The 7 steps I'd give anyone starting over
Read time: 8 minutes
I missed last week's newsletter because I was travelling back to Ireland on Monday, which is my usual writing day.
I had a 32kg suitcase, a carry-on, a backpack, and a bike bag. When I say getting that into a taxi in Barcelona was 'fun', I bloody mean it 😂
I'm back here for two weeks; I've put on trousers and a hoodie for the first time in 4 months, and I've already had my fill of Guinness to do me another few months, ha.
I've done a ton of travelling this year, and I've never let my nutrition slip, and there's one reason behind it.
I've got a system in place that guarantees success.
And today I want to share how you can build your own system.
Let's get stuck into it...
The problem with diets
A diet is an event. It has a start date, a set of rules, and an unspoken finish line somewhere in the distance.
A system doesn't have a finish line. It just runs.
That's the entire difference, and it's why so many people can lose 6 kg twice a year and still end up exactly where they started. They keep getting better at starting. Nobody ever teaches them how to build the thing that carries on once the motivation wears off.
So that's what this is. 7 steps, in order, each one backed by research that's been sitting there for years while the internet spoke sh* about carbs.
Step 1: Find out what you're actually eating
Not what you think you eat. What you actually eat.
These are almost never the same thing, and no plan built on the first one survives contact with the second.
Lora Burke and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh reviewed the evidence on this in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association in 2011, pulling together 22 studies on self-monitoring (1).
15 of those looked specifically at recording your food. The finding was consistent across them ⤵
Keeping a food record was significantly associated with weight loss, and people who recorded more consistently and had more complete records lost more than those whose logs were patchy or missing.
No real shock there, then 🤷🏻♂️
Now these notebooks don't have magical powers, but they do something even better...
They give you awareness and a clear understanding of what you're consuming, how much you're consuming, and when you're consuming it. This allows you to start doing something essential - change patterns that have kept you stuck for years.
What to do: track everything you eat and drink for 7 days, ideally 14-21. No editing, no cleaning it up, no "I'll start properly on Monday." This can be done with a calorie tracking app (like the one in my new app 👀), or old-school with a pen and paper. And yes, this includes the 4 bites of your kid's dinner you eat standing over the sink 🙈
Step 2: Play chess with your week, not your day
This is the one I teach every client, and it changes more than almost anything else on this list.
Stop judging your nutrition day-to-day. Look at it across the week.
Judge yourself daily, and every single day becomes a test you either pass or fail. One heavy lunch and the day's a write-off. And once the day's a write-off, you may as well have a bad dinner on top of it. Then tomorrow starts in a hole.
But a week doesn't work like that. A week is a board with pieces on it. Wednesday's dinner out isn't a failure. It's just a piece that's moved. So you move two others. Thursday and Friday shift slightly, and by Sunday, the board still looks the way you wanted it to.
That's the game. You're not being perfect. You're moving pieces around so everything fits by Sunday.
And this isn't just a nicer way to feel about it. The research is fairly pointed on which of these two mindsets actually works ⤵
Joachim Westenhoefer at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences spent years distinguishing between two distinct dieting styles, which he published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders in 1999 (2).
Rigid control is the all-or-nothing version. Strict rules, forbidden foods, and a hard switch that flips to "off" the moment you break one.
Flexible control is the more-or-less version. The same foods are allowed, in smaller amounts, without the guilt tax.
Rigid control was linked to more episodes of losing control around food, a higher BMI, and binge eating that was both more frequent and more severe.
Flexible control went the other way on every measure. Less losing control, lower BMI, less binge eating, and a better chance of succeeding on a year-long weight loss programme.
Another study in 2013 tracked 106 women who had already lost around 10 kg and were trying to keep it off (3). The women who dieted flexibly lost more weight and kept more of it off. The women who dieted rigidly lost less.
Same effort. Same knowledge. Different relationship with a bad Tuesday.
What to do: zoom out. Look at your food and your calories across 7 days rather than 24 hours. Got a wedding on Saturday? Fine. Move the pieces. Slightly leaner Thursday and Friday, protein-heavy breakfast on the day, and Sunday carries on as normal.
You're not "being good" or "being bad". You're playing a position, and unlike actual chess, nobody's timing you and there's no annoying bloke explaining your mistakes afterwards ♟️
Step 3: Choose the approach you can live with
Now the bit that costs people years and a boatload of headaches.
A trial published in JAMA in 2005 enrolled 160 overweight adults and assigned them to one of 4 popular diets (4).
- Atkins - Low carb
- Zone - Balanced macros
- Weight Watchers - Calorie counting
- Ornish - Low fat
Four philosophies that spend a lot of energy insisting the other three are wrong. They followed them for a year.
The result?
All 4 diets produced modest weight loss. None of them beat the others by a meaningful margin. But within every single group, the people who stuck to their diet more closely lost more weight and improved their heart health markers more.
Adherence predicted the outcome, not the diet label. There's also a second number in that study worth noting.
Only 58% of participants made it to the end of the year.
So the question you need to ask isn't "which diet is best?"
It's "which of these could I still be doing this time next year without any stress?"
What to do: pick the approach that fits the life you actually have. Your schedule, your cooking skills, your budget, the people you eat with. If it requires a different life from the one you're living, it won't work.
Step 4: Build every meal around protein
The one piece of actual food advice in this newsletter, because it does more work than the rest of it put together.
In my opinion, and that of most of the other coaches and nutrition experts I speak to, protein is hands down the most important macronutrient.
It does far more than simply help you build muscle. Your bones, skin, hair, hormones, enzymes, and immune cells are all built from it, and unlike fat, your body can't stockpile it for later.
You need a fresh supply every single day, and most people don't even come close to meeting their protein needs.
