Here is the three-month plan to get started losing weight. No fad diets. No crazy workouts. Just practical and actionable strategies that you can start now.

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In the past, when you’ve decided to get started losing weight, you’ve likely cut out all carbs, embraced a diet of nothing but salads and restricted yourself from ever touching that tray of cookies that Tracy brings into the office every Friday.

Likewise, you’ve probably decided it was time to lace up the sneakers and pound the pavement for long bouts of daily cardio. Or perhaps it was more about jumping right into a bootcamp or spin class or CrossFit style ass-kicking regimen that left you questioning humanity with each hour of rigorous effort that turned your body into mush.

If you’re reading this today, then I’m guessing this all or nothing approach didn’t work out too well for you.

But, that’s okay, because it’s not your fault.

You see, you’ve been tricked into thinking that as long as the diet and exercise routines were as miserable as humanly possible, you were doing it right.

That stupid soundbyte, “no pain, no gain” likely echoed through your head every day as you choked down another salad and dragged yourself out of bed for another 5 a.m. bootcamp class.

All in the name of dropping a few pounds.

This stuff isn’t sustainable. It’s a recipe for creating an on-again, off-again cycle of yo-yo dieting that leaves you frustrated and ready to give up altogether.

How do we break this chain of suck? By applying more simple strategies over time. Which is what I’m here to help you with today.

In this article, I’m going to provide a simple-to-follow Three Month Plan to get started losing weight … for good.

If you can follow the simple rules and strategies laid out over the course of this article, you’ll be well on your way to developing a healthier relationship with food and exercise.

You should be able to see meaningful progress that will lead to healthier long-term, sustainable habits.

More importantly, if you read this article, you’ll finally have a solid game plan to help you get out of neutral and start this fat loss body transformation once and for all.

Let’s get into it.

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You see, getting started losing weight is not easy. It’s a long and arduous journey. There are ups and downs and plateaus.

There are a million different diets and workouts and influencers telling you to do a million different methods and selling you a million different products.

It’s overwhelming.

So I totally understand why you’d get started on a weight loss program only to get overwhelmed before you even begin and give up.

One of the things I’ve set out to do with my content, whether that’s on social media or here on this website, is to try and break the complicated fitness and nutritional shit down into simple to digest solutions for you.

That’s what we’re going to do today. And it all starts with developing the right mindset for this lifelong journey.

Developing the motivation to get started losing weight once and for all

The important thing to note about this journey is that this is a long process. It will take a lot of time. You will be hungry. You will be tired. You will not feel like working out every day. You will not feel like eating protein or veggies or fruit every day.

Motivation is fleeting and after the first few weeks following some of the guidelines I set out here, you’ll likely be looking for something else to get you excited to execute this fat loss program.

That’s when the going gets really tough. That’s when you’ll need to dig in and really trust the process and find the patience to stay consistent and keep going.

So our goal over these first few weeks of your program is to create a process so simple that it is
Embarrassing to miss. Your goal is to create new positive habits that are sustainable for the long haul.

How to get started losing weight

Think of these opening days and weeks as the process to build a foundation. Just like that skyscraper that defines the skyline of a busy city, it’s that base of support that will determine how sturdy your structure will be over time.

Each month is broken down into a few weeks containing goals from both a diet perspective and a fitness/exercise approach. Because you should view the entire fitness and nutrition solution as a holistic and complete package.

Sure, a caloric deficit is the key to weight loss. But, when you combine that deficit with nutrient dense foods and couple it with a lifestyle of movement and exercise, that is how you achieve the total package of health for longer lasting success.

With all that said, let’s get started with the first month.

Month 1: How much are you eating

Weeks 1-2 Goals:

Track your eating

Get moving a little more

The biggest thing holding you back from reaching your body transformation goal is your eating. But, your goal over the initial weeks of this program is not to just start slashing calories and cutting carbs.

Instead, your goal is to be more mindful of what you are stuffing in your face hole.

So for the first two weeks, all I want you to do is to start a food diary and jot down every single bite of food that enters your mouth. Every. Single. Bite.

All of my online coaching clients spend at least a few weeks learning the skill of tracking calories and/or filling out a food diary. It is incredibly important in learning to understand your eating patterns. You might learn things like certain cravings you have at various times in the day.

This process is not unlike a football player watching film of his opponent before a game. They break out the film, study opposing players and tendencies and learn new ways to strategize so they can develop a game plan for victory.

Well, you are doing the same here. You are learning tendencies and eventually you’ll use this research to craft your unstoppable game plan to get started losing weight for good.

