The Momentum Phase: Your Pre-Diet Checklist
Are you sick of nutritional programs or diets that do not fit your lifestyle?
If you have struggled to see fat loss results in the past, I know exactly how you feel.
The solution? You haven’t had a proven method to help you achieve the results you desire.
At Mack Performance, I’m all about teaching you every single thing you’ll need to know to create YOUR ideal diet while fitting your current lifestyle.
Do I have your attention now? 🙃
As a coach, I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen individuals randomly pick a set of macros, or blindly choosing a diet or magnetize workout hoping it will transform them into either Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow or Hugh Jackson’s Wolverine. The result? Regaining that same weight over once the diet is done.
However, to finally lose that stubborn weight and end the vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting to finally becoming the leanest, strongest, and most confident version of yourself requires you to have a plan.
You need to have a realistic game plan that will prepare you for achieving both your physique-related goals and long-term diet success. This is the one article you’ll need to teach you everything you’ll need to know.
The Momentum Phase: The Missing Link to Your Success
One of the most common mistakes most people make when trying to lose body fat that leads to diets failing?
Jumping right into a fat loss phase!!
Instead, my clients start with what I call a Momentum Phase. The Momentum phase is something you don’t hear a lot of coaches discuss, yet it’s absolutely crucial for your fat loss success AND building long-term sustainable habits.
You see, the Momentum phase is similar to a dynamic warm-up before a training session. In this case, the entire purpose is to prepare you for what’s ahead: the fat loss phase.
The momentum phase is where we build your fat loss foundation, which is essential as there’s nothing worse than eating at a calorie deficit and not seeing any results.
Without a solid nutritional foundation, it will be challenging to achieve and maintain your results.
To build a solid Nutritional foundation, we need to focus on the following:
Determine your Calories
Creating an individualized Nutritional Strategy
Consistently tracking data
Improve simple biofeedback markers (sleep, stress, cravings, etc.)
Mentally preparing for the fat loss journey ahead.
Within the Momentum phase, we’re focusing primarily on psychological and behavioral work to prime your body and mind to create the best fat loss possible when you enter the push phase.
This starts with…..
---> Nutritional Assessment
One of the biggest keys to nutritional success is individualization as we are working together to find your ideal diet.
When you start coaching with me, I’ll put you through a nutritional assessment to precisely identify the nutritional habits holding you back. This allows us to take a deeper drive into adequately fueling your body to maximize your progress.
During this assessment, we’ll take into account multiple different aspects, such as:
Your Lifestyle
Dieting History
Food Preferences
Desired Rate of Progress
Stress Levels
Time Investment
Activity Levels
We’re determining your tradeoffs, i.e. what are you willing to “trade” for quicker results. For example, if you are unwilling to trade off the daily happy hours for rapid fat loss, we know a less aggressive flexible approach will probably work better for you.
In short, we want your diet to fit your lifestyle, food preferences, and creating a nutritional structure that you’ll enjoy.
The start of the Momentum phase allows me to individualized your nutritional program to help you find your perfect diet. Some clients are perfectly fine with calorie and macro tracking. On the other hand, some clients absolutely hate the idea of tracking what they eat. Together, we’ll work to create your nutritional strategy.
Speaking of which…..
---> Creating Your Individualized Nutritional Strategy:
The key to any successful nutritional plan is individualization. Together, we’ll be collaborating to discover your ideal diet.
At Mack Performance, I firmly believe the best diet is the one you enjoy while making long-term objectively based measurements.
Your nutritional strategy needs to help you achieve optimal health while building that lean, powerful physique you want. Your nutritional strategy needs clear parameters to create a simple, long-term plan to follow.
Your nutritional strategy needs to meet the following parameters:
Your nutrition needs to have a clear structure. If you don’t have a plan in place, you’re more likely to fall out quickly.
Your nutrition needs to provide the necessary nutrients to fuel your training, lean muscle growth, and lifestyle.
