Losing weight is easier than you think 2025-2026

Introduction to Diets

There are hundreds of diets out there like keto, paleo, Atkins, napkins, carnivore, off the floor, off the wall down the hall, on a ball standing tall, eating meatballs at the mall, while you're in a bathroom stall, still no abs despite it all, gnawing through a pizza wall while you're watching Better Call Saul, which by the way, great show.

Highly recommend. All these diets promise quick results, but the reality is that most of these fat diets fail in the long term, especially the pizza one.

Lessons from The Biggest Loser

In the show, The Biggest Loser, contestants went on strict diets and exercise plans and lost a ton of weight.

But in follow-up studies, half of those who participated in the study regained all of their weight back, and only one of them kept their progress in the long run. Lots of people can go on these diets and see results. But the reality is that getting lean and staying lean requires sustainable lifestyle identity change and not simply goal-based behavior change.

Identity vs Goal-Based Habits

In the book, Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about the differences between goal-based habits and identity based habits. A goal is about what you want to achieve. An identity is about who you want to become. Instead of I want to lose 20 pounds, which as we've discussed often has temporary results, try thinking, I'm the type of person who takes care of my health. That mindset shift can create behaviors that will get you to lose 20 lbs, but will keep you going long after because you identify more with a healthy lifestyle and not just a specific amount of weight. Goal-based behavior is like cramming for an exam. You might pass the test, but you'll probably just forget everything a week later. And after a couple years, you'll be a $100,000 in debt with a degree in anthropology.

God, I hope this YouTube thing works out. If you try reframing your approach to be a healthy person and make the decisions a healthy person would make, you'll go way past your short-term goals. Align your decisions and behaviors with your beliefs about the type of person you want to be, and you'll not only lose the weight, but you'll maintain your progress in the long run. Eventually, your results will catch up to your decisions. Your actions will more naturally align. Overall, it'll be less of a grind. And over time, you'll find that your mind is inclined to design a defined jawline. I think I was meant to be a rapper.

Common Weight-Loss Mistakes

Okay, now let's talk about the common mistakes and traps people fall into when trying to lose weight. There are the people who say, "I'll just start the diet tomorrow," or, "I just won't eat again for the rest of the day." Or, "I actually just decided to start bulking instead." And then they binge eat like their Joey Chestnut or the parents from Spirited Away. Faulting on whatever plan you're trying is totally normal, but it's important that you don't spiral when you mess up. Off days are to be expected because you are human probably.

Don't use those moments as an excuse to go crazy. Two steps forward, one step back is totally normal, but don't start sprinting backwards. You can't see where you're going and you look like a fool.

The Two-Day Rule

You also want to follow the two-day rule. Never miss twice in a row. One off day is totally fine. Two off days in a row starts to build a new bad habit that is the opposite of what you're going for and is a slippery slope. Stick with this two-day rule and you'll see yourself consistently trend in the right direction, taking into account the occasional slip-ups that will inevitably happen. If you fall off the horse, you got to get back on.

What do we do when we fall off the horse? We get back on.

Sorry, my not a gymnast.

How Weight Loss Actually Works

Okay, now let's get into how to actually lose weight. Weight loss really boils down to four things: food, protein, exercise, and sleep. That's the core of it all. Everything else is just dressing, which I should probably stop eating with every meal. The most important aspect of weight loss is food.

Caloric Deficit Explained

Put simply, the number one rule to lose weight is that you need to be in a sustainable caloric deficit. This means you need to eat less calories than you're burning. If you burn 2,600 calories per day and you intake 2,000 calories per day, over time, you will lose weight. That's just the truth of the matter. First off, you need to know how much you're burning by calculating your daily maintenance calories. An easy way to do this is to take your weight in pounds and multiply it by a number between 14 and 18 depending on activity level. If you're sedentary, 14, active, 18, average, 16, square of 69, 8ome. If I'm 180 lbs and I go to the gym pretty regularly, but I have a sedentary job, I'd probably go with 16 or 17 by 16 just to be safe. So, my maintenance calories would be 2,880.

This is the amount of calories I would need to intake every day to maintain my current weight. Now that you have your daily maintenance calories, you should shoot to intake about 20% less than that every day. So, just multiply by 0.8. In my case, I would be aiming to eat about 2300 calories per day to lose weight.

When you find your calorie goal, if this seems really difficult to you at first, feel free to ease into it. It's much better to go slow than to make unsustainable swings that cause you to rebound. Slow and steady wins the race.

Unless you're in an actual race, then go fast. What the heck are you doing?

Tracking Your Calories

Okay, next step is to track the calories you eat, which I know is the most annoying part of this whole process. But if you just do this for a week or two, you'll learn the basic ranges and get a better understanding of how much you're truly intaking. Once you have that foundation, you can just start guesstimating from there with decent accuracy. Just be sure to give the range a reasonable top and bottom. Reasonable bottom was actually my nickname in college.

