Ep. 92 | The Beginner Blueprint For Losing 30+ Pounds

We walk through how we’d lose 50 pounds in a healthy, sustainable way by starting with honesty and small habits instead of a strict meal plan or an intense workout split. The focus stays on data, consistency, and working with your body so you stop quitting when life gets messy. 
• shifting from all-or-nothing to something-is-better-than-nothing 
• running a 1 to 2 week audit with MyFitnessPal to find true maintenance intake 
• tracking key basics: eating out, sleep, steps, water, and how weight affects daily life 
• layering habits in order: steps, water, sleep, strength training, then optional cardio 
• setting a realistic calorie deficit after consistency, plus when to reverse diet 
• choosing macro targets and prioritizing fiber for fullness and stable energy 
• using photos, measurements, and weekly check-ins for real accountability 
• improving food quality and training intensity to support fat loss and muscle 
• handling plateaus by checking sleep and stress first, then making small adjustments 
• expecting scale fluctuations and playing the long game for lasting results 

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Transcript

Welcome And The Big Goal

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, my lovelies. Welcome back to the podcast. I have a really fun episode today. Okay. And we're going to be talking about fat loss, losing 50 pounds. Okay. So if I woke up tomorrow and I wanted to lose 50 pounds, I would not start with a meal plan. I would not start with a workout split. These are the things that I would do first. And so many coaches are going to be like, oh, you need this meal plan, you need to follow these backgrounds, you need all these things. And yeah, that's great. But if you're not somebody that's experienced in actually losing weight in a way that is healthy and sustainable and not just like throwing a band-aid, throwing a quick fix thing on it, you're going to want to start small. And also, if you're somebody who has this like all or nothing mindset thinking, you do not want to throw all of these things on it at once. Some characteristic traits of an all or nothing person can be you start tracking your macros, you start working out, you start doing Pilates, you start doing all of these things. And then you have one week where you don't do any of that and you're like, oh, it doesn't work. I'm throwing in the towel. Like it's all or nothing. And so what I want to encourage you as you're listening to this to

Ditch All Or Nothing Thinking

SPEAKER_00 1:10

do within yourself is something is better than nothing. Instead of being an all or nothing person, be a something is better than nothing person. First change that identity shift. So before you actually need to make any changes, before you do the workout program, the workout split, the meal plan, you need to get honest about where you're currently

Two-Week Audit With Food Tracking

SPEAKER_00 1:31

starting. So the first thing that I would do is I would download my fitness pal, I would track food for one to two weeks. And within this, you can, if you want to be more precise, I would get a food scale. If you want to be less precise, you could eyeball things, measure things in cups, tablespoons, whatever it is. But this is going to tell us what your current body is maintaining on. And I want you to log every single food, drink, alcohol that you put inside of your inside of your body. I want that to be logged. Now I'm not saying things like gum, no, but like your coffee drinks, your Starbucks drinks, your energy drinks, whatever it is, anything that you consume that is over five calories, because gum I think is like five calories. Anything over five calories, I want you to track it and I want you to log it. So this means paying attention to nutrition labels. This means getting really clear on okay, I'm auditing every single thing that I am consuming, every single thing that I am doing. So this number right here is going to be our starting point for everything else. I want you to look at your eating out, look at your eating out frequency. How many days a week am I eating out? How many meals a week am I eating out? Am I sleeping enough? How many hours of sleep am I getting? Am I waking up feeling rested? Am I waking up feeling terrible? Am I staring at the clock all hours? Is it hard for me to fall asleep? How many steps am I getting? Like, why don't you even have a step tracker? Okay, put your phone in your pocket, and that will at least give you a good, a rough estimate of how much you're actually moving and walking. Water intake. Go off of glasses to start. Maybe I'm just having one glass, maybe having one plastic water bottle, whatever it is, be super accurate. Like make this in a make this in your notes app, whatever you need to do to make sure that you're seeing every single thing you're consuming, doing. And I know it seems hard. If you're somebody that's in a rush, rush, rush, go, go, go type of lifestyle. This is going to be very difficult for you to execute. So, and then get specific about how being overweight is making your daily life harder right now. Not to shame yourself, but to actually see, okay, what is it that's actually motivating me and pushing me to actually make change? Is it going up the stairs winded? Is it your clothes digging into your stomach so much? Is it your energy being so low throughout the day? Is it your digestion being awful? Like you being super constipated, or the you have chronic heartburn or your blood pressure is high, or whatever it is, like what are these specific things that are making your daily life harder? Because yeah, you can say you're overweight, but like if your daily life is not being impaired or there's things going on in your day-to-day that you're like, I don't really care, it's not affecting me, then it's going to be harder for you to stick to it. And then the last thing that I want to say about this is all of this is just data, okay? It's not to be restrictive and to shame yourself and be like, I'm a piece of crap. This is just you basically being like a scientist and you are studying and observing and figuring out, okay, what is my body currently surviving on at this point? And I want you to do this for two weeks. I know it seems like a really long time. You don't have to be perfect, but do be honest. Being honest is going to be one of the best things that you can do with this whole thing. Okay. So audit, audit, audit. Two weeks you can do it. Tracking food, frequency, specific about how you're feeling, and then just getting a whole bunch of data collected. Okay. The