While you are tracking how much you are eating, it’ll be important to take a very crucial step towards understanding your body. Your objective for the first few weeks of this program is to slow down when you eat.

The hormone leptin is responsible for sending a signal to the brain that the body has had enough to eat. When you are feeling full and satisfied, it’s because this hormone did its job. But, it takes about 20 minutes for leptin to send that notification to the body and brain.

So instead of racing to shovel that sandwich in your mouth during “lunchtime” while you sit at your desk and pound away at the inbox, I want you to take a beat between each bite.

Try to extend each meal out for 20 minutes to give your body and hormones a chance to catch up. Put the fork down between bites. Slow down your chewing and try to really taste each bite. When possible, limit or avoid distracted eating altogether.

If you have the TV going in the background or if you’re taking a working lunch, the focus on chewing and tasting and eating will be limited and you’ll fall into the same speed eating patterns again.

Write down what you eat. Slow down when you do eat. That’s the baseline habit that will help you for a lifetime.

It’s not just about smarter eating, you’re going to be moving smarter this month, too.

You see, when things are clicking from a health standpoint, we are typically less stressed, more energetic and generally living our best lives. So during this initial phase, I’m encouraging you to get moving a little more, too. We’ll keep things incredibly simple. This isn’t about breaking out those sneakers and running for hours on end.

In fact, all I want you to do right now is walk.

We have to learn to walk before we run. It’s cliched, but true. Aim to walk for 10-15 minutes before and after meals. If your lifestyle or schedule doesn’t allow for that, no worries. Just aim to get 20-30 minutes of walking per day to start.

This doesn’t have to be a speed walk like you’re in an Olympic event. Just a leisurely walk.

Why?

Because NEAT calories (or Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) accounts for almost 20-percent of your metabolism and they are a major factor in your daily calorie burn. NEAT calories include all of the movement you do throughout your day (like fidgeting or nodding your head to the music) and walking is our best method of manipulating NEAT.

Related: Read more on how to control your metabolism and make it work for you so you can see better weight loss progress.

That’s why each step of this Three Month Gameplan to Get Started Losing Weight is going to include progressions for developing an overall approach to eating better and moving more efficiently.

Things will progress as you continue throughout the next few weeks.

Weeks 3-4 Goal:

Add more protein and veggies to your meals

A couple of weeks into this thing and you’re likely getting into the swing of things with the food diary. Instinctively, we tend to eat fewer calories when we are more conscious about the calories we are eating. So, weight loss might actually happen during these first few weeks, even though that’s not entirely the goal.

But now we’re going to start adding a few more habits and practices that will strengthen our foundation.

It starts with two things: Protein and Produce.

Protein is obvious. It’s one of the three major macronutrients. And in terms of weight loss, protein is the most important over its siblings, carbs and fats. Lean protein will help preserve and even build lean muscle tissue, which is how you develop and keep your soon-to-be toned body.

It’s also responsible for the most calories burned in digestion, which basically means your body uses extra calories to burn and digest the calories consumed from that chicken dinner last night than it does the rice or the avocado you had on the side.

How much protein will you eat over these next few weeks? We’re not going to make this too complicated.

All I ask is that for the next two weeks, you aim to add some more protein to each meal. That’s it.

Preferably that protein source will portion out to be about the size of the palm of your fist. But, you can work up to that. We’re not looking for perfect out of the box, just a little more than what you did yesterday … and then you build from there.

In addition to the protein, we’ve got to talk about produce. Also known as: fruit and veggies.

Quick: Name one person that got fat off of eating a diet based mostly off of fruit and vegetables.

Exactly. You can’t. So don’t let the crazy fad whack science pushers try to tell you that fruit sugars make you fat. They don’t.

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s return to our regularly-scheduled programming.

Vegetables are a carb source, but packed with essential minerals and vitamins and help your body perform at peak levels (which you’ll need when you really start kicking things into gear in your fitness approach).

They’re also much lower calorie than the starchy carb sources like pasta, bread and/or rice.

Your task over the next two weeks is to simply replace one starchy carb source with a leafy vegetable option. That’s it.

Sure, you can get creative and toss up a big salad once per day. This is my preferred method and one that I ask all of my online coaching clients to do because it covers your bases on vegetables for the day.

But, if you’d like to take the slow and go approach by adding a serving of veggies to each main meal, that works, too. Remember, this is all about what fits your lifestyle in a way that will make things sustainable for the long-term.