Your nutrition needs to allow some flexibility so you can live your life without feeling like a social outcast. You should be able to enjoy the occasional drinks, burgers, pizza, and ice cream without feeling guilty or losing your results.
---> Ensuring Accuracy in your Tracking
Here’s the honest truth: we are absolutely terrible when it comes to estimating how many calories we eat in a day.
Time and time again, I’ve had clients telling me something similar to ….
“I’m only eating 1400 calories, and my body just absolutely refuses to lose weight. You suck”
… only to realize they’re eating far more calories than they thought.
Now, I firmly believe that they are never intentionally being deceptive. Instead, we’ll work together to learn how to track your nutrition accurately.
I firmly believe that you should track your calories, ideally for a few months. It’s the best way to retake control of your nutrition by providing yourself with your most effective fat loss weapons: Awareness, knowledge, and freedom.
The honest truth is tracking macros actually gives you freedom….
---> Freedom from being stuck in dieting purgatory hell: Following a structured nutritional strategy gives you the education and awareness necessary to create and maintain your results.
---> Freedom from the guilt associated with eating certain food as there are no “bad” or “good” foods: By tracking your food, I can teach you how to make foods you used to consider “bad” work in your diet. Once you realized you can maintain your results, your guilt is replaced with happiness.
---> Freedom from worrying that you overate or under-ate: Tracking your macros allows you to make up for “overdoing it” with no harm done to your progress.
This is a matter of perspective. Don’t think of those 5-10 minutes of tracking as restrictive, look at it as a way that will provide you exponentially more freedom for the rest of your life.
Now, I want to set the record straight, I do not believe that actively tracking and counting every single calorie is a long-term solution. This is a short-term goal that will give you your biggest weapon: Awareness and knowledge!
The ultimate goal of tracking your nutrition is to build awareness, knowledge, and a solid nutritional foundation for the rest of your life!!
---> Food Choices
A major key to long-term success for my online clients is teaching them how to auto-regulate your appetite with proper food selection. Within the momentum phase, we’re teaching you how to choose foods that make you full for relatively low calories.
By doing this, it will literally make it hard to overeat.
Eating to auto-regulate your appetite comes down to consistently selecting the most satisfying foods per calorie. This is called the “satiety Index of Common Foods “ which really helps illustrate this concept.
When it comes to building sustainable habits, we want to make sure your nutrition both fuel your body, training performance AND allows you to enjoy life.
Finding this balance is a big aspect of why most diets don’t work. Here’s what and how my online clients do differently to get such great results.
80-90% Paleo-ish Foods:
The honest truth and reality of the society we live in today, it’s way too easy to overeat. Most foods are highly processed and specially designed to be hyper-palatable as it’s specifically engineered in a lab to make us eat it more.
This is why you’ll be following a paleo-ish approach with 80-90% of your food. In the simplest terms, 80-90% of your foods should have either:
Swam in the ocean
Roamed the earth
Flew in the sky
Grew from the ground
Basically, you’re mostly eating foods a caveman with the exceptions of rice, oats, dairy, and potatoes. These paleo-ish foods are loaded with vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients to fuel your training while keeping hunger and cravings at bay.
Food Choices: The remaining 10-20%
Eating like a caveman is a good idea to build a lean, strong body. However, even caveman wants to enjoy the occasional burger, pizza, and beer, especially over the weekend.
As long as you’re eating primarily whole foods, you won’t have a problem with insane cravings or constant overeating. Instead, your fat loss efforts will come easier, and you’ll feel great.
This means applying an If It Fits Your Macro (ITFYM) approach for the remaining 10-20% of your diet won’t hurt your results or your health.
This means you can use those calories to eat and drink whatever you want. Beer, ice cream, pizza…
Seriously whatever.
As long as you still make those foods work within your calorie and macro goals, your results and health won’t be affected.
