Phases Of Transforming Your Body

Most people think the finish line is “goal weight.” We think that is where the real test starts. We break down the three phases of fitness and body transformation we use with clients: a focused fat loss phase, a structured maintenance phase, and a rebuild phase that restores performance and helps you eat more without unwanted fat gain. If you have ever dropped weight only to watch it creep back, this is the framework that explains why and gives you a clear plan forward. 

We talk through why fat loss comes first for health, energy, and hormonal stability, and why staying in a deficit too long can make progress feel harder over time. We also unpack the sneaky pattern that traps a lot of people: “five steps forward, two steps back.” Those weekend refeeds, untracked treats, and fading urgency near the goal can keep you stuck a couple of kilos from the finish or living in a constant loop of almost-there frustration. 

Maintenance gets a full reality check too. We explain why holding a stable trend is not the same as giving up structure, and why “weight loss” is not always “fat loss” if you lose muscle along the way. Then we move into the rebuild phase and how to increase calories strategically, often by adding carbohydrates, while keeping training consistent so your metabolism, recovery, and confidence improve. If you want a sustainable fitness journey, better body composition, and a long-term fat loss strategy that actually lasts, this is the map. Subscribe, share this with a friend who keeps restarting, and leave a review telling us which phase you are in right now.

Transcript

The Three Phases Explained

SPEAKER_00 0:02

All right. How are we all doing? So today we are talking about the phases of fitness, body transformation. Actually, my whole business is based off this method. And it is a fat loss phase, maintenance phase, rebuild phase. That's basically, I mean, my method is built off that, but that is kind of how fitness and transformation works. Now, some of you will only see the fat loss phase, um, and there's reasons for that because you're only in it for that. But the re you know, if you were to do this properly, I'm gonna speak to you tonight as if I'm speaking to a pro. So you can understand like the high level and then how that works down to our level, essentially. Um, so if you were to go all out, you would know where you'd be at what times, and then if you can bring it down to kind of our level, you'd understand the things that we we need to concentrate on, but also within each phase, we what we really need to understand is like what we need to do within that phase because there's a big misconception that oh, as soon as I get to my weight, I'm just gonna go back to doing what I was doing previously, and everything's gonna be okay.

The House Upkeep Mindset

SPEAKER_00 1:20

And essentially, it just doesn't work like that. Now, you need to think about your body, you need to think about your fitness like what's the best way? Um like a like an expensive house. That's the best way to put it. You are saving up for this house, you're building this house, you're you're doing the renovations, whatever it is, and then you get this lovely mansion that you've saved up for the last however long. When you walk into the house, the work doesn't stop. You could just sit in a house and do nothing to it, like never clean it, but it would become a shithole. Actually, the bigger the house, the more expensive the bill becomes, you know. Maybe service charge, maybe you need to window cleaning, maybe you need cleaners, maybe you need to, you know, fix some bits up, boiler brakes. Like the job doesn't end once you get the house. It just doesn't. And it's the same with your body. The job doesn't finish as soon as you get to the goal weight. Now, there's things that we can do to make it a lot easier to manage, but what I need everyone to understand, and this is a very, very, very, very, very hard pill to swallow. If you want an amazing body consistently to the day you die, you have to do the same stuff that you're doing in the weight loss phase for maintenance and for rebuilding. Now, what I mean by that is the variables. The variables will be different. So obviously, you won't need to be on a be in a diet forever, you won't need to have a high activity forever. The variables change. But when it comes to organizing your food, tracking your food, having an understanding what's going in the body regarding macros, your training will never, should never stop realistically. All these things will always need to be on for you to have a great body or a great life or a healthy life. Now, you can say to yourself, okay, I'm gonna lose my weight, my 10 kilos, and then I'm just gonna. I'm sweet, man. I'm gonna I've got it all under control. What will normally happen is you'll stop tracking, you'll stop tracking your workouts, steps will probably be there still, cardio you kind of do whenever you feel like it. Food will start to slowly creep back in, your protein will get a bit lower, your calories will kind of be a bit all over the place because you're not understanding exactly what's going on, and you'll start to gain weight, essentially. But but not gain weight in the right way, not gain weight in the same way that we do in a rebuild phase, but gain weight in a way that we don't basically want, because the food that's going in is essentially not the right food that we want to be re-rebuilding our whole physique. So I'm gonna go into that into a bit more detail, but I'm gonna talk through each phase really quickly.