What it does for you ⤵
It keeps you full. Protein is comfortably the most satisfying of the three macronutrients. Get enough of it, manage portion sizes and snacking, and half your cravings start behaving themselves without you having to white-knuckle anything.
It protects the muscle you already have. If you go on a fat loss diet without enough protein, a serious chunk of what you lose isn't fat. Unfortunately, it'll be the muscle you'll need at 70 to carry shopping and get up off the floor.
It builds new muscle when you train. Training breaks down muscle; protein rebuilds it. Do one without the other, and you'll wonder why nothing's changing.
It costs you energy just to digest. The Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) is higher, so your body burns more calories breaking down protein than it does fat or carbohydrates. It's literally a win-win scenario.
It steadies your blood sugar. Fewer spikes, fewer crashes, fewer 3 pm biscuit emergencies. Although a chocolate digestive is bloody delicious!
That last one matters more than people realise, and it's why the protein-heavy breakfast does so much heavy lifting for energy across the day.
So how much should you knock back each day?
Aim for 1.5-2 g per kg of body weight every day.
If you're 80 kg, that's 120-160 g. To make it feasible, spread it across your meals rather than cramming it into a 9 pm shake. Which, trust me, is something I've done more times than I can remember ha.
What to do: hit your protein target, and start every meal with the protein rather than bolting it on at the end. If you can't point at the protein on your plate, it isn't a meal yet.
Most people find they need to roughly double what they eat. Which is why step 1 comes first, because until you've tracked it, you have no idea how far off you are. Also, it's genuinely hard to inhale a family bag of crisps on top of 200 g of chicken. Physics is on your side for once 🍗
Step 5: Decide in advance
Saying you'll eat better tells you nothing about what to do on Tuesday night when you get in late, and there's nothing in the fridge. That's the moment it all falls apart.
You're tired, you're hungry, you're 3 hours behind, and you're trying to make a sensible decision in the worst possible conditions. And we both know how it turns out ⤵
You grab the carbiest thing in your kitchen, or you order in food that, 90% of the time, isn't the healthy option. There's probably a glass of wine thrown on top for good measure as well.
It has nothing to do with discipline, and most people lose that fight, including yours truly.
So don't make the decision then. Make it now, on a Sunday afternoon, while you're calm and nothing's on fire ⤵
If it's Sunday evening, I'll cook 4 portions of chicken for the week.
If I'm buying lunch out, I'll pick the option with a protein I can name.
If I get in past 8 pm with nothing prepped, I'll do eggs on toast instead of ordering in.
Every one of those is a decision you've already made. When the moment turns up, there's nothing left to argue with yourself about... No matter how hard you try.
What to do: write 3 of these down this week. Spell out the situation and the response.
Vague ones do nothing. "I'll eat better when work gets busy" leaves you exactly where you started. "If I've got back-to-back meetings past 1 pm, I'll take the overnight oats in with me" actually gives you something to do. Boring? Very. That's rather the point 😴
Step 6: Repeat it in the same context until it runs itself
This is the step where most people quit, simply because nobody warned them how long it would take.
A 2010 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology had 96 volunteers each pick one new eating, drinking, or activity behaviour and perform it daily in the same context for 12 weeks (5). Something like "after breakfast" or "with lunch." Every day they rated how automatic it felt.
For the typical person, it took 66 days to stop feeling like effort. Nearly 10 weeks for one small habit, and that's the average.
The quickest person got there in 18 days. The slowest took 254 days.
Read that again ⤵
The slowest person took roughly 14 times longer than the fastest.
And even after 84 days, around half of them still had to think about it every time.
Worth being straight about the study's limits: it relied on people rating their own habits, and the model only fitted well for a portion of them, but the practical lesson survives all of that.
If you've been doing something for 3 weeks and it still feels like effort, you are not failing. You're on day 21 of something that might take 90 days.
What to do: attach each new habit to something you already do without thinking. After I make my morning coffee. When I get in from work. Before I open my laptop. Same trigger, same behaviour, repeated. And stop checking whether it feels automatic yet. That's a bit like digging up a seed to see how it's doing 🌱
Right, let's wrap things up with the seventh and final step.
Step 7: Decide now what happens when it breaks
Because it will break. Illness, holidays, deadlines, a truly outstanding birthday cake.
The system only counts if it survives those. There's a finding buried in the previous study that I think is the most useful sentence in this whole newsletter.
Missing one opportunity to perform the behaviour did not materially affect habit formation.
One missed day did nothing, and the habit kept building.
People don't get derailed by the missed day; instead, they get derailed by the story they tell themselves about it, and the fortnight of "well, I've ruined it now" that follows.
Step 2 was that principle applied to your food. This is the same principle applied to your habits.
What to do: write your recovery rule before you need it. One line.
"If I miss a day, I start again at the very next meal."
Not next Monday. Not next month. Next meal.
The gap between 1 bad day and 1 bad fortnight is a single decision, and you can make it in advance while you're calm and reading a newsletter.
Putting it together
Read the 7 steps back, and you'll notice that only one of them is really about food. That isn't an accident.
Get the protein right, and the rest of the food part is genuinely simple. Plenty of plants, mostly whole ingredients, drink your water, don't be a child about it.
The other 6 steps are the ones that decide whether you're still doing any of it in 6 months. Seeing clearly, zooming out, choosing honestly, planning specifically, repeating patiently, recovering quickly.
Nobody's stuck because they don't know what a vegetable is; we're all adults here. They're stuck because there's no underlying system.
So build the system one step at a time, starting with step 1 this week, and give it longer than you think is reasonable.
And please remember, if you've ever got any questions or want some advice, all you've got to do is hit that reply button.
I'll catch you next time.
Mark ✌️
