The 9 Transformation Secrets

Most people suck at breaking through fat loss plateaus.

But if you use these 9 transformation secrets, I guarantee you won’t:

1. Re-evaluate what you’re doing. Often what you THINK you’re doing isn’t quite what’s being carried out on a daily basis. If you hit a plateau, check your accuracy with your steps, cardio, training, nutrition and water intake.

2. If you’ve been eyeballing or “guesstimating”, it’s time to tighten it up. You can get away with loose measurements at the start, but as you get leaner, it won’t work. Mindless snacking, eating your kids’ foods, or picking at social events are big watchouts.

3. If you’ve started weighing everything to the gram, check if you’ve not gotten lazy and started “guesstimating” (opposite pattern to #2 above). Make sure your teaspoon of peanut butter hasn’t become a heaped one. All the little things add up.

4. Dieting hard brings with it some lethargy and fatigue, especially after you’ve dropped over 10% bodyweight. When you’re tired, it’s easy to start getting lazy. You start ordering more Ubers and/or taking elevators, versus walking more. Keep an eye on your NEAT - non-exercise activity thermogenesis, or you daily general activity.

5. The biggest culprit for plateaus are social events and eating out, and underestimating how much you’re eating. You might think you’re eating 1400 calories as a weekly avg, but it’s really 2000.

6. Most plateaus can be solved by tightening up your food intake and resetting your activity markers back to where they should be (points 1-5). Once you reset, give it a week or two before any changes.

7. Don’t just rely on the scale. Pictures, biofeedback, tape measurements and body fat testing can all be useful. All come with pros and cons, but when used together, can give you a holistic picture of your progress.

For example, the scale is great, but I’ve worked with far too many people who’ve experienced such a great body recomposition effect that the scale only budged a few kilos, while their physiques completely transformed. If I’d only used the scale, I’d have wrongly assumed a plateau.

8. If you've dialed in your food, cardio, daily activity levels, and broadened your use of trackable metrics, but you still can't see any change, then it's simply a case of stepping up your game and picking your poison.

At this stage we’ve got a few choices to create a greater calorie deficit. The key is to not pull every tool out the toolbox at once. Pick one:

Reduce calories by 5-10% (timeframe dependent)

Add 2,500 steps to your daily target

Add time or frequency to your cardio sessions

Increase use of thermogenics

Increase training frequency

In 95% cases, it will be one of the first three.

9. Digging deep and grinding harder is the least glamorous part of busting through a fat loss plateau.

Most people think you need to add a refeed or cheat meal into the mix, but these are actually needed a lot less than you think. If you’re not a “robot bodybuilder”, you don’t need one.

Every time I’ve hit a genuine plateau, the one answer that always works is going harder. Crazy transformations don’t happen by accident.

One key takeaway?

If you’re doing everything with 100% accuracy (eating everything according to plan, no extras, no eyeballing), you’ll be losing body fat even if the scales aren’t showing immediately.

In fact, there’ll be weeks where you may see nothing happen on the scale for days on end and then all of a sudden, a massive drop overnight.

When I’m dieting, this is exactly my pattern of loss and I’ve seen it with many others.

But if things genuinely stall, you’ve gotta suck it up, embrace the grind, and take yourself into a new place to create a transformational change.

When I got shredded in 2022, I went as low as 1300 calories to get the last few lbs of body fat off.

Going lower in calories is often frowned upon, but it works.

So long as you safely reverse back out, and time your aggressive periods well, they’re completely fine.

I’ve got more plateau busting tips, but I’ll save it for another day.

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