Why Fat Loss Comes First

SPEAKER_00 4:37

Now, first, no matter where you are in your fitness journey, the first phase, which is the most important phase, is the fat loss phase. Now, why is this, guys? Please don't keep unmuting yourself. Um, not that I don't want to hear from you, but yeah. It's my time. Um, so the fat loss phase is the most important phase in the beginning because while your body has unnecessary body fat on it, not unnecessary weight as such, unnecessary body fat for your type, your body shape, it is not working at its best. It is risk, a higher risk of all diseases and death, basically, because anything that comes your way is a lot harder to handle with more body fat on your body. It's just an unhealthy version of you. Um, your hormones won't be as stable. You won't be able to deal with food as good. So you're at a place where you're not efficient, your body is not working at its best ability, and that is down to habits that have happened, processed food, sugar, alcohol, not doing the right training, and it's left us in a place where we've got excess body fat and we're we're essentially unhealthy. Now, I don't know if you've seen the debate that I put in the group, there was like body positivity activist versus Julie Michaels, who obviously her approach is a bit more extreme, but essentially what she was saying is body fat, excess body fat on the body is unhealthy. Simple as that. So, what we want to do is get the excess body fat down to a good level where your hormones start to stabilize, your body becomes a little bit more efficient at food, you feel good, you feel more confident, you feel more energetic, you can move more, you've got better, your joints hurt less, you've got more strength, your sleep is better. So we're getting your body into an efficient place. Now, that's just the general health stuff. We then also want the aesthetic stuff on top when we want to look a certain way. So that's also why we're doing that body fat as well. I mean, some of us are doing the body fat for the aesthetic first with the health second, but you know what I mean. It we want to lose that weight. Now, realistically, in realistic terms, if you were a pro coming to me and you were saying it doesn't matter how much fat loss you have to lose, I would go be looking at a fat loss phase of anything from 12 to 18 weeks. Where we go, right, from 12 to 18 weeks, I'm gonna put you in a fat loss phase, lose the fat, and then I'm gonna put you into maintenance no matter what happens. And the reason we do this is because we don't actually want to be in a fat loss phase for too long because your body's in a deficit, basically. So while it's in that deficit, it's the metabolism's getting slower. Um, your hormone, hunger hormones are starting to go up a little bit. So, as you the longer you're in a fat loss phase, the more your body will start to resist that fat loss phase. Now, some of you are thinking, hang on a minute, I've been in a deficit for years. Here's where it's different. I'm talking about a pro. I'm talking about someone that can abide by the variables for 12 to 18 weeks without going off. The average person can do that for around about 10 to 20 days before a birthday party pops up. I mean, some of you guys would be doing it on five five-day cycles, yeah? Weekends come off, and you'll be eating over the amount that you're supposed to be eating. That is essentially called a refeed. So your deficit is getting to a certain level, then you're refeeding. So if we look at days as steps, some of you are taking five steps forward, two steps backwards. Five steps forward, two steps backwards. So you're you're constantly putting yourself back into maintenance or surplus. So you're actually turning on the hormones, which means you can be in a deficit for much longer. You're actually not in a proper fat loss phase for 12 to 18 weeks. If you were, we would be putting in food every now and again to rebuild you. But you're doing that naturally because that's basically what a normal person would do. Go out with a friend, do this, do that. You're putting that food back in without you even knowing it. So you can stay in a fat loss phase for a lot longer. But if you was like, you know what, I really want to go all out, we would be looking at a 12 to 18 week fat loss phase and then putting you in maintenance for a bit, letting your body calm down, let it maintain, let it understand that this is the new weight. And then if it had more to push, you push more. So you do fat loss in cycles. Some of you are doing them cycles, but you're doing them at a much smaller scale, where you're going, oh, it's been seven days, and oh, I had a bag of chips at the weekend. That's refeeding the body. So that you're basically doing them cycles in a much smaller scale. What you've got to be careful of is the smaller the scale, the longer the journey's gonna be. Yeah. Because remember, five steps forward, two steps back. Actually, on a weekly basis, you're only taking three steps forward. Where someone in a fat loss phase is taking seven steps forward. You can imagine how that compounds over time. By the time you're even at what, nine steps, that person's at 21, you know. So your ability to stay within that diet makes the compounding effect of fat loss a lot better. So, realistically, you want to try and get this thing done in a short amount of time as possible,