Understanding Macros

Macros are protein, fat, and carbs. All important, but to start, I mainly focus on protein as well as calories. To track them, you can read nutrition labels on the food you eat. You can look the food and different ingredients up online. Or you can use an app like Calai that allows you to calculate the calories and macros and food just by taking a picture of it, which does feel like it shouldn't be possible, but here we are living in the future. Cali is a sponsor of this video, but it's also an app that I've been using a lot lately because it really cuts down on all the annoying parts of tracking food, which makes it a little easier to be consistent. On the app, you set your goal, and it'll give you your target calorie and macros for the day, so you don't have to worry about any spreadsheets or mental math. Then, you take a photo of the food you're going to eat, and it gives you a breakdown of the meal's calories and macros. Overall, it's pretty accurate, but I do usually double check the ingredients after I scan to make sure it caught everything, and then I add in anything it missed.

Cali is a pretty good solution for the majority of people trying to track their macros and are cool with roughly 90% accuracy. Consistency is the name of the game, so being able to track my macros with as little work as possible makes it really worth it for me. If you're trying to be extremely precise and need more on the dot tracking, there's a big food database on the app that's going to be a little more accurate. And for foods that have nutrition facts, the app has a scanner, so it's pretty easy to log these kinds of foods. Cali is $10 a month, or you can get a whole year of Cali for $30 upfront, which comes out to $ 250 per month. If you're interested in trying it out, you can click on the link in my description and use code smart for a free 3-day trial. In the end, the best diet plan is the one you'll stick with.

So, if you want to lower the friction that could be preventing you from tracking your macros consistently, then Cali is a great tool that I personally use all the time. And for 250 a month, it's a pretty affordable option that can be really useful. If you're hitting that caloric deficit consistently, over time you'll start to see weight loss results purely from diet.

Importance of Protein

One thing that you probably don't want, however, is to lose a lot of your muscle mass. This is where hitting proper protein numbers comes into play. If you eat enough protein, your caloric deficit will eat away at the fat on your body and not your muscle. And if you eat a lot of protein, you can build muscle while losing fat, which is called body recomposition. Body recmp for short, bump for really short.

To maintain muscle, you should try to hit about 0.4 four grams of protein per pound you weigh. I'm 180 lbs, so to maintain muscle, I'd aim to eat about 72 gram of protein per day. If you're trying to build muscle, you should aim for about 0.7 to 1 g of protein per pound you weigh. For me, at 180 lb, it'd be within the range of 126 g to 180 g of protein per day. And I already know people are going to think this is a crazy amount of protein. And I agree, it is a lot just to be built like a muffin.

But there have been some reputable studies in the past 10 years that outline the health benefits of this higher protein intake for bomb.

How to Actually Eat More Protein

Eating that much protein is difficult. So the trick is to drink it. Every morning I mix 12 ounces of water with lemon protein powder, which is 20 g of protein, and collagen powder, which is 20 g of protein, and also helps make my skin glow with the light of a,000 suns.

I also throw in a zero sugar liquid IV for extra hydration, and sugar-free green powder for probiotics. And with that, I'm already at 40 g of protein first thing in the morning. And then for coffee, I mix an espresso shot or instant coffee with a can of my favorite protein shake, Nuri, which pairs great with coffee and gets me to 70 g of protein before I start work. From there, if your meals have a prominent protein source in them, you'll probably be right where you need to be protein-wise without having to stuff yourself like crazy. Unless you want to. I'm still so hungry. I'm so hungry. I could ride a horse.

Oh, I I thought it'd be a different horse. This one's so sad.

Food Tips for Easier Weight Loss

All right, here are some food tips that can help make this whole process of losing weight a lot easier. First off, you want to avoid liquid calories. You can intake an insane amount of calories without noticing because there's just so much of it in things like soda, juice, bubble tea, and frappuccinos, which I'm sure you know is Italian for Frappuccinos.

For me, honestly, if I'm craving a drink like this, I usually just drink a zero sugar liquid IV because it has a lot of flavor and it also has healthy salts and helps with hydration. I also drink a low sugar protein shake like Nuri, which honestly tastes better than most desserts. Or I just drink water because a lot of times when I'm having these cravings, I was actually just thirsty, not specifically for a frappuccino, but just for a drink in general.

Some people add chia seeds to their water to help make it extra satiating, but I personally have never done that because I am afraid of the chia seeds growing through my skin.

Chia, uh, wasn't something supposed to happen by now? Hey Trevor, can you check on it to make sure?

I don't get paid enough for this.

Food Swaps

Another tip is to utilize food swaps.

Swap high calorie foods for similar lower calorie foods like a low carb wrap instead of flour tortillas. Greek yogurt desserts instead of ice cream, lean ground turkey instead of ground beef, Greek yogurt instead of sour cream, cauliflower rice instead of white rice, chickpea or lentil pasta instead of regular pasta, zero sugar soda instead of the usual hella sugar soda. And there's good tasting protein shakes like Nuri. I freaking love Nuri. I don't know if you could tell. Nuri, if you're listening, I'm a fan of the vanilla flavor, but I'll truly take anything.