One Habit At A Time

SPEAKER_00 5:10

next piece you're going to do from this is separate yourself from, oh my gosh, I got to do everything at once to. What is the one habit that I can for sure change this week? One habit at a time. So, and I and that doesn't mean you have to start on a Monday. If you're listening to this, it's gonna come out on a Thursday. I don't mean that you need to wait till Monday to start one of things. You can start just by listening to this, you can start with one thing today. And I think that is where you're going to see the most progress is like, okay, how can I just start with one simple little thing? So exact order. This is this is like the exact order that I would do as far as habit. We've already started tracking our food, logging our food consistently. The next thing I would start to layer in is setting a step goal for yourself. So, for example, if your daily steps you find out on your iPhone app are 2,000 a day, okay, you say, I want to like double that, okay, that's gonna require you doing an extra 20-minute walk because a thousand steps is about equivalent to 10 minutes of walking. So you can say, okay, I'm going to add in a 20-minute say you're not doing any walking right now. This is just your daily movement. You're gonna add in a 20-minute walk every morning at this specific time, or I'm gonna do it every day after work, or I'm gonna do it every night after eating my dinner. My next thing is I have to go on a walk. And maybe it's putting your running or your walking shoes right next to right next to the door or right next to where you're going to see them, or you have your headphones laid out, or something's laid out that it's going to spark the, oh yes, after I eat this dinner, I have to move and I have to go on my walk. Whatever that little trigger for you could be, there's so many different things that it could be for you. Even if it's just like an alarm, you know, you typically eat dinner at 5, 5:30. Okay, cool. After my after I eat dinner, say dinner takes 20, 30 minutes. You have that alarm set at 6 p.m. That's when I'm going to go on my walk. When you can, when when you can have it stack, that will change the game for you. So one, tracking food consistently. Two, and remember these are layering. So it's not that you stop tracking, it's that you're tracking and then now you're adding in this layer of a habit. Next thing, three, hit a water goal. Say, for example, you're doing one water bottle right now. Okay, I want to double that. I want to do two water bottles a day. Same thing. Have it out to where you can see it. Have the two water bottles sitting out, have the jug out, have the reminder app in your phone, whatever it is. Number four, sleep. Creating a good sleep environment for yourself. Okay, after I, after I go on my after I eat dinner and I go on my walk, then I'm gonna come back, I'm gonna do the dishes, I'm gonna sit on the couch and read, I'm gonna take my shower, I'm gonna go lay in bed, and that is going to be kind of my routine so that I can improve my sleep. So just even starting with one simple thing of putting my phone in the bathroom at this time, shutting off all my social media at this time, one little thing that could improve your sleep, wearing your sleep mask so that it's dark, or turning the temperature down, or stop eating so close before bed. Like I said, eat at like 6 p.m. You want to have a consistent time frame from you eating and you going to bed. Now you don't have to be perfect, okay? But I always say like two to three hours should be the time frame between eating and going to bed. Remember, we're laying these, layering all these in. So track food, hit a step goal, hit a water goal, improve sleep. Five, then we can add in strength training. Now, obviously, there's so many different little things in there, habit-wise, that we could layer in, but these are just examples, okay? Five, adding in strength training. And so adding in strength training could be, I'm not doing any right now. Let's just start with two days a week. And these could be full body days. So some examples of full body exercises could be you do two leg movements, a shoulder movement, a back movement, a bicep, a tricep, and then you do one ab. So one core exercise. So that could be five to six exercises right there. And those can be two separate on two separate workouts on two different days. So you're just adding this in. It's small, it's not a lot, but it's still going to move the needle forward. And maybe that sixth thing is okay, now I'm gonna add in cardio. I'm consistent with that. I would say, as far as layering in and adding these things in, I would start with one new habit per week for those who want those faster, quicker results who know they can stick to one thing at a time. One, if you're like, I need to like, it takes me time to like build in habits, maybe one per month for people who want it to feel more sustainable, not so much all at once. Remember, these are this is for beginners. This is for people who have no clue what they are doing. Obviously, the order of this matters. Nutrition, this piece is going to matter more than anything else. So, food tracking should always, always, always be coming first.