Diet Cycles And The Refeed Trap

SPEAKER_00 10:27

but we have families, we have life, so it's not always as easy as that. Second phase is maintenance. Now, this is where most people think that you take the foot off the pedal. I believe maintenance is a lot harder than fat loss. I really struggle at maintenance. I'm an all or nothing kind of person. I like to be, I like the weight up, I like the the build, I like the the challenge, I like the I actually like the diet phase. I don't like it a strong word, but I put I feel my best in that. You know, for me, it's not so much the destination, it's to who the person I am within that, doing my steps, getting my cardio, getting my food tracked, being healthy. I'm a machine when I'm in that period. And so sometimes I'm better at that. Maintenance for me feels a bit like I've taken my foot off the pedal. I kind of lose my sense of belonging. You know, it's it's a little bit harder for me. So I believe it's it's a difficult place to navigate. Now, what we've got to understand about maintenance, maintenance is you've you've hit a weight goal and you're staying at that weight goal consistently for a period of time. That won't always, let's say I've I've hit 70 kilos, for example. I'm not going to be 70 kilos every week. It won't work like that. What it will work like is that sometimes I'd be 71, sometimes I'd be 69, sometimes I'd be 73, sometimes I'll be 67. But over the space of a few months, if I drew a line over it, I'd be in maintenance. Now, I believe maintenance is great, but we should always be thinking about rebuilding the metabolism because the longer we stay in maintenance, the more bad habits are going to kick in. Um, so therefore, it could basically just put weight on rather than lose it or stay the same. So a rebuild is key, and I'll talk about that in a second. But before I go into that, what I need you to understand is all weight loss isn't the same. So there's weight loss and then there's fat loss. Yeah? So weight loss is essentially losing weight on the scales weekly, but we don't care where that weight came from. What we're trying to do is fat loss. Now that's the difference between people that can take the medication, that's essentially going to be losing a lot more weight. So you'll be losing a lot more muscle, which is longevity goes away. We're trying to lose fat and keep as much muscle as possible. So we're keeping that metabolism in a good place, longevity, all the goodness. We're trying to get the fat off the body, but keep the shape that we basically got. So all weight gain isn't fat gain, goes both ways. So this is when sometimes some of you are losing your bloody marbles each week when the scales go up by a point or down by a point. You're going, oh my god, fucking put on weight. It's like, okay, all weight gain isn't fat gain. I could show you seven different pictures of me at 100 kilos, and some of them look like I've just come out of men's health, and some of them look like I've just walked out the back of McDonald's after an eating competition. I personally, which I probably class myself as close to pro, I don't really have too much of attachment with what weight I am. So when I'm looking for a goal, I'm looking for a look. I'm looking for a look to maintain. My weight will go up and down. Sometimes I'll be heavier, sometimes I'll be lighter. You know, so I'm I'm always looking for uh a basically a look to maintain rather than a weight to maintain. Um, it's a bit harder to navigate and it does have some relationship to the scales, but as we look at the rebuild phase in a second, all weight is not in the same weight. So as we come down, we've lost this weight, we've now maintained for a little bit. Someone will decide to lose a bit more weight, some will decide to rebuild. The rebuild is key. There's a few of you in a rebuild right now, uh, or have been in some sort of rebuild where what we're trying to do is let's say you've hit 70 kilos, that's your weight, we've maintained for a little bit.