Come on. I have a degree in anthropology. That is a cry for help.

The only way I can make money from anthropology is by working at the store.

Eating Strategies to Avoid Overeating

Okay, back to the food tips to distract me from my terrible life decisions. To stop yourself from overeating, you can try splitting your meals and putting the other half away before you start eating.

Personally, if I'm in the middle of eating, I can just keep going without even realizing that I've eaten enough to feed a family of four. But if the other half is already in the fridge, the obstacle of getting the food out is enough to make me realize that I'm not even hungry anymore. I'm just eating for the love of the game.

I like to eat. Is that such a crime?

You also want to make it easier to eat healthy and more difficult to eat unhealthy. That means not buying the junk food in the first place. You don't have to constantly challenge your willpower to choose healthy food over junk food. Willpower doesn't even have to be part of the equation. Having only healthy food in your house is like bowling with bumpers. It's almost impossible to throw gutterball. And if you do, it's almost impressive.

Overall, you want to figure out what feels easiest for you in the long run.

Sustainability is the real key here. So try some food swaps. Split your meals in half. Drink more water. Turn into a chia petet. And whatever you like, keep doing. And whatever you dislike, don't do it anymore. Because if you hate your diet, you won't do it for long. The goal is a lifestyle change for the long term, not a weight loss goal for the short term.

Exercise Overview

Okay, now on to exercise. Exercise matters, but maybe not the way that you think. Most people think that you have to do a ton of cardio to lose weight.

This is far from the truth. Unless you love running, it's not really recommended to run a lot to lose weight.

Often times running makes people way hungrier, so they feel the need to eat a lot more, which can be an issue with their diet.

Plus, most people just hate running at the core of their being. So, it can be unsustainable, especially if you're running backwards like a fool.

Cardio Recommendations

Low impact cardio for up to 30 minutes per day can work really well. This can be incline treadmill, stairmaster, taking a long walk outside, or doing the worm at the beach.

Wait, no. I'm I'm not a real worm.

There's been a misunderstanding. Walking 10,000 steps a day can have a huge impact on your life. If you walk 10,000 steps per day for just 3 months, believe it or not, you will actually be over 400 miles away from your home. Help. Is anyone there? I recently got a walking pad, which I really like because now I can always get my steps in without losing contact with all of my friends and family. Also, when I'm feeling lazy, the walking pad doubles as a food transportation device.

Strength Training

Lifting weights is also important if you want to lose weight, avoid losing muscle, and overall have a better physique. It increases metabolism, burns more calories, and having larger muscles makes you look leaner because the fat becomes more spread out. I already have a video about lifting weights, which I'll link here.

But a good place to start is to focus on dynamic lifts like bench press, squat, and deadlifts about three times a week.

To keep it very simple, if on Mondays you do five sets of five bench press and stairmaster for 10 minutes, Wednesdays you wear pink and do five sets of five squats and incline treadmill for 15 minutes, and Fridays you do five sets of five deadlifts and take a 20-minute walk outside, that's a great place to start.

Of course, you can add on more to each workout and use alternate workouts if you don't have access to a gym. But if you're pretty beginner or intermediate in your fitness journey, keep it as simple as possible so you can build consistency and then you can just add on more over time.

Women and Weightlifting

I know a lot of women out there feel like they don't want to lift weights because they don't want to get too buff. But I will say getting super jacked is actually pretty hard to do. But I get it. It's the same reason I don't want to learn more about science because in my apartment there's not enough room on the shelves for a Nobel Prize.

Putting It All Together

Overall, to put it very simply, if you eat less, and move more, you'll lose weight. If you eat less, move more, and eat enough protein, you'll lose body fat. And if you eat less, move more, eat enough protein, and strength train, you'll lose fat and build muscle. Do all of these things and get good sleep, and you'll unlock Super Saiyan mode, and your hair will stick up as high as the college debt from my anthropology degree. Please subscribe to the channel.

Final Thoughts

In the end, it's not about avoiding food. You're still allowed to eat really good. You don't have to count everything that you've chewed. Just be consistent with what you do and there will be a high likelihood. That you'll conclude your beitude will be as good as you thought it would. If you thought you couldn't, well, you could. Diets are always misconstrued to be about what you exclude, which can totally ruin your mood and make you think that you've tabooed. Just be sure to drink lots of fluid and work out like you know you should. Do it over and over. You'll feel deja vued. Your progress will build.

Results are acred. You'll feel confident and become proud of your body, your mind, your nips that protrude. You used to hate mirrors and avoid being viewed.

But things have changed and you look really good. Now, even if there is a crowd, you're totally fine going completely butt naked.