What comes next?

What do I do after? Will I get fat again? Is it easy to maintain?

Congrats for finishing the BellyProof program! You started at a weight of with % body fat mass. Get in touch with me and tell me how it all went?

If you are happy to share your before and after photos, it comes with a few incentives for you! 🙂 Get in touch.

I’m a big believer in working on strength and mobility, you know – to develop your skills and abilities as a human being. Most people agree that looking good should be secondary to being strong and healthy. This is why we like to work on weight loss quickly & efficiently – say over 5 to 6 weeks…

The problem starts with how fitness is being advertised, where it’s all about the looks. That mindset makes most people think along the lines of  “Sure, I understand my mobility is the most important thing, and I will work on it. As soon as I look like this magazine person, on his best day during a photo shoot, year round – then I’ll start working on strength, muscles, mobility and my skills.”

What this mindset ignores is not just how vain it is, but also, the fitness models you aspire to look like, don’t look like what you see in magazines and especially
not year round. Having worked with fitness models, actors etc… they are no different to you. With a lot of work, we can make them look their best for an event or a
photo shoot. I can make you lose belly fat, but I can’t make you look your absolute best, every day for the rest of your life. It’s unrealistic.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to look good and there is something powerful about taking control of your own body transformation process.
Give it 5-6 weeks, as the program suggest, don’t make it a life long mission to chase a 4% body fat.

If you’re just looking to spend the next 30 years of your life lifting weights, making gainz and impressing people with how much you can lift… I’m not the right person to speak to.

The best way to do it is:

Become passionate about your physical abilities / strength. That could be anything from mobility, to calisthenics, to posture. It could be getting good at yoga, swimming or even martial arts. It’s the long term approach so that you’re not stuck in the gym forever and ever and ever. You know, constantly checking your biceps or your abs or constantly worrying about weight. That’s what I call being in a good state of maintenance. (first button).

Every now and again, decide on short-medium term goals. Dedicate a month to work on something and get it done. Whether it’s to increase your strength dramatically, solving a movement restriction, dedicating 5-6 weeks to lose as much fat as possible or creating a 3-4 month plan to permanently elevate your muscle mass. It’s good to do that, set goals and go after them with a great strategy. As long as you are not committing to spend the next 5 years constantly looking to lose fat / gain muscles and be unhappy about your visual appearance, it’s cool.  (Second button).

So what would you want to do next:

I want easy ways to maintain (and possibility work on mobility, skills or a sport) - ideall for the long termI want to progress my aesthetics (more fat loss / more muscle mass) - short to medium term ideally

(Short-Medium Term) Progress

We all start at a different body fat percentage and a different goal in mind. You already know how effective this program is so if you still feel like you want another bucket of fat dropped from your body weight, you can always consider going again. Just make sure you take a couple of days to recover.

If you decide to go again, I would urge you to go through the setup again, there’s a lot of stuff to consider after all and most people do miss a thing or two – it’s your opportunity to do it even better, not missing any important details along the way.

It is important to understand that the more muscle you have, the easier it is for you to get leaner and the easier it is for you to look leaner. This happens because of an increase in strength & performance, increase in neural tone and the simple fact that we are talking about body fat as a percentage.

Why do you look leaner?

Consider the following, a 60kg person with 15kg in body fat (15kg out of 60kg=25% body fat) is going to look a hell of a lot more chubby than a person with added muscle mass. It’s simple math. If you had a 90kg person with the same 15kg in body fat, they are going to look fairly ripped. Why? Because 15kg out of 90kg is 16% body fat.

Why is it easier to get leaner & stay leaner with more muscle?

First, one of the best way to build muscle is to use eccentric strength training (maximal mechanical stress) and combine it with high level metabolic stress (you can read much more in depth into the science in the Abs guide if you have access to it as well as the introduction page for the muscle program). Luckily for us, the first part of the training is one of the best training protocol to add usable strength (and even groove ranges for mobility gains).

With more mobility (if done right) and more strength to use, comes better performance – both in training and day to day. Of course, if you are stronger, perform better and recover better – you are also going to find it easier to do your weight loss training at a higher performance level – so it might be easier for you get lean.