Why Maintenance Feels Harder

SPEAKER_00 14:55

What I'm trying to do now is I'm trying to put food back in. But we're trying to put whole foods back in. Remember what I said in the beginning when you have too much excess body fat, your hormones, your ability to digest food, your ability to use food in the right way are compromised. Well, as you've lost that body fat, your body becomes more sensitive and it can deal with food a lot better. So what we can do is we can start to put food back in. That normally is carbohydrates. And as we're putting a little bit in at a time, what we'll see is the weight will stay the same. And you'll be like, how am I how's my weight staying the same? It's because what's happening is your body's becoming more efficient, it starts to use it better, and it becomes more of a powered machine. So over time, we can keep adding a little bit more, a little bit more, topping you up until we find that threshold where we're just putting a little bit of weight on, but not enough. But now what we've done is we've rebuilt your metabolism. We've rebuilt how you're body deals with food, your training will be better, your recovery will be better, you actually can eat more food and keep the weight off. Um proteins are a lot easier to hit because we've got more carbohydrates. So this is like Zion. Yeah, this is like the place that we want to be. But what happens is some of us get stuck in this fat loss phase, and we're just in this tumble dryer of fat loss phase. Um, and actually, what's happening, we're not even in the fat loss phase. We're actually in maintenance, but we're not getting the joy out of maintenance because we're doing five steps forward, five steps back, five steps forward, five steps back. So the five steps forward feel like a diet phase, the five steps back feel like a failure. So we're either getting positive and negative, positive and negative, but we're not actually getting neutral. That's why sometimes, if you've got like a Christmas, for example, where I say to people, we're not trying to lose weight every Christmas, we're trying to just maintain. Sometimes you've got to make the assumption like right now, at a period of my life, maintenance looks a bit better. Why is the label better? Because it doesn't feel less of a failure when you're stepping on the scales on a week-to-week basis. You go, I'm the same way. Well, that was the goal. Bob's run called, we're winning. Then we can go back into the fat loss phase. But like I said, some of us get stuck in this fat in this fat loss phase, and we never quite hit the maintenance or the rebuild because we're just doing two sets forward, two sets back. So my urge to you is go right. I'm in the fat loss phase right now. I had you have a some of you have like two, three kilos to lose, and really just put your foot down and get it fucking done. But you're letting life get in the way. So just remember that analogy of the the every day that is a day off is a step back. And if you've had four days on and two days off, it's two and two, you know, four and two. You're not quite getting that momentum forward. Now, I want to just talk you through a quick diagram. Let me just pull it up real quickly and share my screen. This will make it make sense just a little bit more. Um so you'll see my screen here. This is a fat loss phase, and what we're doing

Weight Loss Versus Fat Loss

SPEAKER_00 18:12

here is this is your metabolic rate, this is your calorie intake, and this is your weight. Now, what you'll see here is let's say I start at 100 kilos. Let's take me for example, 100 kilos. My goal is to get to 90 kilos. I've got 10 kilos to lose. As I lose the weight, I will not need as much calories as I did in the beginning. Because what's happening is as I'm losing the weight, one, I'm getting smaller, so I don't need as much fuel. Two, my metabolism is starting to get slower because before I could deal with that food a bit better, my metabolism gets smaller. It's getting my hunger hormones are basically pushing against this diet. Um, so my calorie intake would probably need to come down a little bit. Now, here's a big, big, big, big, big, big, big, huge mistake some people make. I give you calories here, and you will get some steady weight loss. Yeah. And then we'll be about here, and you'll say to yourself, you know what? I can get to here on my own. Well, I'm on the same calories, I just see it through. And then when I'm in maintenance, I'll pull my foot off the pedal and I'll be absolutely sweet here. But here's what people do not understand the reason you have an ability to keep losing weight without dropping your calories along the way is because this, in the beginning, you believe this isn't gonna work, I'm not gonna get any results, I'm gonna take a pun, I'm gonna go for it. So you do it at about 7, 60%. But 60% is so much better than where you were before, you start to lose weight. And as you start to lose weight, you go, oh, this is actually working. I've lost two kilos. Okay, I'm gonna do this a little bit more. So you do about 80%, 90%. So you're you what you don't know is you're consistently putting yourself in more of a deficit by your ability to do the program more. Now, as we get here, we're now closer to your goal. And what happens is this two things. Number one, these calories don't work anymore because you've reached a threshold and you go, oh, these calories ain't work anymore. I don't know what to do. And I get you get stuck around this mark here. Or some, because they're now close to their goal, what they'll do is they'll start allowing a few bits of bobs to come in and they'll get stuck at this stage here. Because what's happening is they're just like four steps forward, two steps back, four steps forward, and they'll get stuck here, two, three kilos away from where they need to be, because they can't quite get here because they've got they keep saying yes to the biscuits again. And this area is where a lot of people get stuck. Now, what should happen is we should get to our goal, and you feel like, okay, now I'm in my goal, I want to maintain. So, what we need to do is we need to now think about okay, we need to level out these calories. We need to get you on a calorie basis where your body stops losing weight, and that might be a two, three hundred calories or maybe less. And then what happens is we can start to add that food back. And as we add in the food back, your metabolism starts to get better, but your weight stays the same. This is key. So eventually, if we do finish the full cycle, we're eating more calories here, but the weight is now the same, where it's different to here. Here is weight is higher and it will drive us down. But here we can start to eat more and more and more and more, and weight stays the same. And this is rebuilding the body, and it's so essential and part of this journey that if you don't finish with a good maintenance and a good rebuild, over time you will start. Start to let things slip and your weight will go back. But it won't be the same as a rebuild, because a rebuild takes strategy, and a just I'm eating freely again isn't strat, it hasn't got strategy behind it. So if we look at the variables that we have, yeah, we've got some real simple variables, food tracking, we've got your daily steps, your training, and obviously your check-in is that everything combined. Now, just to touch on food tracking, food tracking is your protein, your carbohydrates, and your fat. We know protein is for your muscular recovery, we know carbohydrates for your energy and energy, and fats are for your hormones. Bit more than that, but let's keep it pretty simple. If I can track all three of these to my best ability, and I can track my steps, which is my output, my activity, and my training, which is also my output and activity, we sleep recovery and so

