Ignore the drama about carbs, cardio and detoxes. Instead, follow these 5 Rules to Fat Loss to create a sustainable healthy lifestyle.

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We make nutrition much harder than it needs to be.

This is born from the pseudoscience peddlers out there trying to convince you to skip meals, or foods, or even food groups.

• One person says carbs make you fat.
• Another preaches about fat making you fat.
• And yet a third will tell you it doesn’t matter as long as you are eating at very specific times throughout the day.
• Or maybe preaching why you shouldn’t eat at all.

It’s confusing as shit.

Nutrition coaches argue over the most mundane things

Especially when it comes to providing actionable (and healthy) tips on what you should be eating to see results. Today we’re going to do what I do best: simplify things and make sense of it all.

While it is true that nutrition coaches don’t agree on a lot of things, we do agree on some core principles. Many of which are included in these five rules to fat loss.

Let’s get into it.

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The Five Rules of Fat Loss that will serve you for life

When all else fails:

The kids are being jerks.

Your work inbox looks like a train wreck.

Life is handing you a bag of zebra shit.

Turn back to these rules as your baseline to get back on track.

If you embrace these rules to fat loss, you’ll learn the proper way to balance your diet, avoid restriction and end the yo-yo dieting cycle of suck.

Eat slowly

How often do you find yourself eating at your desk? Performing another “working lunch?” Mindlessly chewing during the regular “lunch and learn,” conference call, or in the middle of a meeting?

And how often do you race to eat that lunch so you can direct your full attention back to your work, call or meeting?

Slow down when you eat.

Here’s a challenge for you: set a timer for 20 minutes and try to fill your meal to meet that entire timeframe.

Why 20 minutes?

Because it can take that long for your body and mind to sync up with the signal that you are completely satisfied with your meal.

If you hastily inhale your food without much thought, you could be overeating without really knowing it.

Your body is smarter than you give it credit for.

Calorie counting is not required for weight loss, maintenance or muscle gain. Sure, it is a useful tool that I encourage everyone to try for a short period of time.

But that’s largely because we’ve screwed up our portion sizes and no longer sit mindfully at meal time that calorie counting can become a bit of a built-in accountability partner.

If you want to know how to calorie count for fat loss, you should check out my guide to setting up your macros for a calorie deficit.

Even with calorie counting, I highly encourage you to practice this slow eating skill. It’s the baseline for the fat loss habits to follow. Once you develop this one, everything else is so much easier.

Stop eating when you reach 80-percent fullness

This one takes time. And underscores the importance of the first rule.

Your goal is to avoid that feeling after mealtime of being horribly stuffed with a food baby of bloat and gas. Gross.

When you are slowly and mindfully eating, you’re much more in tune with your body and mind. You can understand when those hunger cues and satiety signals start to register.

As a result, you’ll be able to stop eating when you are truly full and satisfied.

Once you learn that slow eating skill, you can adapt it to stopping at 80-percent full.

A calorie deficit is how weight loss occurs. That means to eat fewer calories than your body requires to maintain its weight.

If eating and stopping at true satiety is your body’s way of saying “this is how much I need to eat to keep me happy,” then stopping just shy of that at 80-percent full is how we create a bit of a buffer for a deficit without giving it much thought.

But you wouldn’t be able to develop this skill without learning the baseline habit from eating slowly. That’s why these two rules to fat loss go hand-in-hand.

Add protein to each meal

If you didn’t see this one coming, then you simply haven’t been following my content long enough.

The benefits of protein are seemingly endless:

• Most filling macronutrient
• Preserves lean muscle tissue when in a calorie deficit
• Burns more calories in digestion than carbs or fats

For those reasons alone, many people can simply eat the same amount of food, but make the shift to higher protein portions and end up losing weight.

In fact, many of my clients start with this protein habit and see measurable results without making very many tweaks to their overall diet.

How much protein do you need?

Let’s keep it simple. Aim for a quarter of your plate at mealtime to be dedicated to a leaner protein source.

It ends up looking like a portion about the size of the palm of your hand. For many folks, this ends up working out to about 100 to 120 grams of protein per day.

