The most exciting part of any fat loss diet is the part where the fat starts melting off your body and you were seeing yourself physically transformed week after week. And this part of the process happens during the progressive phase, which is exactly what I'm going to be covering in today's podcast. Phase one was the primer phase, covering how to prepare for the diet ahead, and that'll be LinkedIn the description of this podcast because we already covered that in Part 1 of this series.
Phase two, which we're doing today, is the progressive phase, and this is where we're going to calculate our calories and macros, set up the diet, determine the timeline, and start pursuing the physical transformation we are after. And finally will be phase three, which we'll cover in Part 3 of this series, the PROSPER phase. And this is designed to help you come out of the diet properly and sustain the results you've achieved, avoiding weight regain entirely.
For now, let's dive into phase two, the progressive phase, and learn how to set up an optimal diet for maximal fat loss results. The greatest things in life all start with a challenge. You must accept that everything is hard before it gets easy. Every every, every, everything you want in life begins with a hard path. So the first part to cover with the progressive phase is
determining the timeline. At the end of the day, every person diving into a phallos phase, they want to have a light at the end of the tunnel, right? If somebody has 100 plus pounds to lose, this is a very difficult thing to do because they could diet for a full year or more and actually continue to get healthier and healthier as it goes. If somebody has £50 or less, it is really important to set a
timeline. And this also doesn't mean that somebody with more than that can't set a timeline because they should. And as humans, psychologically speaking, we want to see the light at the end of the tunnel. We want to see a destination that we are going to. There's nothing worse than getting some calories, understanding you're going into a phallus phase and not knowing exactly when it ends, or at least what the next step is,
because the end point can shift. So we might be determining this timeline and saying it's 16 weeks, for example, and it might be 18 and it could be 14. Things change. The point is, is that we do want to try to create a goal for the client as often as we can. We want a destination They are going to a timeline that they know that is a finish line and they're in a journey to pursue that.
Because when there isn't that aspect, it can be more difficult to stay engaged and motivated to continue the diet. A few more things this does is obviously give us this objective measure, but that objective measure gives us the ability to adjust the diet properly. It also sets us up for making sure we're calculating the calorie deficit properly and looking for a rate of loss that makes sense. How much weight should we be losing per week to get to point B by the end of blank month? Right?
We need to know a full timeline so that we can break it up and then further calculate the calories. This also opens up the calendar for potential diet breaks, deloads, refeeds, social events, things like that. Because if we know we're dieting through the holidays, for example, we just have to factor in the different events coming up to make sure that we are dieting appropriately and able to participate in those without it setting us back. And there's no reason why somebody can't do that.
But having that timeline allows us to understand this. And then last but not least, it gives us all real expectations because if somebody is expecting to get really lean and they don't know when they might think they're going to get there sooner than you are as the coach are actually telling them to. And if you're somebody watching this that is self coaching through a fat loss phase, then for you, it's setting your own expectations in the process knowing how long this is really
going to take you. So you to get your hopes up for a fast track fat loss if you have more weight to lose and it should be taking a little bit longer to do it the right way. Now that we have this timeline mapped out, we need to create a deficit. We have to actually calculate the calories. And in my opinion, from really reading a ton of research and coaching thousands of people at this point, an aggressive calorie deficit is going to work
best in the beginning. And there's a few reasons for this. And this doesn't mean I disagree with people that think you should go slow and steady, right? We have this slow sustainable process. What people don't understand when they lack scientific research from a knowledge base or the experience required to work with people like this, is that your metabolism adapts really well.
It's very dynamic. And if you create a small 5% deficit in the beginning, you're not going to see any weight loss, which is very really frustrating because you might see it in the diet. You feel it psychologically and you know, physiologically you're a little bit hungrier because you just cut calories, but not enough to where you're breaking out of that maintenance range because your maintenance isn't a dead set target. Your maintenance is a range.
And if we know it's a range and you don't breakthrough that maintenance range, your body will not start dropping calories because it instantly will adapt to the deficit you've created. That 5% drop isn't a big enough gap to avoid adaptation. Your body will step a little bit less, it'll move a little bit less, talk a little bit less. It's going to train a little bit less hard. You're eating less food, which is also going to drop your thermic effect of food, right?
