Read this before our call
"I've tried Noom, detoxes, YouTube workouts, gyms. Everything except GLP-1."
"I must have lost a thousand pounds over 41 years of dieting."
If you've got a list like that, you're not alone. Keto, intermittent fasting, Weight Watchers, shakes, cleanses, a 20-day reset that took off 18 pounds and then put them back on. Each one worked for a while, which is what makes it so maddening.
After enough rounds, "I've tried everything" quietly turns into "maybe I'm the problem." Wrong diagnosis. Every one of those plans had the same missing piece, and once you see it, you'll stop buying the next shiny thing.
Why they all worked, and then didn't
Under the branding, nearly every diet works the same way: it gets you to eat less. Keto takes away carbs. Fasting takes away hours. Shakes take away meals. Cleanses take away basically everything. Less food in, the scale goes down. That part works.
The trouble is what they leave out:
- No exit plan. The diet tells you how to lose and says nothing about the year after. So you go back to how you ate before, and the weight comes back with it.
- Lost muscle. Crash diets take muscle along with fat. Regain usually comes back as more fat than muscle, so each round leaves you softer at the same weight.
- No skills. You learned to follow rules, not how to handle a restaurant, a holiday or a hard week. When the rules stop, so does the progress.
- Hunger always wins in the end. Anything that leaves you hungry and tired every day has an expiry date.
So your history doesn't prove you can't lose weight. It proves you can. You've done it many times. What's never been built is keeping it off.
What's different about an approach that sticks
- It's slower on purpose. Losing about 0.5 to 1% of your body weight a week means you're eating enough to train, sleep and stay sane. A crash diet looks better for the first month and worse on every other date.
- It protects your muscle. Protein and lifting so that what comes off is fat.
- Your normal foods stay. If the plan bans bread forever, you already know how it ends.
- It teaches you to adjust. Reading your own data and changing one thing at a time, so you're not dependent on rules.
- Maintenance is a planned phase. Eating at a steady weight for a stretch is part of the plan, not a failure.
- Somebody checks in. Most of the plans you've tried left you on your own the moment it got hard.
None of that is a secret. It's just less exciting to sell than a 21-day reset.
If you've used a GLP-1
Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound can be really useful tools, and whether you start, stay on or come off one is between you and your doctor.
What I'd want you to know either way:
- On the medication, appetite drops a lot, and it's easy to under-eat protein. That costs muscle. Make protein your first priority at every meal and keep lifting.
- Coming off, appetite tends to come back, and so does weight for a lot of people. That's where having the skills (protein, portions, tracking, a plan for weekends) matters most.
- Either way, the same basics apply. The medication changes how hungry you are. It doesn't build muscle or teach you anything.
If you're planning to come off, tell me on the call. The months around that are a great time to have coaching in place.
Your 7-day checklist
Before our call
Bring your list. It's the most useful thing you can bring me. Then have a think about these:
- Which approach did you enjoy most, and why?
- What did the weeks after each diet look like?
- What would make this time different for you?
On the call we'll go through your history and build a plan around what's actually gone wrong before, so we don't repeat it.
See you on the call.
Aaron