Well done on completing the 30 Day Fat Loss Challenge!

This is no small achievement!

We’ve balanced hormones and repaired or replaced at least a trillion or so cells, if not 10 or 20 trillion.

We’ve removed fatty deposits not only from our fat cells, but from our blood vessels, where it can narrow blood flow, causing more work for our heart.

We’ve removed fatty deposits from our organs, where it can make them less efficient or prevent them from doing their job. (Not good.)

And we’ve improved our digestion and microbiome, the most important gatekeepers for our overall health.

In short… we’ve done a lot!

You’ve probably heard of the Cholesterol Hypothesis.

This is a hypothesis that higher levels of cholesterol, particularly LDL Cholesterol, are associated with higher rates of Heart Disease.

This hypothesis is so deeply ingrained in our understanding of how the body works that challenging it is almost laughable. (Even though it’s still just a hypothesis after all these decades.)

However, over the last decade, more and more scientists and doctors have been doing that for one very glaring reason: there is no evidence to support the hypothesis.

Welcome to the final week of the 30-Day Fat Loss Challenge!

During this challenge we’ve had our ups and downs as cravings came and went and hormones began to balance.

But by Week Four things have evened out or soon will.

Energy levels rise, mood may become more even, sleep becomes more restful, digestion improves, and overall health rises.

And, of course, we’ve lost a significant amount of body fat.

As we near the end of the Fat Loss stage of this or any protocol, fat loss will slow. We might still have some extra fat, but it’s not coming off or it’s coming off very slowly.

Also, we’re getting hungry. Not for sugar or junk food, but hunger for more nutrition.

At this point, it’s counter-productive to carry on with Fat Loss, even if we have a bit more to lose. We need to do something else.

Well done on making it through Week Two of the 30-Day Fat Loss Challenge!

For some, we're finishing the last of the cravings. For many, we’re in the midst of hormonal re-balancing, something that will continue through the end of the challenge.

But for others, we may have already reached our goals. And we need to talk about what that point looks like, because if we go beyond it on our current macros, then we’ll cause ourselves trouble.

We know our bodies do most of their repair while we sleep. But did you know they do most of their fat-burning while we sleep as well?

That’s right. And if our sleep is interrupted often, it can lead to not only less fat-burning taking place, but more fat-creation.

There is a reason this is the Fat Loss Challenge, not the Weight Loss Challenge.

Usually when someone wants to be thinner, trimmer, fitter-looking, they say: “I need to lose weight.”

And that’s the first error, because weight loss is not necessarily the same as fat loss.

Any time we go on a diet, cutting out sugar or cutting down on food, we go through one phase before anything else. Cravings. This can be for sugar or junk food or processed food or just food. But your body wants and it makes you feel that want.

YOUR 30-DAY CHALLENGE EXERCISE ROUTINE: You may or may not have lifted weights before, but on this protocol you will be lifting 5 days per week. This is key as it helps you build muscle that both tones your body, but also speeds fat-burning, cellular restructuring, and hormone rebalancing.And the more muscle you have by the end of this challenge, the easier it will be to keep excess body fat off.

The key to sustainable fat loss is not “cutting calories”, “working out”, or “changing our diet”.

Yes, we absolutely do need to do all of this for immediate fat loss.

But we’re talking about sustainable fat loss now: how to reduce body fat in the smoothest and most pain-free way, and how to keep it off afterwards.

And there is one thing that determines this more than any other: our hormones.

You will also be consuming more protein than you are used to and most likely will not be up to that at the very beginning. This is because the amounts of processed sugar and foods, and lack of enough protein that most people have had for decades, have lowered most people’s ability to fully digest proteins.

WEEK ONE OF THE 30 DAY FAT LOSS CHALLENGE: To lose body fat we do something called calorie counting. If you eat less calories than your body needs, it will burn body fat to release energy. So you lose fat. At least, it should do this. But it doesn’t always… This is because of your hormones.