You’re chubby.
You hate taking your shirt off because you don’t like how your chubby lil belly hanging out looks.
Aunties are always commenting on your weight at family gatherings.
Your face looks hella pudgy in all the photos of you, and you get hella double chin as soon as you smile.
You walk around sucking in your stomach, not being able to breathe properly because you hate how big your belly looks.
You’re sick and tired of having such a lackluster physique.
You know you could do better and cultivate a body you could be proud of.
You could have an aesthetically pleasing lean, muscular body, whilst right now you’re a slightly chubby marshmallow.
“Okay”, you say to yourself, “I’m gonna try to lose weight.”
It’s always the same story.
You try going to the gym, slogging away at the treadmill. And you hate it.
You starve yourself and make yourself miserable when eating with friends and family.
And after a while, as your motivation fizzles out, you drift back to square one.
Table of Contents
Thicc Fat to Six-Pack
I’ve been there.
I was that chubby kid. I used to think I’d always be fat, and never be able to get a six pack.
I got relatively lean over the years (about ~16% BF), then I put everything back on after I got fired from my dream job on Star Wars.
Stress eating to cope with feeling hella depressed.
Now, after a lot of trial and error, I’ve found a way I’m able to stay lean year-round.
You CAN do this shit too!
Why Get Lean?
Imagine yourself looking cut and toned any time you need to take your shirt off.
When you look good, your confidence will shoot up as well.
People around you WILL notice.
And you don’t have to only eat salad, boiled chicken breast and rice. You can enjoy your food.
In your journey to becoming lean for the long term, you will build a much better awareness of your body and a better relationship with what you eat.
Enjoying food and being lean are not mutually exclusive. You can have your cake and eat it too (guilt-free)!
Even if you go on holiday and choose to fully indulge and enjoy whatever food you want, any weight that you gain can be easily lost again.
However, this is only IF you have built up the right mindset to be lean, and have effective training and nutritional habits at home (which I will go over below!)
How to Get Lean and Lose Body Fat
The key to getting lean and losing body fat is to follow the law of thermodynamics, which is a fancy way of saying:
Burn more calories than you eat.
That’s it.
If you expend more energy than you input, you WILL lose body fat.
So this sounds good and all, but how do we achieve this consistently, in a sustainable way so we don’t burn ourselves out?
Step 1: Training
You want to build muscle.
It’s a lot harder to get and stay lean if you have less muscle on your body.
Having more muscle means you’ll have a higher amount of calories you burn overall at rest.
So if you have more muscle, you can eat more food. Good news for you foodies.
No, you will not become like the Incredible Hulk – even if you deliberately tried, achieving that kind of mass is very difficult for most people.
The likely result of you starting to train you will look more toned and lean like an anime character. You WILL look good, trust me.
So, how do we build muscle? We do this through resistance training.
Training Programs
Find a training program – any training program that suits your fancy, and stick to it.
As long as you’re incorporating movements to train all parts of your body, you should be good (don’t be the guy that skips leg day).
I train 3 hours a week in 3 full-body training sessions. My training routine is similar to this Athlean X workout video, I’ve modified it and tailored it to my own needs and interests to be more fun, and more effective in my eyes.
If you’re training at home without a gym, I gotchuuuu!
During lockdown, I trained with a routine similar to this Athlean X workout, again my routine was tailored to my needs and sporting interests.
Make this shit a habit, as automatic as going to brush your teeth.
You don’t ask yourself “Hmm should I brush my teeth today?” You just do it regardless of how you feel.
Do the same with your training.
Step 2: Nutrition
While you need to be working to gain muscle through training, your nutrition and eating habits will be the deciding factor if you get lean or not.
Nutrition was always holding me back – for so long I just focused on my training, and I developed more muscle, but I still looked like a marshmallow kid with a chubby lil gut, and no vascularity.
After a lot of trial and error, I made progress and got lean by cleaning up my diet (cutting out most processed junk food) and making sure I didn’t overeat.
What do you eat?
The key is to find foods that you like, that are aligned with your goal of losing body fat.
Find recipes that incorporate these foods that you enjoy eating, and get good at cooking them.
How much should I eat?
You could count calories with everything you consume, to ensure you’re eating at a slight deficit not overeating and getting the right macronutrients in your diet.
Personally, I’m too lazy for that shit.
To get lean, I followed a much easier method that you’re much more likely to stick with long-term.
Eyeballing!
You divide your plate up visually to ensure you’re getting a balance of nutrients without overeating.
As long as you’re not eating hella junk food on your plate, you should be good. Athlean-X has a great video on this:
It’ll take some fine-tuning to ensure you’re eating not too much/not too little, so I would suggest taking pictures of how much you’re eating so you can figure out how much you should be eating intuitively.
Key Takeaways:
- Build a habit of training hard, consistently
- Start counting calories/visually dividing up your plate to avoid overeating
Mindset Shift for the Long-term
You want to find foods you can eat for the long-term and a way you can eat for the rest of your life.
Short-term diets may get you results quickly, but as soon as you finish that diet, you’ll resume the old habits that have kept you at a higher body fat all this time, and you’ll rebound.
Diets are doomed to fail from the jump. Shift away from thinking about ‘diets’, to creating a sustainable way of eating that you enjoy, and you can fit in with an enjoyable lifestyle.
This is a marathon, not a sprint.
Action Steps
I want you to shift the way you think.
You’re not someone out of shape trying to get lean like an athlete. You ARE an athlete.
Change your self-perception.
To use a different example – say there are 2 people who want to quit smoking.
Who do you think is more likely to be successful in quitting? The person who says they’re trying to quit smoking or the person who says they don’t smoke?
Start embodying who you want to become through your actions. Live in a way so it’s inevitable you’ll get what you want.
Action Steps:
- Find someone who looks like you with your ideal physique, save the picture, put it up on your wall/phone, and look at it every morning (we’re creating a vision board – visually seeing what you’re aiming for will motivate you)
- Find a training program to follow and block out time in your calendar to train -> make your health a priority!
- Find 5 recipes for food you will enjoy (you can switch it up over time!)
If you’re looking for specific tips and guidance, send me a DM on Instagram or X and we can arrange a free call to talk about your goals and any issues you’re having.