Second, the body is very reluctant to get rid of muscle tissue and it will do a hell of a lot to maintain it. Especially if you are using your body (and not stuck at a desk all day), more of the same food you are already eating, will find its way to nourish the muscles. It’s also worth saying that you haven’t lost any muscle doing the BellyProof program. You have to a certain level, depleted the muscle out of glycogen so it looks flatter – but that doesn’t mean you lost muscle. It’s easy to prove as well, 3-4 days of heavy eating and training and suddenly (as if by magic), you think you gained the muscle back. You haven’t lost it, or gained it back – it was there, just not “pumped” with glycogen and water.  Real muscle gains takes time, which brings me to the next point…

Next point – Time

With fat loss, if you work inefficiently, you will lose little fat. Work smart (i.e. BellyProof), and you will lose a lot more fat – even as quickly as a few weeks.

With muscle gains it’s a different story!  It takes longer to build good quality muscles, at least if you don’t use steroids (don’t use steroids…). Sure, there are better ways and worse ways to do it which will also reflect on what you get out of it. What I can tell you is that traditional training can be effective to a point (and it can also be bad for you). I’ve spent a couple of months developing another training protocol which should (and I am saying that based on real experience with clients) give you comparable if not better results.

I can guarantee it’s easy to keep your results but I can’t promise you will stay lean forever (that depends on your future lifestyle…).

With the new BellyProof muscle, I can guarantee slow (yet steady) and permanent results in the following areas:

  • Muscle Gains of a better proportion than traditional bodybuilding.
  • Movement Skills (you can never unlearn how to do a handstand or human flag, you can become rusty but that’s easy to fix)
  • Strength Gains and Mobility Gains (you can ultimately lose a bit of strength but regain it fast).
  • Posture and Pain-Free Mobility – This often goes underestimated but true joint mobility will define everything you can or can’t do.

It took a long time to develop and while it’s already pretty good, it’s far from finished and will see massive development over then next 2-3 years.

Check out BellyProof Muscle. On another note, one of the perks to sharing your before and after results is getting access to the program – sort of an aftercare 🙂

(Long Term) – Maintenance Lifestyle, Work on Skills

Maintaining your result is easy! You just have to find a balance (rather than going back into whatever balance that led to fat being stored in the first place).

Before you do, let’s get something clear:

  • Losing weight (as you now should know), is a lot more complex than just “not doing bad stuff” like over eating candy.
  • Not gaining weight, is a matter of keeping a balance in regards to nutrition and physical activity. We are not talking about calories!!
  • Gaining weight is a result of lack of physical activity, over-eating and more than anything – constantly eating / snacking (which elevates insulin levels and put the body into fat-storage mode).

There’s is no YoYo trap

Yoyo weight (losing weight successfully just to put it back on within a few weeks) is something in the realm of other fitness programs.

It happens for three reasons:

#1 Not dealing with fat cell apoptosis (programmed cell death)

Most weight loss programs (when you do manage to lose a bit of fat) are limited to shrinking fat cells but never take measures to kill them off. This is an on-going field of research (and integrated into the program heavily as more research comes out). When fat cells  shrink (you still lose fat), it creates a potential for fat gain unless we kill them off. There are a few things we have incorporated already and a few extra measures you can take to improve this proccess over time:

  • Gut health is linked to fat cell apoptosis. As you improved it through the program (and hopefully more so in the future), this improves as well.
  • Intermittent fasting is one of the best way to promote apoptosis, you have already done it every day of this program and have killed many of the fat cells you shrunk. You can continue to do that and it’s healthy for you so why not.
  • Green tea can help you promote this process due to compounds called EGCG found inside.
  • Direct Sunlight on your skin is one of the best ways to promote this process. You are now leaner – why not use it for a day out in the sun? 🙂
  • There is a complex way of doing it efficiently called CyroLipolysis – however, it’s very unpleasant and very expensive so not for the average person.

#2 Relying too much on glycogen

Most weight loss programs focus on calorie restrictions and aerobic exercise. In lack of structure, there is lack of fat breaking. In lack of fat breaking – most of the weight lost in the form of glycogen. This is what we call water weight and it is the primary reason behind Yoyo weight:

  • Glycogen is easy to lose and easy to gain (with a bit of food). It attracts up to 5 times it’s own mass in water (that’s a lot of water weight). You think you did well, you go on holiday and BAAMM – you put it all back. Truth is, that didn’t have much to do with fat loss, it was just shifting glycogen and sweating in the gym. But not in this program!
  • During the BellyProof program, you have lost body fat. We’ve taken down glycogen early on (first few days) and kept it at bay (if you saw a big shift of weight down in the first 3 days, it was partly due to that). However, your last 3 days contained a fair amount of carbs and salt. What we have done is restore glycogen which means you are now at your maintenance weight. With glycogen restored and water weight back in it’s place, there can’t be many surprises. If you go on holiday or a go for 2-3 days of meals out, you will not put much weight on. That space has already been taken and accounted for – so less worries for you 🙂
  • 3 Days before the end of the program would have been your lowest weight (still glycogen depleted), on your last day, it won’t be your lowest weight (as we restored glycogen) but it will be your lowest body fat and it will look great. If you’re reading this, you already know what I’m talking about.