A few options:

• For breakfast, add a handful of spinach to your omelet or bell peppers. Toss in some berries with your yogurt.
• At lunch, ditch some of that sandwich bread and swap it out with a side salad.
• When dinner hits the table, make sure about half of your plate is covered with a side veggie, like broccoli.

Add protein. Add produce. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Once you handle those two items to round out the first month, it’s time to take things to the next level with your exercise.

You’ve likely noticed a few things about yourself over this first month. What habits were the easiest to maintain? Which ones were more difficult?

You may have actually lost a little bit of weight over the course of the four weeks simply by being more mindful of what you were eating and by adding some more movement into your day.

Now you’re finally ready to take this to the next level by developing your calorie deficit.

Week 4 Goal:

Start planning your calorie intake

Find a food scale, download your calorie tracking app of choice and determine your calorie deficit target.

In this article, I broke down exactly what a calorie deficit is and why it is crucial to your fat loss progress. It is not how many calories you burned exercising, rather it is the ability to limit how many calories you consume throughout your day that will make or break your dieting success.

Be sure to hit the pause button on this article, go through and read my piece on setting up your calorie deficit to understand the ins and outs of how that works. When you are ready to return, this three month plan will be waiting for you.

But, for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to share the quick calculator process for setting up your calorie deficit right here anyway. This is for the cheaters of the group that didn’t click through to the really important article. I still think it’ll serve you better to do the assigned reading, but what do I know.

Anywho.

To get started losing weight with a proper calorie deficit, you’ll take your bodyweight in pounds and multiply it by a factor of 10-12.

This is where you’ve got to be really truthful with yourself and take a little personal audit of how much time you spend moving throughout your day.

• If you are sedentary in your everyday life outside of the time you spend training. We’re talking about homelife, work life and everything in between. If you sit on your bum most of the day, you’ll multiply your bodyweight in pounds by 10.
• If you are relatively active outside of your workout sessions––think about teachers that stay on their feet all day long––you’ll multiply your bodyweight in pounds by 11. This works well for those in big cities where walking everywhere is the only form of transportation.
• If you are really active outside of the gym, you’ve got a little more wiggle room to play with. This is for the professional movers and construction workers and firefighters of the group, you can multiply your bodyweight in pounds by 12.

For example:

Lindsey weighs 151 pounds and her goal is to lose the 20 pounds she packed on after her second child. Lindsey has two kids, works as a PR consultant in New York City and walks everywhere. She averages close to 10,000 steps per day. In other words, outside of her weekly workout schedule, Lindsey is pretty active.

She’ll take her current body weight in pounds (151) and multiply that by 11 to get a daily calorie target of about 1,660 calories/day.

If Lindsey can consistently get within about 5-percent of that calorie target, she will lose weight over time. She has a range of about 1,575 to 1,750 calories per day. I like providing a range of calories to avoid making things so stressful and rigid.

As you shift into the second month, it’s time to put that calorie deficit to good use.

Month 2: Make your calorie deficit work for you

Weeks 1-4 Goals:

Nail that calorie deficit

Incorporate some small doses of strength training (in addition to the walking) like push-ups and bodyweight squats

Weigh and measure your food as accurately as possible. The idea being that you won’t do this forever, but developing this skill takes time. You should also make a mental note of what each accurately weighed/measured portion looks like so you don’t become a prisoner to the food scale.

As you continue to weigh and measure your foods, you’ll be tracking every single bite in your handy food tracking app, or old fashioned pen and paper food diary.

This will take some time to get used to your method of choice, so bake that time into your day. Yes, you have the time. It’s up to you to make this your priority. Your health is too important … so make the time.

We aren’t looking for 100-percent compliance here. As long as you are consistently hitting your calories within a range of about 100 or so in either direction, that is all you need to see long lasting results in a positive direction.

Remember this phrase and take it to heart: Consistency over perfection.

Being too strict, too rigid and striving for perfection is not the goal. Instead, the objective is to get as close as possible without feeling like you are punishing yourself. That’s why the calorie target we set at the end of last month was a moderate one.

You always want to eat as much food as possible while seeing progress. What the hell is the point of overly starving yourself if you can still lose weight and eat food? Exactly.

Which leads to the next point: You do not have to suffer through some low-carb, no fun diet here. Calories. Protein. That’s all we’re concerned about.

So occasionally that will mean enjoying a cookie or a slice of pizza or a scoop of ice cream. For the most part, you’d like those calories to fit into your normal day of eating and your daily calorie target. Which means you’ll be weighing out those scoops of ice cream with your new food scale.