Metabolic adaptation is going to happen. We know that. And it's going to happen a lot easier and it's going to be more prominent in the results you see, or better yet said the lack of results you see if you do this tiny calorie drop in the beginning. So what I recommend is a 10% minimum and 5% adjustments should be saved for the adjustments down the road. You can drop your calories by 5% after you've already started the deficit and you hit a plateau months down the road.
That is totally fine. But in the initial phase, 10% is the bare minimum you should go. 30% I would say is the maximum. Above that it becomes very unsustainable, even though there is research to support greater deficits than that. And what I've seen work best for most people from an adherence perspective and a results perspective is 15 to 25%. So that means you initially create a deficit of 15 to 25% from your maintenance calories drawn from carbs or fat, which
we'll get into here soon. And from there, you consistently diet. And as plateaus or stalls happen, you pull your calories by 5 to 10%. These tiny micro adjustments or drops in calories to keep the diet moving. And there's some good examples of this. We have the Matador study which showed A2 week deficit and two week maintenance. But what they did and they adjusted for this is a 33%
calorie deficit. If we look at doctor Bill Campbell's diet break study where they had five day deficit, 2 day refeed week after week that a 25% calorie deficit. And they actually made-up for that in in meaning at the end of the seven day average they were in a a 25% deficit, which really means the five days of dieting was even greater than 25%. But when you factor in the two days of maintenance during the weekend, it equal to a 25% calorie deficit.
And then we have something called the Tempo Diet. And what they did here is they actually had two different dieting groups. They had a four month versus a 12 month diet group with post menopausal women and the four month groups weight loss was significantly greater short and long term and they dieted with a 65 to 75% deficit. The other group was a 25 to 35% deficit. It's pretty crazy because the the results showed long term they sustained the weight loss better.
And this is likely because in what the scientists in the study actually alluded to is that they had a greater motivation curve. You have more motivation when you see results faster. So these women saw more results and they saw them quicker and that motivated them to keep going. So that's a 65 plus percent deficit, which is massive and very difficult to adhere to. So when I'm saying 15 to 25% in this context, you realize it's actually pretty small.
So we want to have that semi aggressive initial drop for the calories. Setting up your optimal macros is the next step, and a really easy way to understand this is if you're just trying to focus on adherence and preference. Maybe this client is sedentary and just wants weight loss, but they're not really so focused on performance or muscle or anything like that. Just generally need to lose weight. It's very neutral, you know, Have enough protein, getting a calorie deficit?
Don't worry about carbs and fats, just stick to your calories. If we're looking at performance with, you know, higher activity, so we're looking at strength, performance, sports, stuff like that, we're going to want to have a higher carb diet and a lower fat diet. If we're favoring muscle tissue and we're trying to have physique transformation, it's going to be carbs favorite over
fat as well. So a higher carb diet, always being a high protein diet and individual factors such as hormones, gut health, stuff like that. It's going to be individually dependent. Everybody's going to be different. Some of these situations are going to be better off on a high carb, low fat and some of these are going to be better on a high
fat, low carb. But the main take away here I would say is that anybody who is focused specifically on physique changes, so looking at fat loss and muscle retention or growth or performance, we need to make sure we have enough carbs and diet does not mean fats don't help, does not mean fats need to be low, especially not initially.
But when we are pulling calories down, we need to understand this so that we don't take away from our carbs too much because that will negatively impact our performance and our muscle growth aspirations. So when we set up these daily targets for fat loss, maintenance is again, again, we take our maintenance calories, then we are going to pull 15 to 25% of those calories, create deficit. If you don't know what your maintenance calories are, track
your diet for one to two weeks. Weigh yourself everyday for one to two weeks and take the averages. Or you can do it way easier than that and just use an online macro calculator to find out what your total daily energy expenditure and your maintenance caloric intake is. And you can find that at taylorcoachingmethod.com. You can hit the menu and we have a bunch of tools. You can calculate that your one Rep Max, you can calculate that.
You can calculate your one on RAM, You can look at supplement index. We have loads of stuff. All that is in the description of this YouTube video. So you can actually go calculate that very easily. Then you will pull 25 to 15 to 25% of those calories create a deficit. We're going to be looking at 1 to 1.5g per pound of body weight in protein for somebody who has
£20 or less to lose. If you have over 20 lbs, we can lower that to 0.8 and upwards of 1.5 because this ultra high protein intake is not dangerous, it's totally harmless. It might actually help promote better muscle protein synthesis while in deficit to maintain muscle tissue as well as support a good metabolism leading to more fat loss.