Set Calories, Macros, And Fiber

SPEAKER_00 10:22

Okay, now after we have our calorie tracking, we're seeing what's coming in. The next piece is going to be setting the calorie and macro target. Once your food tracking becomes consistent, I would say two to four weeks. I would set a calorie target that is between 200 and 300 calories below your current average intake. So that average intake that you got from you tracking. So say one day you had 1200 calories, the next day was 2,000 calories. You're gonna want to add up all of these days in a seven-day time period. Then you're gonna want to divide this, that total number, by seven, and that would be like your consistent average intake. I would then work on hitting that number consistently daily. So say it's 1800 calories. Then I would work on hitting that number daily. And I would do that for like two to four weeks and see, okay, how is my body responding to this daily average intake? This daily intake needs to be very consistent. If you're gaining weight, cool, you need to know I need to drop these calories back a little bit. If you're losing weight, great, stay on that. Stay on that path of eating that amount of calories. But the biggest thing that will help so many people on this journey to losing this much weight is the consistency of the actual calorie intake itself. Not one day you're like undereating so much and the next day you're overdoing it. It's going to be about the consistency on a day-by-day basis. So, like I said, if your say your average calorie intake a day is 2,300 calories, cool. We're gonna subtract 300 calories from that. This is small enough and sustainable enough to for you to drive fat loss in in gear. The only exception for this is if you have tracked your calories and your average intake is under that 1400 calories, you do not cut. You reverse diet instead. And so reverse dieting looks like slowly increasing your calories over weeks. So I would do 100 calories to 200 calories per week up to a good spot of rebuilding that your metabolism, that metabolic capacity. So you want your calories to be in a good spot before you can even get into a deficit because I'd hate for you to come from 1400 calories a day and then you're like, oh, I gotta pull 300 calories from here, and then you're eating 1100 calories. Will that work? Yeah, maybe, but also this is going to be down regulating your thyroid, your metabolism, and then it just is like a causation for so many other issues. Digestion slows down, you feel less energized. It's harder for you to actually move and work out because you're having less energy coming in. And so reversing your calories up. Reverse dieting simply means increasing your calorie intake to a spot of homeostasis. And this calorie intake can look different for everybody, but I would stop at a point where your body is not gaining weight super quickly. Like you should not be gaining more than one pound per week. Honestly, a lot of people when they reverse diet, they actually can potentially lose fat, lose weight. And this is because they're getting out of this, like this state of survival and like chronically low energy to more energy. When we have more energy, our cells are able to function properly, we're able to move more, strength train better, have more energy. And so we feel better, and therefore our body responds a lot better to this. And it's like, oh, yeah, like you're feeding us, you're you're nourishing us. And so what that intake you get to looks like is very much just dependent on you and your body. So this is where tracking your weight and your rate of gain, your weight circumference, things like that on a weekly basis is going to be very helpful to know where to stop at that kind of maintenance spot. This is for those who are under-eating. Anyways, getting into actually okay, so setting we setting the calorie target, right? Two to 300 calories below that maintenance. Now, when it comes to actual macros underneath that, I would set your carbohydrates first. And so I would typically I would always start with like 200 grams, and then I would start and I would do like 60 to 70 grams of fat, and then protein can be anywhere from 120 to 150. I don't like to really go go above that for many women. We want carbs to be higher than protein. And so what you can do is you can insert this into my fitness pal, these ranges, and you can work on striving for these, and you can play around with the numbers to make sure it's hitting two to three hundred calories under your actual um that maintenance. Sorry, I lost my train of thought, that maintenance that we kind of established. And I will say too, on that, just because you're in a calorie deficit doesn't mean you should slash carbs, slash fat. As far as the ratios go, like I said, 60 to 70 grams of fat, anywhere from 150 to 225 grams of carbs and then protein anywhere from 100 to 150. And if you're somebody that is, say you're like 250 pounds, you want to get down to 200, I would keep your protein higher in that like 150 range. But if you're somebody that is, say like 175 and you're wanting you're needing to go to like 125, I would keep your protein a little bit lower, like keep it closer to the kind of that goal weight. So like 120, 125. And then yeah, that's that's pretty much that on the macros. And then the one little brief thing I want to mention is that on that is making sure that your fiber intake is between 25 to 35 grams per day. So, next piece consistency and accountability aspect.