But, sometimes, it’s going to be okay to go over a tad. That’s okay from time to time. It happens. This is life. Life happens.

Weddings. Birthdays. Happy hours. Vacations. Random slices of pizza because you feel like it. It all happens. And you should be comfortable enjoying those occasions guilt-free.

But when you do, it’s up to you to get right back on track after that one meal. Have a never miss twice attitude and you’ll be fine.

Along with the calorie tracking, it’s time to add some more movement to your day in the form of resistance, aka strength training. But just like with the nutrition, this is going to be a slow build.

In this second month, you’ll pick 3-4 days out of the week and perform the following bodyweight circuit:

• 5-10 Push-ups (elevate your hands if you cannot do a full push-up)
• 5-10 Air squats or lunges or stationary lunges
• Set a timer for 5 minutes and cycle through this circuit as many times as possible without rest

That’s it. Five minutes. Perform it before or after your daily walk. Or crank it out as soon as you wake up. Or before dinner. Or during your lunch break.

Doesn’t matter, just find the time to make it happen 3-4 days out of the week and try to stay as consistent as possible.

Remember, we’re looking for 80-percent consistency and that includes both nutrition and your new fitness habit.

In fact, here’s an exercise that I want you to follow this month to help keep you accountable.

Whip out a handy calendar. For every single day that you hit your calories and protein within that 100 calorie range along with performing this new circuit, you’ll mark a black “X” through that day.

On the days when you did not hit your numbers and missed your workout, you’ll mark a red circle.

At the end of the week, and subsequently at the end of the month, if 80-percent of the days are black “Xs,” I guarantee that progress was achieved. As long as you really did hit your numbers with accurate portions.

Month 3: Putting it all together to make this a lifestyle

Weeks 1-4 Goals:

Continue to hit your calories and protein

Begin a strength-training program

Diet is the driver of your fat loss journey. Make no mistake here. If you nail your nutrition, you will see fat loss. Period. The science is undefeated.

That’s why the first two months of the program has been so diet heavy.

However, I mentioned that the fitness and nutritional lifestyle should be viewed as a more holistic package. This is still very true. And it’s why movement in the form of walking and some resistance exercises were included early on in your journey to get started losing weight.

But now it’s time to really nail down your weight loss workout program. And for that, you are going to focus on strength training.

Building strength is not about getting big and bulky and muscle-bound. It doesn’t mean you need to all of the sudden crush an entire tub of protein powder every single day in the name of gainzzz.

It simply means getting stronger. That’s it. And getting stronger has a ridiculous host of benefits, especially when dieting:

• Strength-training increases your metabolism (so you can lose weight quicker)
• Resistance training helps strengthen bones and connective tissue, which leads to a more durable body that can withstand a little more wear and tear
• Strength training improves sleep, heart health, blood pressure and lowers cholesterol
• Getting stronger through resistance training increases endorphins that signal the brain to be all happy inside

I wrote an entire article on how to get started losing weight with the right strength-focused training program. Be sure to click through to read that and get a better sense of how to make that work for you.

Likewise, you can also pick up a free download with 52 Fat Loss Workouts, all include a strength-training focus and all of them can be performed in fewer than 20 minutes with minimal equipment.

 

But, Pete … what about my nutrition this month? Great question.

Simply put, you just keep going. That’s it. Remember, this takes time. This is a journey and not some fancy named overly marketed bullshit diet that promises rapid results.

Instead, this is a slow boil.

Ideally, you’ll lose on average about 0.5 to 1.0 pounds per week. This is fantastic progress. There are additional factors you should take into consideration for measuring progress, which I laid out in this article: How to Accurately Measure and Track Weight Loss Progress.

So if you are seeing progress from a scale weight and (especially) a measurement perspective, it means that the calorie deficit you created is working. And you should continue the course you’ve charted for yourself.

Do not try to fix something that is not broken.

When the going gets super tough and life gives you a really shitty hand or when you think you’ve been doing everything right, but the progress isn’t happening for you, don’t get caught up in the flashy stuff and revert back to the yo-yo dieting, silly bootcamp crap.

Instead, go back to your foundation. Come back to the tactics laid out in this article and just get right back to work. Sure, this article is your baseline plan to get started losing weight, but it’s also the habit-forming strategy to help you kick start fat loss again.

Enjoy the journey. Trust the process. You’ve got this.

Featured Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay 

Let me help you get started losing weight … 

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 “How to get started losing weight” 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.

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