And there's plenty of research showing individuals consuming well over their body weight in protein and actually losing body fat even though they're at maintenance or sometimes in a surplus of calories because the thermic effect food is very high with protein doesn't necessarily mean you need to. And for some people that can be uncomfortable.
So I'm not saying everybody has to, but the point is you don't have to worry about high protein and there is plenty of research to say that a recomp goal might be more successful if you consume more protein. Next we look at that we're looking at 0.25 to 0.5 times your body weight as like the minimal effective dose, the lighter you are. In general, and I see this a lot with really smaller female individuals. A female individuals is 115 to 125 lbs looking to lose 5 to 10 lbs.
We're probably leaning towards that .5g per pound because they are a lighter individual. But everybody else, the lowest you should go is 0.25. Your hormones are going to be totally fine. The the hormonal negative impacts going to be greater from the calorie deficit you're in or the lower body fat levels you achieve if you take it very far. So you're totally safe to do that. But a good healthy range is going to be found in between
that 0.25 to 0.5. And then last but not least, all your carb or calories left go to carbs. So take the rest of your calories, divide those by 4. That's going to give you your carbohydrates because carbohydrates have 4 calories per gram. Now that we have our macros figured out, should we just track macros and play the flexible dieting game or should we set up a meal plan? And the reality is it's totally
dependent on the individual. And most of the time, I think you can find a balance between the two. I often like to use a flexible meal plan or a structured flexible dieting plan. And what this is, is we're always going to have our calories and macros as our baseline of what we should be paying attention to and what we
should be adjusting from. But there's plenty of circumstances where we might create a meal plan to fit those macros so that we can just easily prep, rinse and repeat, and have a scheduled system around the foods we eat. This often helps people have better energy, better digestion, way better adherence to sticking to those calories and macros
throughout the week. Because they don't have to think about it every day and play the macro Tetris game where day-to-day they're trying to swap foods in and out and get fancy. When you could just rinse and repeat over and over again. And then when the weekend comes, you can play that macro Tetris game and have a little bit of flexibility. So which one should we be using? The reality is, is that both can work really well and there's research to support both of them.
A flexible dieting plan has actually been shown in research to increase micronutrient variety. And this is pretty common and, and expected. If you think about it, if we're eating a, a vast, you know, variety of foods and of course we're going to get different micronutrients and different types of foods because we're changing up the foods we eat. So we're getting different colors and different greens and different meats and different fruits and produce. And this is going to lead to a
lot of micronutrient diversity. However, we can set up a flexible meal plan to where we do change up the fruits and vegetables throughout the week, but we rinse and repeat them. So maybe breakfast is the same set of blueberries every day and dinner is always green beans, but lunch is Brussels sprouts and we have an apple on the side of our snack.
And so we are getting the variety throughout the day and then the next week, we can easily swap the blueberries for raspberries and change it up this week. So there's a good way to go about doing this where you can have consistency and standardization to adjust from while also getting that variety. And then of course, if we want to have more of that, if it fits your macros approach on the weekends, we're still within our calories.
We are going to still accomplish the goal of fat loss while not losing all that progress just because we're constantly changing things every single day, which we know leads to inaccuracies within tracking. But a little bit of that is OK. It's not going to outweigh the rest of the diet. So ultimately the decision kind of boils down to what is best for the client, how serious their goal is, and what stage of the game they're in. For somebody brand new, it could
go either way. They might need a meal plan to show them and teach them, give them some education and knowledge around food awareness, what foods to eat, how to meal prep properly, and then for somebody else brand new, that might drive them crazy because they feel so restricted. So we have to understand the individual we're talking about here and just know that we have these options. We can put them together, we can use them separately and we can find the right approach for them.