Rebuild Your Metabolism With Food

SPEAKER_00 23:02

we could take into consideration, but I'm not gonna right now. Let's just put that to aside. If I can track these in the best way possible, I can basically fix any outcome. Because if I want to lose more weight, I adjust the variables. I bring the output out or I bring the steps up. So I start to do more output than I have got coming in. Um if I want to lose a bit more weight a bit quicker, I can slowly bring the carbohydrates down by keeping the protein in a good place and the fats in a good place. Now, as I go into maintenance, what I want is to control these variables just as much. Because what I don't want to do is like, okay, I've stopped doing my activity because I feel like I'm at the right place now and I've started doing Pilates because that's what everyone's doing. And I'm just gonna eat what I want, and my proteins come low, um, my carbohydrates are just all over the shop, and I'm losing track of these variables. So then what happens is I start to the whole formula gets messed up. And that's why each phase needs as much structure as it did for the fat loss phase. Because these variables are so important to control because we want to control the outcome. We don't want to leave the outcome to chance. So when you hit maintenance, if you want to control that outcome, if you want to control the fact that I want to maintain my weight, you need to control the variables. If you want to rebuild yourself, you want to rebuild yourself in the right way, you need to control the variables because you want to control the outcome. Now, some of you thinking, fuck me, I have to do this for the rest of my life. Yes and no. What you have to do to bring that weight down, you have to have high output and you have to have low income. Yeah, because it's a deficit and high output. And that's the hard part. As you go into maintenance, you can have more food and less output. So you can already feel a bit better. Rebuild is less output and more food. That's the fucking best place. But we need to understand the variables to the best of our ability. Now, some of you go, but I don't want to be tracking for the rest of life. You don't need to again. What you might find is you've been doing it for a longer, big enough period where you can go, I kind of know where my day is at. And if you step on the scales and go, you know what, I'm probably eating a bit too much. I need to just navigate. That could be a way of navigating it. But if you want an elite body, if you want an amazing, sexy figure for the rest of your life, tracking these variables seems like a pretty fair trade-off. If you get the expensive car, if you get the big house, it needs upkeep. It would be completely ridiculous to think we could just sit in this expensive car, never get it serviced, never get it MOT, never change the oil, never change the tires, drive it till the fucking wheels come off, drive it like it's a city car, it's gonna get fucked up. And then you're gonna have to go what? Back into a fat loss phase. And the body is the same. If you leave your house untouched for a period of time, one day, fucking real that bit of leak that we've not fixed, what happens? The fucking ceiling falls down. Now I've got to go to fix all the fucking things. It's super expensive because that one thing I could have just kept my eye on. It's the same as your body. If you don't pay attention, it will go back. If we don't weigh ourselves and look, is my weight going up? It's going up. I've not weighed myself recently. I went into maintenance. Um, but I went into maintenance without tracking all these variables. And to be honest, I just said to myself, I'm gonna take a bit of time off. I'm in a bit of a privileged spot, if I'm honest with you. I can turn it on when I need to. I don't ever let myself get past the stage of like, I look bad. I always keep myself looking, I feel like, really good to kind of good. Sometimes I let it go a bit too much, but I didn't track my weight recently. Um, and I stepped on, because I'm just getting ready for my summer and the baby came in. And I stepped on, I was like, oh, okay, I'm five kilos up. I thought in my head I was about three kilos. I was well, I was five kilos. I was like, fuck it, that's how quick it can go, it can happen. Was I eating terrible? Not really. I was just, I didn't track my food, I just was navigating my day. It went on for four months. I put in five kilos in four months, and I promise you, I was not eating bad. But I stopped looking at everything. I went on pause with my coach, I took a bit of time off. I wanted to work on my business. I had a bit of strategy behind it, I knew I was going to come back to it. But at the end