That’s more than enough to help. However, even more can be beneficial, especially if fat loss is the goal. For that, I have a guide to eating more protein for fat loss that you should click through and check out.

Eat your damn veggies

Show me someone who got fat eating nothing but veggies and fruit, and I’ll provide absolutely free coaching to that person for life.

There’s a collection of dogmatic, low-carb mouth breathing influencers who will tell you to avoid fruit because of the sugars.

Just stop. Stop it.

Fruit is an incredible low-calorie companion and perfect for a bridge snack between meals.

I’d much rather you eat an apple, even two apples, over scarfing down an entire bag of pretzels.

And when it comes to vegetables, you should know by now that the importance of eating some leafy green plants at meal time is non-negotiable.

One of my staple go-to meals is the daily Big Ass Salad (or BAS). It’s packed with four to five handfuls of veggies, along with a ton of protein and some healthy fats.

It checks all of the boxes. And it provides almost all of the veggie servings that I need in a day.

If you struggle to eat salads because they are boring, this is more of a “you” problem that we’ll need to fix. You should read my guide to making your salads awesome.

Include some healthy fats

A well-balanced meal will have at least one palm-sized portion of protein, some veggies, a little dose of carbs and then some healthy fats to round it out.

While protein is the most filling macronutrient, fats can help prolong that satiation after meal time.

For many of the keto crowd zealots, the higher fat ratio (upwards of 70-percent of total calories coming from fats) leads to a fullness factor that a newbie dieter has never experienced.

This is largely due to the increased fat intake.

Please do not mistake this for some defense or endorsement of keto. That dietary approach is wholly unnecessary to see any kind of results.

You can eat carbs and still lose weight.

Which leads to the final point:

Don’t be afraid of carbs

Carbohydrates are tasty. Bread. Pasta. Cereal. It’s all good.

And they are all totally fine to include in your diet. Even if weight loss is the goal.

In actuality, carbs are the body’s preferred source of fuel. Not fats.

Tell that to Keto Kevin that keeps preaching about the butter-bacon gods whilst blowing up his cholesterol levels to epic proportions.

Fats are important for hormonal health.

But so are carbs.

Dropping carbs to stupidly low levels can wreck testosterone output for men.

Leptin levels can drop dramatically (making it harder to judge true hunger).

Reproductive hormonal output can slow, or even halt.

In other words: Eat some fucking carbs.

And no, there is no magical ratio of how many carbs to fats you should be eating for weight loss, or muscle gain.

As long as total calories are met and protein is adequately consumed, you can eat high carb or low carb, high fat or low fat and still hit your goals.

Bonus: Enjoy in moderation, but never miss twice

This is one of the first rules that I teach my Lean4Life Academy members.

Food is culture … it’s religion … family … fun … memories … experience.

It’s meant to be enjoyed.

So any influencer or guru who has you restricting foods that you enjoy totally from your diet, deserves to be punched in the pancreas.

You can and should be including your favorite foods in your diet.

It’s just important to know that you can’t always be eating pizza or donuts. But, if you’re following the first five rules of fat loss, you’ll have the room to indulge in moderation.

Embrace the 80/20 Rule

As long as 80-percent of your eating comes from lean proteins, fruits, vegetables, healthy fats and decent starches, the remaining 20 percent of how you eat can go to foods typically regarded as “unhealthy” or off-plan.

The important next step is to remember to enjoy that food mindfully and without guilt, and then get right back on your plan with the next meal.

If you miss a workout, try not to miss the next.

When you break away from the nutritional rules presented here, make sure the next meal is back on track.

If you do just that, and do it consistently, you’ll never have to worry about losing the weight again.

Let me help you learn to apply these 5 rules to fat loss to your fitness lifestyle … 

I’m here to help you out. 

If you have any questions, reach out. I answer all of my emails at pete [at] petecataldo [.] com … Hit me up with the subject line “5 Rules to Fat Loss” and I’ll answer any questions you have to make this work for you.

Or you can hit me up anytime on the socialz on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

If you enjoyed this post, maybe you’d like more knowledge bombs from me. I’d be honored if you join my mailing list to get regular updates every time I post something pretty dope.