And so when we summarize these two options to try to help you figure out which one is best for you, Looking at the benefits of meal plans, consistency and accuracy is going to be really high. Troubleshooting dietary issues is going to be really easy because if somebody has a gut problem or anything like that, it's very easy to figure out what the culprit is. If they're eating the same thing day-to-day, we can remove one item and boom, we see the
improvement in their gut health. We're going to limit cravings. There's actually some good research to show when we repeat foods day after day, we're actually going to lower the cravings we have, right? Because you do not crave things that you constantly consume. And this even goes to the
flexibility side. Somebody who has the same set of Oreos every single day begins to easily control their ability to eat Oreos within the diet or to control their cravings for other foods because they're allowing those things in. But it's, it's really coming from the repetitive nature of this or from the healthy foods itself that limits the cravings. And then last but not least, this also controls our hunger
and our overeating patterns. And there's multiple studies that show we can be over stimulated just from good smells or new taste and triggers these hunger signals, which is hard to avoid completely. But if we can repeat foods throughout the week with a meal plan, then we are going to limit our overeating episodes because we control hunger better and it's going to limit overeating as a whole, which tends to lead to a calorie surplus. And that obviously doesn't help
us with the deficit. The benefits of flexible dieting is number one, education and autonomy. If we just follow a meal plan, it's on a piece of paper as like a list in a menu that we got to follow day-to-day. We don't really learn anything. We're just it's monkey see, monkey do. I want to educate clients on why they should fit certain foods in, what foods we can swap and still get the same nutrients or the same caloric value. And you know, flexible dieting actually allows this variety to
happen. And it does teach people quite often a lot more than they would learn if they were just doing a meal plan. They're going to increase their food selection. So again, as I mentioned before, there's research that show this is going to increase our micronutrient diversity throughout the diet.
And this also, and this is probably the biggest one, and This is why even if you are following a meal plan, you should definitely make sure that you have at least one day a week where you're not social inclusion. You can't follow a meal plan and also go out to eat with friends.
So being able to go, you know, have a social meal with friends or family and not feel like you're trapped in this diet and it's not allowing you to have social encounters is a very negative place to be in. And dieting should be something that improves your life because you're getting leaner and healthier throughout the process.
So it's really important to make sure that if you are following a meal plan, understand how to be flexible with your diet so that you can have the opportunity to be social and enjoy social meals and foods and settings and things like that. As we wind down towards the end of this progressive phase presentation, we, we need to look at diet adjustments, right? So we have established the point of a progressive phase loose
fat. We have determined our calories, we have determined the calorie deficit from those calories and what are macro should be. We've learned about structured flexibility so that we can toggle between a meal plan and flexible dieting as needed or as we see fit. For us individually as a person and what our lifestyle is like now, we need to know how to adjust the diet, right? How do we adjust as plateaus hit?
I, I alluded to this slightly before, but 5 to 10% drop in calories is almost always going to be a safe bet. If you are stuck at a plateau, take your total caloric intake. Say you have 2000 calories in your diet. We're going to pull 5 to 10% of those calories to create a bigger deficit because you hit a plateau. You've been dieting you, you hit a plateau, you're at 2000
calories. We're going to pull 100 to 200 calories from that to give us an extra 5, an extra 5 to 10% drop in calories to pursue that deficit. The reality is as you lose weight, you are lighter, you have less mass. You probably are moving a little bit less too, because your body adapts. And if you have less mass and you're moving less than your metabolism is going to catch up and you're no longer going to
lose weight. And as these plateaus arise, we have to breakthrough them by just dropping calories further. There's obviously a limit to how often we can do this or how far we can push that because you can't just infinitely drop calories until you have no calories left. But five to 10% is an easy way to do it. Take that total, drop it by 5 to 10%. Pull those calories via carbs or fat.
Usually whatever you have the most of or whatever you can adhere best to, for some people, don't touch their fats, just pull it from carbs. And it's a really easy way to toggle the diet. For some people it's a it's a blend because they can't really decide. And for some people, they're all about the results. So if they're an athlete or if they're trying to build muscle or maintain muscle and they're like pull whatever's going to be
most beneficial. A lot of times that means pulling calories from fat so that you can save carbs and keep training hard to maintain muscle and continue to get leaner. Another thing that we can consider here is maintaining calories, increasing protein, and dropping fats. So very similar, dropping your calories by 5 to 10% via fats. But let's say hunger's already an issue right now. Well, we can safely increase our protein to replace that five to
10%. So let's say we drop our calories by 200. Going back to that 2000 calorie example, we drop our calories via fats by 200. Well, now let's replace that 200 again to bring us back up to 2000 calories with protein because maybe we set our protein at 1g per pound and we know it's totally safe to increase above 1g per pound and we're already hungry on this diet. That's only going to promote more fat loss, more muscle maintenance, and probably better adherence because you're just
increasing protein. And there's no mechanism in the body that we are aware of that allows you to store protein as body fat. And I do believe it's impossible based on the amount of research done on people consuming 2 and even 3G per pound. And Doctor Jose Antonio's labs, you can look these things up. The free research that you can go read it is wild, but it just goes to show that it is totally safe to increase your protein if needed in these circumstances.