The Diagram Behind Plateaus

SPEAKER_00 27:52

of the day, I said to my coach, I should have just stayed on with y'all. I should have just stayed with you to just just so I was at least tracking, kept myself accountable. But even me, I second guess this journey sometimes. But there is no second guess in it. I can't even cheat the system. You got fucking no chance, yeah? Don't take this for granted. You know, someone asked me today, it's like, how do people deal with tracking like you know, all the time? It's not overwhelming. Make it so it's not overwhelming. Prepare the day before you do it. Get in bed that night and go, what am I eating tomorrow? Bam, bam, bam. Takes five minutes, done. Like, really, tracking's long when you're fucking about on a day-to-day. It's not long when you set it out the day before. Like when you're organizing a holiday, like when you're organizing your kids, like when the kids have got a fucking show and you've got going on and you've got to organize their stuff. Just organize yourself in the same way. Find what phase you're in right now. Find how close you are to that next phase. Or say to yourself, okay, I want to, let's say you've got, I don't know, let's say you've got still got 20 kilos to lose. So you've got to think, fuck, got 20 kilos to lose. It's still a big journey. Break it up. Okay, six kilos at a time, six and a half kilos at a time. So I'm gonna go into a fat loss phase for three months. Yeah. And I'm gonna smash six kilos and then I'm gonna put myself into maintenance for a week or two just to ease off, take a bit of time off, and then I'm gonna put back into it for another six kilos. Break it up in them in that period of time. If you've got under six kilos, it's done in less than three months, like that easily. Then you're already in the maintenance phase. You're already nearly at the finish line to get to rebuild, you know? But don't get stuck in this tumble dryer of like, I feel good, but you know, now the the chocolates are coming in because I don't feel as much urgency. You start to be able to dress it up a bit nicer. Get in front of the mirror, naked, look at the body and go, okay, am I happy here? And if the answer is yes, boom, maintenance today. Am I not happy? Get my ass back into a fat loss zone and sacrifice just like you did in the very beginning. Just because you're close to your goal, people think that it gets harder as you get lower down. It doesn't get harder, we just get more privileged. The body's not as bad. The urgency's gone. I don't feel like shit anymore. Okay, great. So I might eat that chocolate, but I might have two more glasses of wine. Because what happens is we start to think the wine and the chocolate feels better than the destination that we're going. Where before, anything to get you away from where you were. So the destination feels so appealing where it's easy to give up that. Start to dress up the destination a little bit more. Don't be okay with okay, look to be fucking elite, sexy, unbelievable all the time. Fucking no questions asked. Don't allow yourself to slowly go back to where you was before. Don't allow the mindset, food, treats, alcohol, sugar, it's nowhere near as good as putting on a bikini, putting on some nice clothes, looking in the mirror and going, I feel fucking great. If you can find me a bit of chocolate that can beat that, send me that chocolate because that's gotta be a good bit of fucking chocolate. We'll leave it there.