Accountability Plus Food Quality

SPEAKER_00 16:22

So this is where you need to be tracking your progress with more than just the number on the scale. I want to see photos, we want to see trends, we want to see measure waste measurements, we wanna have some weekly and daily check-ins. So be honest with yourself. Did you hit your calorie intake? Go look at your My Fitness pal. Go see where you overdid it, where you underdid it, where you can improve. Go see audit. Oh my gosh, I ate out like four times last week. It's not that I need to slash my calories, I just need to cut back on that. Cut back on my eating out. Where can I make these little minuscule improvements? What was the pattern? Where am I slacking on a day by day, week by week basis? And then this, like, this is the piece where most of you are going to be self-sabotage because you're not being honest with yourself. And okay, I'm actually overeating. I'm having like more nibbles of things than I should be. I'm going out a bunch, I'm drinking too much alcohol. Be brutally honest with yourself. Okay. Call this out directly, not because you're trying to shame yourself, but because you love yourself enough to actually call out the BS. Be authentic and true because this is typically the missing piece. Another piece that I want to mention is quality over quantity, okay? This applies to food choices. This applies to training, whole most minimally processed foods that is going to fill you up. So the difference between you having 300 calories of a donut and 300 calories of oatmeal, blueberries, and chia seed, one is going to make you feel drastically better. And actually, it's going to do something in your body a lot differently. This donut right here is going to keep your blood sugar, it's going to spike that blood sugar and then it's going to drop. So blood glucose is going to be high. It's going to be running high because, for one, there's no fiber, there's no protein, there's nothing in that that's keeping you satiated and full. So, yes, inside of your body, your insulin, your glucose is going to be spiked and stay high because of this. And then you're also going to get that crash, that energy is going to come down. Whereas if you were to compare that 300 calories of the donut to the 300 calories of the oatmeal with the chia seeds and maybe the protein powder or a couple eggs, you're going to feel tremendously better because why? Because your blood sugar is going to be more stabilized because we have fiber in there and we have protein in there. And so that's why, yeah, calorically they're the same. Same, their macros maybe not be the same because it's just straight carb and a lot of fat. Where this is going to be, yeah, we're going to have carbs, fat, and protein. The protein, for one, is the missing piece, and the fiber is the missing piece. So if you want to, if you want to track your macros and eat those types of foods, you can, but then again, your blood sugar is going to be elevated, which is going to make blood, which is going to make fat loss harder when blood sugar is chronically elevated and dropping at L when we have stable blood sugar, our body responds to this very well. And fat loss can actually happen as a byproduct of this. So macros, food quality, make sure that they intertwine. And then also training that's actually challenging. Like you want to be going to the gym and strength training, and you want to be getting stronger and building muscle and training with intensity that is actually going to build muscle, not just going just to move your body just because it's there just to burn the calories. No, this is we want to be getting the right amount of intensity. We want the quality to be good. And this is really important for making sure that you're able to build muscle and you're not just going in there to burn calories because having muscle is actually going to be able to help you build or burn more calories at rest because it's going to make you more insulin sensitive. You want this more insulin sensitive when you have more muscle. And also when you have more muscle, that food that you're eating is going to go straight to the muscle, and that glucose is stored into the muscle cells themselves. And it's not just going to be stored as fat. The next piece that I want to touch on is going into what happens if you hit a plateau on this fat loss

