Hi, everyone! It’s Chris here from Chris Gates Fitness, and today I’m going to map out for you exactly how I plan to structure and execute my upcoming diet.

Everything here is what I plan to do, and it can absolutely be applicable for YOU if you’d like to give this a shot (and if you decide to do this diet challenge with me, please contact me and let me know! I’d love to support you along the way.)

If you are new to me and this website, let me start by give you a little bit of background information. I am an online fitness coach, and I’ve worked with tons of people to successfully navigate their own body transformations — whether it being losing weight, building muscle, getting stronger, or anything else.

My long-term personal goals are centered around building muscle and developing a functional base of strength. Occasionally (about once every year) I diet down to shed unwanted body fat. This helps me to maintain a healthy body weight and just generally feel good.

I tell you all of that about me so that I can document this process to help YOU! During these once-a-year diets I think it’s helpful to document the process to help guide others who might want to lose some weight of their own. So that’s what I’m doing here, with the first post of about 9-10 as we break this diet down each week!

Here’s the Challenge

I’ve talked about this a little bit already on Twitter (if you’re not already, click over and hit “follow!”), and I’d like to invite you to join in!

Here’s the scoop…

Rather that take the traditional approach to dieting where you take something like 90 days to lose a certain amount of weight, I’m going to experiment with a phased approach. It will look something like this:

Weeks:	Phase:	Notes:
Weeks 1-3	Calorie Deficit	A somewhat aggressive calorie deficit in order to lose as much weight as possible.
Weeks 4-6	Maintenance	Calories will come back up and the goal will be to maintain my current body weight.
Weeks 7-9	Calorie Deficit	Another aggressive deficit to drop additional weight before the diet comes to a close.

The duration of this diet will be nine weeks. I’ve never tried a phased approach like this before, but I see this approach as beneficial for a number of reasons…

• First, it should be highly sustainable — much more so than the traditional 90-day approach I mentioned above. Dieting in phases allows for periods of restriction along with periods of higher calorie consumption. Simply put, dieting hard for three weeks is easy to do when you know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel (and it’s not several months away). It can allow you to be a little bit more aggressive when dieting.

• Second, this approach can help to sustain as much muscle mass as possible. The longer you’re in a calorie deficit, the greater the chances are for you to lose a significant amount of muscle mass, along with body fat. One thing I want to preserve in this diet is my strength. I don’t want to have to drastically lower the weights I’m lifting throughout this cut (which often happens when I do a long-term diet). Maintaining strength and continuing to be able to handle the same workloads as compared to when I was in a calorie surplus will be a good indicator that the vast majority of the weight I lose will be body fat.

• And third, it teaches you that dieting can be sustainable. There are a million different ways to go about losing weight and do it the way you want. All it requires is for you to be in a calorie deficit. I don’t care what you’ve read elsewhere, or what other weight-loss programs claim — you can set yourself up for success with weight loss. A phased approach like this takes a little bit longer, but you can still achieve the progress you’re looking for.

In the end, who the hell cares what the structure looks like, or how long it takes, if you get where you want to be in the end?

The answer is nobody.

Nobody cares.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing more details about how this process is going and what my training, nutrition, and adjustments look like. For now, I’m inviting anyone interested to join me!

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Thanks for reading! If you’re interested in coaching to help you navigate your own weight-loss journey, or achieve some other type of health and fitness goal, check out my coaching services page and feel free to contact me. We can talk about what your current goals are and how we might potentially be able to work together and find success!

CGF