive diets, sad salads, and daily boot camps — these can be endured for 12 weeks.
But it’s much harder to establish a forever plan.
A set of habits and behaviours that keep you lean (not just get you lean).
The most important aspect of the Forever Plan is the fundamental attitude you approach eating with.
It’s not about cutting out carbs. It’s not about the latest fad diet.
It is a food mindset.
The single biggest problem we (as a society) face with fat loss is that we are 100% focused on short-term solutions, and we completely neglect the long-term mindset shift that needs to happen.
People who manage to stay lean have upgraded their mindset toward food, and I'll describe what that change looks like to the best of my ability.
I’m going to do so using the best analogy I’ve come across: finances.
The person who has learned to stay lean has effectively learned to budget their “food finances.”
They’ve also ideally optimized their financial health and given themselves a salary increase.
And to be clear, when I talk about people who stay lean I’m not talking about naturally lean and skinny people.
They don’t have to do anything.
Naturally skinny people struggle to put on weight (which can be a pain if they want to build muscle).
I’m talking about people who, left to their own intuition, would be fatter than they would like to be and who employ intentional strategies to shift their behavior so that they can live life in the body they want.
Full disclosure — I’ve never been obese.
I don’t have an epic story of losing 100 lbs and keeping it off.
But I am someone who, for the most part, “stays lean” according to the definition I provided.
If left to my eating intuition, even with lifting weights 4-5x per week, I’d be at 18 - 22% body fat.
And while I don’t regularly go for DEXA scans, I estimate that I keep a consistent 12 - 15% body fat for the most part unless doing something more drastic (like prepping for a show) or spending Xmas vacation at my parent’s house…
The first time I heard the financial analogy for body composition I found it very useful, so if it’s the first time you’ve heard it, I hope you find the same.
Income and Expenses
Getting and staying lean is exactly like balancing your budget.
Your income is your Total Daily Energy Expenditure, all the energy (measured in calories) that you burn in a day.
Your expenses are your consumption. If something has energy and you put it in your body, it counts as an expense.
The principle of being financially responsible looks the same for everybody: it means you should not be spending (consuming) more than you earn (burn).
However, this will vary drastically between people because, just as with finances, there is massive variation in energy incomes.
For example, when training for the Olympics, Michael Phelps had an energy income of around 10,000 calories per day.
This meant that he was able to consume his now famous “Michael Phelps” diet without going into any energy debt — he was eating this much to support his training.
Compare this income to 45-year-old sedentary women with thyroid complications.
This individual may have an income of only about 1200 - 1500 calories to work with.
This is an important concept to grasp because critics of energy expenditure will use topics like “hormones” or thyroid complications to assert that “calories in vs. calories out” isn’t true.
The truth is that calorie balance always matters, but underlying health complications can drastically alter your energy income (TDEE).
Now, imagine that you had to save a significant amount of money over the next 6 months, but with a catch:
You don’t know how much anything costs.
You don’t know how much you earn.
Sounds nearly impossible, right?
Yet this is the challenge people who try to lose fat (which is like saving money) face if they don’t understand their energy finances.
You don’t have to track everything to the calorie, but if you have no idea how much you burn in a day and no idea how much you eat, you’re making it hard on yourself.
Energy Debt and Increasing Your Salary
With the income and expenses analogy in place, let’s expand it to include debt and increasing your salary.
Body fat is energy debt.
It accumulates as a result of having spent more than your energy income for an extended period of time.
Yes, maybe there are some genuine reasons that you have a compromised energy income.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that you are lazy or stupid.
But if you carry excess body fat, you have consumed more energy than you’ve burned for a substantial period of time.
This is as irrefutable as claiming that someone with credit card debt has spent more than they’ve earned.
Losing fat is paying down your energy debt.
You have to enter a period of earning more than you spend, and how long you need to do this will depend on how much energy debt you have.
But here’s an important note: there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
The process of paying down your debt may be tough and feel a bit limited.
In real life, when someone is paying down debt, there are no vacations, no dinners out, and no frivolous expenses.
But once the debt is paid down, as long as they don’t default back to the same behaviour that got them in debt, they do have some more room to play.
For our purpose, paying down energy debt it being in a calorie deficit.
You cannot lose fat without being in a calorie deficit — losing fat and a calorie deficit are synonymous.
You have 2 levers to work with to create a calorie deficit:
You can increase your movement (which is increasing your income), or you can reduce your calories (lower your expenses).
Most people do a combination of both.
Hence, the typical fat loss advice: move more and eat less.
But the “move more and eat less” advice, while mostly sound, is far from perfect.
It falls short in a number of ways, including that it fails to address one of the most powerful aspects of staying lean:
Working more hours vs raising your salary
Here’s another part of this analogy I want to introduce:
More hours vs raising your salary.
If you approach burning more energy by doing more—more steps, more cardio—this is like working overtime to save money.
But it doesn’t scale very well, and pretty quickly, you’ll run into a limit on how far you can push this.
But something that does scale is earning more per hour.
For our energy analogy, earning more comes in the form of lifting weights & building muscle.
Key takeaway coming:
The more muscle you have, the more your metabolism increases.
You’ll burn more energy while you sleep when you have more muscle.
And not just that — you’ll burn more energy all the time.
You’ll build a body that requires more fuel.
You’ll burn more during cardio sessions, at the gym, going for walks, and watching TV.
This is why lifting weights is the best training to do to improve body composition.
While cardio burns more calories at the level of individual gym sessions, when you lift weights, you work on increasing your energy salary.
The other big way we can increase our energy salary is by eating a high-protein diet.
A high-protein diet is crucial for building lean mass (and increasing energy salary), but protein has a further benefit: it has a strong thermodynamic effect.
