I’m not gonna lie, fat loss can be hard…

When I started my fat loss journey it was an absolute struggle and most of my clients come to me feeling the exact same way.

I banged my head up against the wall for years and I genuinely used to believe that people who were lean had something that I didn’t…

Knowing what I know now after losing 60 lbs and keeping it off for well over a decade is that I was wrong.

What I learned is that folks who lose fat and keep it off don’t have some sort of unique quality that you or I don’t, they’re just playing the game differently.

And I’m going to share an important piece of that game with you right now and it has 4 simple and straightforward steps.

The first step is to make your fat loss decision making super obvious, for example…

Start by stocking your fridge, freezer and pantry with nutritious whole food because this way when you go to eat something, those healthy options are obvious because they’re right there staring you in the face.

This visual cue reminds you and reinforces the habit or behaviour that you want to implement.

Also, I’d recommend getting rid of the not so healthy foods that you find especially tempting…

For me those options are things like cookie dough ice cream, peanut m&ms and fuzzy peaches.

Step 1 summed up in a single sentence is…

Make eating the foods that you want to eat incredibly convenient and make eating the foods that you don’t want to eat highly inconvenient.

The second step is to make fat loss attractive, so let’s say that some of your favourite foods are red meat, different types of potatoes, onions, peppers and most fruit…

But you’re not so big on seafood, rice and cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower.

Stock up on options that are the tastiest to you…if you don’t like broccoli, don’t force it just choose something else because if you don’t enjoy the food that you’re eating, your approach by definition is not sustainable.

The third step is to make the concept or idea of progress easy meaning, you probably don’t want to go from zero to hero, for example…

If you’re eating out daily so 7x per week, you don’t have to completely flip the switch and say that you’re not going to eat out at all or ever again…

That would almost certainly be too big of a jump and so we can scale that back to 3 or 4x per week let’s say.

Or maybe you still eat out every day, but you make healthier choices i.e. picking up something like sushi instead of fast food.

When in doubt, make your goal easier because we want to gain momentum and stack wins, even if they’re small ones because small wins compounded over time lead to great results.

Step 4 is to make it satisfying, you can even implement a little reward if you’d like to, for example…

Let’s say that want to make a nutritious home cooked dinner each night this coming week and you do it…awesome and as a reward…

You could pick up a kitchen appliance that you’ve been wanting for a while like an air fryer or a slow cooker.

Now you might be thinking, Marcus…what kind of reward is that?

I would highly recommend implementing rewards that lend themselves to your goal vs. sabotage them, for example…

A kitchen appliance incentivizes you to want to cook more aka to eat healthier, however…

If you reward yourself with something that directly contradicts what you’re working on achieving, it can create some complications…

Because if you reward yourself for making a healthy dinner each night for a week by eating processed food all weekend (I was guilty of that for years)…

Your reward conflicts with your goal being that you’re rewarding yourself for staying on track by going off track,meaning…

It can create this psychological push and pull that may lead to issues down the line, it absolutely did for me.

That’s not to say that you never eat a treat, you can absolutely still indulge here and there and lose fat, we just don’t want to get into this funky contradictory reward setup.

Here’s another really simple way to think about habit building for fat loss…

If you’re ever confused about what to do, just ask yourself what would you obviously not do…this is called inversion.

You wouldn’t stock your fridge, freezer and pantry with your favourite highly processed foods because that would make eating unhealthfully really obvious, easy and attractive right!?

If you wanted to build a habit of working out and you had 2 gym options.

One gym is 6 minutes away from your place and the other is 60 minutes away…

You’re not going to choose to drive 2 hours roundtrip if you could get there and back in less than 15 minutes.

At its core, sustainable habit building is about making behaviours that you want to do as convenient as possible and doing the exact opposite for behaviours that you don’t want to do.

I’m super adamant now about keeping unhealthy foods out of my home because I know myself and it’s not a matter of if I will eat them, it’s when.

Folks often look at me nowadays and think that I have tons of willpower and that couldn’t be further from the truth…

I just make things as easy as possible for myself and that’s without a doubt the biggest difference between my habits now vs. when I was 60 lbs heavier.

There was a super cool study done looking at people that had seemingly high willpower and compared them with people that had seemingly low willpower and what they found was…

The folks with quote unquote ‘high willpower’ actually just used it less and the people with quote unquote ‘low willpower’ used it far more, quick example…

2 people want to use their phone less often, 1 person keeps their phone in a different room (out of sight out of mind) and the other keeps it right next to them everywhere they go…

The individual that doesn’t have their phone in their visual field is going to require far less willpower than the person who has their phone at arm’s reach…

Because the visual cue of seeing your phone reminds you to use it and in comes the need for willpower…but if it’s not there, you don’t have that reminder.

Also, if you’re like me and you tend to reach for your phone simply as a reflex…

If it’s in a different room, ya can’t do that and that interrupts the whole pattern…

You go to grab it, it’s not there and you’re like “oh ya, I don’t want to be on my phone right now”…and ya do something else.

All of a sudden a week or even a few days later you’re using your phone much less.

The same concept applies to your fat loss habits and your food environment.

So, you can use this simple 4 step process to lose fat or build any habit at all.

Make it obvious, oftentimes via visual cues.

Make the habit attractive or in other words, incentivize yourself to want to do it.

Make it easy, so when in doubt set the standard a little lower vs. higher.

And make it satisfying and/or implement a reward of some sort that lends to the outcome you want.

I’ll quote James Clear who laid out a lot of this system for habit building in a book called Atomic Habits…

“People tend not to rise to the level of their expectations, but they instead fall to the level of their systems.”

Create a system and the habit will follow!