It’s ok to have some drinks and be social on the weekends. You don’t have to give up your favorite foods as long as you make them work within your nutritional strategy.
Throughout this process, I’ll be coaching and educating you every step of the way to make your nutrition strategy fit your lifestyle. As your coach, this is the most empowering thing I can do to give you the necessary confidence and belief to succeed.
—-> Click here for my recommended food list.
---> Consistency with Daily Movement
Do you know the most overlooked aspect between lean and obese individuals? It’s their Non-Exercise Thermogenesis Activity (or NEAT).
N.E.A.T is all your movement outside the gym that burns calories: pacing, blinking, cooking, doing laundry, or any other active hobbies.
Before diving into a fat loss phase, I want to ensure you’re consistently hitting a daily movement target, usually a step count goal. NEAT is one of those little secrets people constantly overlook, despite its importance for fat loss.
So, before we put you into a fat loss phase, I want to ensure you’re consistently hitting a daily movement target, usually, a step count goal I have for online clients track daily in their accountability tracker.
---> Education and Mindset
No matter how disciplined you are, at some point in your journey, you’ll feel like you’ve “failed”- from blowing past your total calories or seeing progress at a slower rate than you’ll like.
With the wrong mindset, this temporary failure usually leads to you quitting the diet altogether.
This is why I spend so much time going over this stuff within this blog and with my clients. Not only am I helping you creating sustainable fat loss results, but this is literally setting the foundation to improve the rest of your life.
The Momentum Phase helps us avoid this by educating you on the idea of consistency over perfection and teaching you to become focused on the process, knowing that this will lead you to your desired outcomes.
Throughout this process, I’ll be coaching and educating you every step of the way. As your coach, this is the most empowering thing I can do to give you the necessary confidence and belief to succeed.
This phase is highly individualized as it may last 2-3 weeks or 2-3 months. It is just completely dependent on the individual’s needs and history.
Throughout my coaching career, I firmly believe that education creates sustainability. I want to give you all the nutritional knowledge and tools to be successful on your own sooner rather than later. I don’t want online clients to be co-dependent on me for every day-to-day decision, rather I want to empower you with the knowledge so you can be independent.
So, to nicely summarize everything, here is the Momentum Prepared Checklist.
Understand and Consistent with Tracking Foods Accurately
No macro goal will create fat loss if you’re not tracking accurately and consistently
Consistently Eating Satiating Foods
Consistently hitting target protein intakes, and the majority of your foods choices are whole foods
Diet Structure fits your Lifestyle and Goals
The best diet is the one you enjoy while making long term measurable progress.
Consistently Hitting Daily Movement Goal
Consistently moving outside the gym is essential for fat loss. You’ll need to stay active outside the gym.
Mindset and Education
With the wrong mindset, a single “slip up” can lead to quitting altogether. Ensuring clients are not in the “All or Nothing” mindset is essential.
To sum it up, the momentum phase is all about building good habits surrounding food choices, daily movement, building a diet specifically for you while educating you about food choice, and improving your mindset.
This phase can take anywhere from 2 weeks to months, depending on where you’re currently at. This phase is completely individualized as some people need to take longer to build their nutritional foundation.
If you build your fat loss foundation upon a shaky foundation, I can almost guarantee you won’t see the long-term success and progress you’ve always wanted. Even if you do get lean, you won’t have the necessary tools nor education to sustainably maintain your results.
So, take the necessary time to fully prepare yourself with the necessary tools and knowledge and you’ll reap the rewards forever.
Two other critical factors to whether your diet succeeds or not?
● Accountability
● Structure and a clear plan to follow
My online coaching service provides you with both. At Mack Performance, I firmly believe that the best diet is the one you enjoy while making long-term,objective-based progress.
Together, we’ll create a tailored plan to get you to the physique you’ve always wanted, and expertly guide you through every step of your transformation
If you want expert guidance throughout every step of this method, apply for coaching.