Up to 30% of the calories you consume from protein can be burned off by digesting that protein.
That may not seem like much, but let’s crunch the numbers here.
If you eat 200g of protein per day, that’s 800 calories of protein.
Up to about ~225 calories of those 800 can be burned through digesting the protein.
That’s nearly a half pound per week!
That’s over 20 lbs per year.
So, when you eat a high-protein diet and choose weight lifting as your primary form of exercise, you are increasing your energy salary.
Disposable Income
Your income is your TDEE.
Your expenses are everything you consume.
You can increase your income by lifting weights and eating a high-protein diet.
Now, let’s go over the last element of the analogy: disposable income.
This is the part that truly separates the mindset of people who stay lean from the permanently chubby.
You don’t just want to spend your energy budget on whatever.
You want to prioritize important nutrition that allows your body to function at its best.
You want to get enough micronutrients, protein, and fiber.
Prioritizing solid nutrition with your energy income is paying your bills.
You’re not going to blow your check on pizza and donuts — you have to pay the rent or mortgage.
Phone bills, daycare, subscriptions.
You have to take care of the important stuff before you have fun.
If you stick to your budget, optimize your earning potential and stay organized, you have some income left over after you’ve paid the important bills.
This is your disposable income.
It works the exact same way with food.
If you have room in your energy budget after you’ve hit your protein goal and eaten plenty of micronutrients and fiber, anything you can fit in that remaining space is not unhealthy.
Going over your energy budget and adding energy debt is unhealthy.
Neglecting protein and nutrition to fit in junk is unhealthy.
But spending the leftover room you have after you’ve prioritized what is important is not unhealthy.
But most people, as with real-life disposable income, have a fairly limited amount of room to play here.
The main difference between someone who gains fat and someone who stays lean comes down to how they treat their disposable income.
Let’s imagine a financial example:
Take 2 people: one irresponsible spender and one responsible spender.
They’re both considering a jacket they like at a department store.
It’s an expensive jacket, and neither person needs it.
The jacket is flashy and stylish but not functional.
The irresponsible spender thinks:
“I like the jacket.”
“The jacket looks good on me.“
“I have the means to leave the store with the jacket (a credit card).”
So they get the jacket.
They don’t worry about paying off their credit card in the future; their thought process is only about how they feel in the present moment.
The responsible spender, on the other hand, enters a process of self-negotiation.
They think to themselves:
“Can I comfortably afford this jacket?”
“Is it really worth the price tag?”
“How much will I wear it?”
“Will this make the rest of my budget uncomfortably tight?”
Important point:
The responsible spender may indeed buy the jacket.
If they can afford it, if they truly like it and believe it will be worth it, they’ll buy it.
They just won’t buy it willy-nilly.
This thought process is the difference between lean people and fat people.
The permanently lean person sees consumption as a finite resource, limited by their energy salary.
When faced with an expensive purchase (donuts at the office, going out for a pizza), the lean person engages in a process of self-negotiation similar to that of the responsible spender.
The lean person considers her energy budget, remaining meals, and the amount she earned that day and that week (TDEE).
And most importantly, she asks whether the food is worth the expensive price tag.
“Is this worth it?” isn’t a question you ask about food when you’re not looking at it as a limited resource.
Overweight people ask:
“Do I want it right now?”
“Do I have the means to eat it?”
And if the answer is yes, they eat it.
When you embrace a permanently lean lifestyle, you consider whether eating something is worth the cost of its calories.
Whether it’s good enough to consume your precious disposable income.
Justifying the Sacrifice
Let’s address the obvious issue here:
This sounds stressful.
Much easier to just eat for fun and not worry about this.
And there is an entire movement that is popularizing that message.
From what I can tell, the core message behind the body positivity movement is that you should relax and eat what you want — feed your body whatever you want and don’t let it stress you out.
That sounds much more fun.
I want to introduce the last piece of the analogy here:
Imagine you have a good friend who is in debt.
They have a terrible habit of buying things they can’t afford, their credit card debt is racking up, and you see it heading to a bad place.
What do you want for this person?
Do you want them to continue having short-term fun and making more purchases?
Or do you want them to adopt more painful habits in the short term to aid their long-term health?
If you truly care about them, you’ll want the latter.
You’ll recognize that, yes, sticking to a budget is more work and less fun than simply buying whatever you want.
But it’s in this person's best interest for the long term.
You wouldn’t give them the advice to simply buy what they want when they want.
You’d tell them they need to stick to a budget.
You’d tell them that out of love.
It’s the same thing with food.
To be clear, these aren’t the ramblings of some ice-cold food hater who lives for nothing besides lifting and surviving on chicken breast and broccoli.
I loooooove eating.
Don’t you think I’d rather just eat whatever I want when I want, without considering the consequences?
You’re damn right I would.
And I did, for years!
What I’m saying here isn’t hypothetical—I lived as an “irresponsible energy spender” for years of my life.
This is what kept me over 20% body fat, hating the way I looked and setting myself up for health problems that would only get worse as I age.
It is easier to be fat in the short term.
It is more comfortable to be fat in the short term.
However, it is not the right choice if you care about creating a long-term strategy for health and vitality.
You can accept the responsibility of staying accountable to the reality of your energy expenses with the full knowledge that, yes, it would be more fun to “feed your body what it wants.”
Or you can cater to your base impulses and justify the sacrifice of your health, vitality, and potential to a vaguely concocted facade of “self-care.”
This is the choice.
It’s the choice for all of us who naturally default to being less lean than we’d like to be.
I won’t lie to you — choosing to be lean is harder than being fat.
But when you step out and view your choices in the long term…
It’s not really a choice at all.