THE SIX-STAGE FAT LOSS FRAMEWORK

You need to be in a genuine calorie deficit, that part isn't up for debate. What decides whether you keep your muscle or burn straight through it along with the fat is how big that deficit actually is.

I coach people to lose somewhere around 1 to 2lbs a week. Any faster than that and you're not dieting anymore, you're just losing weight, muscle included, and it tends to come straight back the second the diet ends.

One of the most underestimated tools for building that deficit is something most people already do every day without thinking about it, walking. Steps are one of the biggest levers you have for creating space in a deficit without cutting food any further, and almost nobody uses it properly.

This isn't about jumping straight to 10,000 steps from a standing start. It's about knowing your current baseline and nudging it up in stages as the diet goes on. If you're averaging 5,000 steps a day right now, the first target is 7,000, not 10,000. Once that's comfortable and normal, push to 8,000. Keep climbing like that through the diet and a lot of people find themselves comfortably at 10,000 or beyond by the end of it, without it ever feeling like a big jump.

This is the one number I don't let clients negotiate on. Whatever the calories land on, protein gets set first and protected all the way through.

For men, aim for roughly a gram of protein per pound of the bodyweight you're aiming for. Most men training regularly land somewhere between 160 and 220 grams a day depending on that target weight.

For women, the same principle holds, a gram per pound of goal bodyweight, it just tends to land lower in absolute terms because of the bodyweight difference. Most women training regularly are looking at somewhere between 110 and 160 grams a day. If anything, women are more likely to be underdosing protein relative to calories than men are, so don't be afraid to sit at the higher end of that range.

Cardio doesn't build the shape you're chasing, it just burns calories on the way there. What actually protects your physique while you diet is resistance training that keeps getting harder, not longer, and it needs to happen often enough to matter.

Four to five sessions a week is where I start almost everyone, resistance training prioritised well above cardio. For men, a four day week usually runs push, pull, legs, upper, and a five day week runs push, pull, legs, upper, lower, giving legs the extra dedicated day. For women, a four day week I default to lower, upper, lower, upper, doubling up on legs across the week without needing a fifth session to do it.

If week eight in the gym looks identical to week one, you're not training, you're just moving. Add a rep, add a set, add weight, something has to progress or your body has no reason to hold on to the muscle.

Willpower runs out by mid afternoon for most people, that's not a character flaw, it's just how it works. So I stop relying on it and redesign the environment instead, minimise the temptation and you minimise the number of times a day you're relying on discipline to hold the line.

What's actually sat in the kitchen decides more than what's in your head. If the food that derails you isn't in the house, it's not a decision you have to make fifteen times a day, it's already made for you. Staying diligent isn't about being stronger willed than everyone else, it's about giving yourself fewer moments where willpower is the only thing standing between you and the plan.

Most people say they want shredded when what they actually want is lean enough to feel good in photos and in their clothes. Those are two completely different diets, with two completely different costs.

Chasing a leaner state than you actually need burns you out for nothing. Decide honestly what the end goal really looks like before you commit to how brutal the process needs to be.

The diet isn't finished the day the fat comes off, that's actually where most people undo the work. They stop weighing in, stop tracking, stop training with intent, and wonder why it's all crept back within a few months.

This is the part most people get wrong, and it's not really a physical problem, it's a mental one. After weeks of being disciplined with a deficit, the instinct is to either keep cutting because it's working, or drop everything the day the goal's hit. Both are mistakes, and this is where you need to be just as accurate and just as diligent as you were on day one.

The way you come out of a fat loss phase properly is by working your way back up to maintenance calories gradually, not all at once, while letting the fatigue you've built up over the diet come back down with it. From there you've got two honest options, stay at maintenance and hold what you've built, or move into a structured calorie surplus if building muscle is actually the next goal. Either is fine, what's not fine is drifting upward with no plan and calling it maintenance.