Plateaus, Diet Breaks, And Adjustments

SPEAKER_00 20:34

journey. Before making any calorie changes, increasing activity, check the basics. How is your sleep? What does your stress look like? Fix these levers first because a lot of the times when I, especially my clients who've been on these big weight loss journeys, and I'll is I'll see that they've told me in their check-in and I'm so stressed. Like the scale weights up, and it's not because we increased food because we didn't, it's not because I ate more food, it's because stress is a little bit higher. And so what I don't do, or maybe the the scale plateaued that week, what I don't do is like, okay, I'm immediately slashing calories. They're like, no, I'm genuinely stressed. I've slept like five hours. Okay, so that next week, let's focus on sleep. If that doesn't do the fix, then we can look into cutting calories and adding in, adding in um more exercise. The but if consistency has been genuinely dialed in, options are lower calories slightly, about 100 calories. I would, I would always, not always, most of the time pull from carbs. I don't like fats to go under 50 grams. I can go under 50, but not for a long period of time. And then you could also increase steps, add in more zone 2 cardio, or take a diet break. A diet break would be okay, I'm gonna increase my food by 100, 200 calories. This doesn't mean you just have a free for all, eat whatever you want. This means you intentionally increase your food, your calorie intake, so that you can you can give your body a break from that. One other thing from dieting. One other option that you could do is you could set a high, higher high days and low days. So high days could be specifically on your training days. This is just like what you've already been eating your deficit at. And then you could have low days where you do decrease the food. So this just gives your metabolism like, ooh, like we're having like high days. Great. We're getting our metabolism restored and it's coming back alive, and then we're having low days. It's almost like a shock to the metabolism, which it likes. So that's another option for you. I think which option you decide depends on how long you have been dieting and how consistent you've actually been. So if you've been dieting for six months, but only hit your macros consistently, 50% of the time, you don't need a diet break. You need more consistent consistency. But if you're somebody that's been on your consistency, it looks like you're 90 to 95% dialed in on your nutrition every week, then that's where a diet break may be warranted for you. Andor you adding in the cardio, you increasing your exercise, your steps, whatever it

Play The Long Game And Wrap

SPEAKER_00 23:03

is. So the last couple of things that I want to pinpoint on is like I want you to play the long game. This is not a this is not a full-on sprint. 50 pounds over a year, 50 pounds lost in a year is roughly one pound per week, which is very, very doable. It's a very sustainable pace because some weeks you're gonna be losing three pounds at a time and some pounds, some weeks you're gonna be maintaining. Like it's not, it's not like this. It is definitely like this, okay? You're gonna see it trend down like that. And that is normal because our body goes through fluctuations, okay. I just want you to know it is not linear. One thing that I would follow as well is allow one meal per week that isn't tracked in your macros. This isn't just, I don't want you to be like, oh, this is my cheat meal. I don't want you to have a cheat meal mentality. It's just a sustainability tool so that you can still feel normal like a human being, got to eat dinner, got into these things. But you're still having that discipline of like, okay, but all my other meals throughout the week need to be following and hitting these macros as close as I can. That's where you're gonna see the most progress happen. And this is going to help your adherence long term because for one, whenever we, whenever we diet, our metabolism downregulates. So when we get that meal of like, oh, a higher food during the week, it's like, great, we love this. Our metabolism's being fed up. And then we go back into our calorie deficit. And it's like, oh, okay, cool. Like, we're good. We can keep going. And also, too, this is just going to help you mentally work through this fat loss. Other factors that I want to touch on that can affect your weight are menstrual cycle fluctuations. When you're in different points of your menstrual cycle, so say you're about to start your period, you're on your period, you're gonna have more water retention, which means you're going to gain a little bit of weight. This is not fat. I need you to know this. Travel, if you're traveling, if you're going somewhere that's really hot and you're you're constantly like moving and doing all of these things, or maybe you had lack of exercise and you ate more of the normal in foods that you're not typically used to, all of these things, stress, water retention, not drinking enough water, these can definitely play part on your weight. So I want you to make sure that whenever you're tracking your weight on a daily or weekly basis, you're taking these things into consideration. It's very, very normal to have fluctuations. Scale weight is not always the same as foul loss. And like I mentioned in the beginning, paying attention to these other markers as well is how is my energy improving? Am I nicer? Am I less winded walking up the stairs? Do I see my bicep in the mirror? Do I have better poops? Like, what are the things that are actually changing? So looking beyond the scale is very important to actually be able to make the process more enjoyable and more process focused and not just, oh my gosh, the scale didn't go down, the scale didn't go down this week. And being like, okay, where do I really need to change? What do I need to do? And embracing all the little things that are making your life better beyond the scale. So last thing that I want to cover with, cover on is just going through going through each little phase. So obviously starting with the audit, fixing one habit at a time, setting your calorie target, and then the consistency and accountability with yourself are like the big four things to that I want you to take away from this. And then breaking through that plateau. So following those steps. It is not just a quick list, like one fix is gonna change everything. It's the tiny little mundane things every single day that are going to get you to that goal. So the last thing I want to say is I am always a big proponent of work with your body, not against it. And that means you need to take things small steps, and it means you need to think that take things in a process focused way and not just let me slap everything on me all at once, get overwhelmed, and then quit. Do it for a week and then quit. That is not how this works. Play the long game, work with your body, not against it. I love you guys so much, and I hope you guys appreciated this episode and loved it and can get some good tools to take away to make it happen. All right. Bye.