Another way that we could create a breakthrough, a plateau and adjust the diet is just swapping foods or adding or add meal plan for improved accuracy. So if somebody is on a flexible diet and we know that they're probably not being accurate because they each poultate too much or they're having a lot of packaged foods, let's shift to a meal plan and just say, hey, for the next one to two weeks, keep your calories where they're at.
We're not going to adjust them, but follow a meal plan that we can create together so that we can keep the food the same day-to-day just to standardize everything. And nine times out of 10, this actually helps breakthrough that deficit, that plateau, because it does create a deficit without
them realizing. They were a little bit above the deficit they thought they were in, Meaning they're at maintenance because they were eating a lot of packaged foods or eating out or not accurately measuring things, or they were unable to track them because of where they were sourced. And that was actually taking them out of a deficit without them realizing, right? And this is just a way of really
tightening the reins. Maybe we're like lowering the amount of alcohol we're drinking in the diet or restaurants we're visiting. And it, it's essentially just creating more accuracy. All of this works. You can use either of these options and it's really about where you're at. 5 to 10% calorie drop works perfectly.
Pull it via carbs and fats. If you're already really hungry on the diet and you're worried about adherence, replace those calories again with just protein after dropping the fats or carbs. Or if it makes sense to do so, you can swap foods and really just add a meal plan to create a, a higher level of accuracy and consistency within the diet. Of course, we can also add cardio.
So if somebody is already pulled calories from the diet, they've broken through a couple plateaus and they're stuck and they're like, I, I need to pursue fat loss, but I can't afford to take more calories because I'm already hungry. I don't want to push that any further. Or maybe in the beginning, you create that initial deficit in the first plateau you hit, the person would just rather do cardio because we often ask clients, hey, we got to break
through this plateau. Do you want us to pull calories from food or do you want to burn more calories from cardio and movement? And if they would rather keep their food and do cardio, that's fine. It's not always as accurate as pulling calories, but it can have the same effect. So we might just be increasing our step count. I would usually recommend doing this by at least 10%, but upwards of 20%.
It could also mean that we are just adding some high intensity cardio or low intensity cardio if we're in the initial phases of the diet. There's nothing wrong with doing high intensity cardio. As you progress through the diet, diet fatigue accumulates. It's going to be harder to recover from high intensity cardio and that's where low intensity steady state cardio might be more effective.
But either way, we're just adding, you know, two to three sessions of about 30 minutes into the week that's going to help us breakthrough that plateau. And if we are adding a step count on top of that, we're probably going to go with one or two cardio sessions. Again, it boils down to what the person's going to adhere to
best. So at the end of all of this, the progressive phase is really just setting us up with a realistic timeline to provide us with expectations of when we can actually expect to get to the result. What our calories should be, how much calories we should drop to enter into this deficit itself, how to separate the calories into the right macros for us based on our preference, our lifestyle, stress, hormones, performance, all those kind of
things. And then really trying to determine, should we go with a meal plan? Should we be flexible with the diet? Should we have a combination of those? Or should we just have these like kind of as tools on our tool belt? When we need to add cardio, we add cardio. When we do need a meal plan, we'll do a meal plan. When we want to be flexible and go on vacation and still diet, we can do that too. There's so many options. There's a million ways to skin a
cat. And with a fat loss phase, in this progressive phase that we are talking about here, it's really important that the person going through the diet understands that these are all options and they can intermingle. We can use them simultaneously and we can more effectively get to them, to their goal because of that. Once we've reached their goal at the end of this progressive phase, they've lost the weight they want to lose. We've got to transition into the
PROSPER phase. That's going to be covered in the next video. And the prosper phase is really just setting up more expectations and timelines, but this time not for achieving the goal, but rather having a slow drip and slow removal of some of these tracking habits, metrics, all these things that we are intentionally doing with the diet. Like what does this timeline look like? How can we expect to pull these things away while maintaining the goal that we achieved,
Right? And we're going to reverse calories by increasing them up, develop some maintenance habits that are really fundamental for a consistency long term, and then determine the next goal or an exit strategy. How do we teach this person to sustain it? At what point do they know I'm good, I'm sustaining it, I'm doing what I need to do, I can live like this and the diet is over. And they feel confident about
that. And that's what the PROSPER phase is all about, which will be covered in the next video of this series.