#3 Not knowing how to maintain a balance.

You don’t have to be in frantic fat loss mode or frantic feeding mode all the time. There are good ways in between.

And here are some suggestions to help you do just that:

Nutrition:

  • I still recommend skipping breakfast (doing a bit of exercise in the morning is ideal).
  • I really recommend you give this a read. This will help you with finding a better balance with how much you eat, over eat and snack. This is still not about calories / macros.
  • Try and cycle carbs. That means some days try and go for low carbs (similar to what you did during the program), where as other days, you can relax and not really watch the intake. This will help you create a cycle where the glycogen is being emptied in the muscles & liver which will in turn help you balance potential fat gain. 2-3 low carb days a week is ideal, the rest doesn’t need too much attention so please enjoy life a bit!
  • Stick to good quality food. You can enjoy yourself in-doors and out-doors without junk food, sweets, sodas and other crap. Equally you can do it without being obsessed about every ingredient, macro or how much protein is in the dish.

LIfeStyle Factors

A lot of the protocols that are built into the program are very much about improving well being and overall health – you may want to consider keeping some of them. Just because you’re not doing extreme weight loss, doesn’t mean you have my permission to sleep badly, eat badly, ignore toxins and radiation and avoiding any form of physical activity.  Capish?

  • Keep drinking lots of water – even if you don’t go as high as in the program… why stop a healthy habit? Keep your sodium up slightly to match.
  • Keep working on a great night sleep.
  • Live healthy, reduce radiations and toxins  – this will help you promote cellular health, hormonal balance… it’s important and it’s easy enough.
  • Consider keeping Glutamine, Caffeine (before exercise) and Creatine… they are all good for you.
  • Keep working on gut health – not reason to stop making your own probiotics and prebiotics and it also a big part of any healthy and sustainable eating.
  • Keep the mobility warm-ups and the evening mobility. They do more than just prepare you for exercise, unless you don’t really think that joint or spine health is something that counts as sustainability 🙂 It’s not all about your weight, it’s also about not suffering from arthritis and back pain.

Physical activity

Life is movement and we can’t talk about sustainability without considering some exercise. The mobility is great (and I hope you keep it) but we also need some level of physical stress on the heart and muscles. Your options are endless:

  • You could get a new hobby / join a new class: surfing, yoga, playing football or maybe a self-defense class. Keep your body moving – at least 2-3 times a week.
  • Surely getting stronger, releasing endorphins and keeping healthy isn’t all bad. If your exercise is making you hate it, you’re doing it wrong. Learn to enjoy it or switch your exercise altogether until you find something that works for you. You don’t have to go mad on exercise and nutrition to maintain, but you still have to go somewhere.
  • Don’t use the advice above to lose weight, this will be frustrating if you try. You’ve got BellyProof to lose fat – maintenance should be something you can progress and love to do long-term.
  • Consider going for something highly aerobic (running / swimming etc…) once a week / once every two weeks.
  • Consider using exercises you learned during the BellyProof program – a lot of them have progressions you can use as you get better.
  • Every now and again, you can do one of the workouts. They are not going to work for fat loss in isolation without the rest of the structure, but they will help you maintain.

Don’t have time? Trying to figure out where to start? Here’s a little idea of what you can do start:

First thing in the morning, 2-3 times a week before you had a chance to eat anything – do the following:

  • 2 sets of the 8 Seconds Zombie
  • 3 sets of 6 reps per leg doing the Dragon Walks
  • 1 min doing Plank Plate Switch

You can find the video tutorials for these in the workouts. This is just something to get you started (which should take about 10 minutes to do).

 

Congrats again for finishing the BellyProof program!

Get in touch – share some results and tell me how it went. If you need any advice, I’m always happy to help with anything.