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you

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Hey everybody, Mikki here. You're listening to Mini Mikkipedia on a Monday. And this week, I want to chat about the most dangerous phase of fat loss. And it's not what you think. Dangerous is probably a little bit dramatic, but I'm going to continue. Most people don't quit their fat loss journey at the start. Obviously, week one, everyone's excited. The plan is fresh. Motivation is high and the scale drops faster. And

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Most people don't quit when results are obvious, when clothes are fitting differently, when people start commenting, when the finish line of that fat loss phase is in sight. They quit in the middle, right when the effort is still high, but the novelty has worn off and the feedback loop can get bit fuzzy. And this is what author and marketing strategist Seth Godin calls the dip. And understanding it changes everything about how you approach weight loss.

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how you coach clients, and frankly, how you stay in the game when things feel harder than they should. So today, I want to reframe the middle of fat loss, not as failure, not as something you need to fix with a new and shiny protocol, but as the predictable, uncomfortable, incredibly normal phase where success is actually decided. So let's get into it. Firstly, who is Seth Godin and what is the dip? Seth Godin is a bestselling author,

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I've heard him several times on several podcasts like Tim Ferriss, Joe Rogan, and he is one of the most influential thinkers in marketing and business strategy. He's written more than 20 books, and one of them, a short punchy book called The Dip, explores a really simple but powerful idea. Every worthwhile pursuit has a middle phase where progress slows, discomfort rises, and most people quit. And, of course, he calls this phase The Dip.

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The dip is in a sign that you're doing anything wrong, obviously, although that's what your brain's telling you. It's the cost of doing anything that matters. Learning a language, building a business, mastering a skill, they all have a dip. Early on, you make really fast progress, newbie gains. Everything is new and exciting. Then you hit a wall. Progress feels slow, the dopamine drops, but if it feels disproportionate to the reward.

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And this is where most people bail. And here's what Godin argues, the dip is actually a sorting mechanism. It separates people who are casually interested from people who are strategically committed. It filters out the noise. And the people who understand the dip, who recognize it, expect it, and navigate it, are the ones who break through to the other side. Now, I want to be really clear here. This is not about gritting your teeth and pushing through

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pain blindly. It's not about ignoring red flags or white-knuckling your way through something that's genuinely misaligned with what you want to achieve. It's about recognising that there are predictable phases in any process, and the middle is almost always uncomfortable. And if you mistake discomfort for failure, you'll quit right before things start to consolidate. So with that frame, let's chat about why weight loss has a dip built right into it. Now, I have talked about this several times before.

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This is not news to you. Weight loss, fat loss, it's not a linear process. It doesn't unfold in a straight line. And the beginning feels very different from the middle. In that early phase weight loss, first week or two, the scale drops fast. You're losing water weight. Glycogen stores, which are our muscle carbohydrate stores, are emptying. Inflammation might settle if you've cleaned up your diet. The feedback is immediate. Motivation is high. The plan feels new. And you're excited to meal prep.

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You're tracking everything, you tell your friends you're doing a thing. And the phase, it's psychologically rewarding. The dopamine system is lighting up because novelty equals reward. And then you hit the middle. And this is what changes both physiologically and psychologically. Physiologically, fat loss is slower. You're no longer shedding water weight. You're now losing actual adipose tissue, which happens at maybe 0.5 % of body weight per week if you're doing things sustainably.

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up to 1 % a week, you know, if you've got a bit more to lose, that's fine too. But still, isn't a lot. Scale noise also increases. Hormonal fluctuations, sodium intake, training load, digestion, all of it affects daily weight. So even though you're losing fat, the number on the scale might not reflect that for days at a time. Appetite cues can fluctuate. Some people get hungrier as they lean out. And I've chatted about this a lot, that the brain gets hungry for

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I think on average 83 to 100 calories for every kilogram you lose. So you're dropping body weight, your body requires less calories, yet your brain is hungrier for more. And therefore, this can make your appetite less predictable than week one, and you're just a little bit more in the grind in the middle. And your body adapts, not in some sort of catastrophic starvation mode, but metabolic rate does adjust slightly. You are carrying less mass, you require less calories,

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Non-exercise activity thermogenesis almost reliably drops a bit if you're not being super dialed in with your activity during the day. And your body becomes more efficient. And this is normal biology. In addition to that, you've got psychological changes. Dopamine drops because the behavior is no longer new. Meal prepping on Sunday used to feel like an achievement and now it feels like a chore. The novelty has worn off. You're eating the same meals, doing the same walks, tracking the same foods and

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just a little bit less thrill in it. The feedback can become unclear, largely due to a lot of what you see in the scales, but because early on every week bought a new low on the scale, but now you might weigh the same for 10 days, then drop 800 grams overnight. The signal is still there, but it's buried in the noise. And this is where people start to panic because the effort is still high. You're still saying no to things. You're still planning. You're still showing up.

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but the reward feels distant or invisible. And that mismatch between effort and perceived progress is the dip that Seth Godin talks about. And it's completely expected and it literally is a sign that you're sort of in this middle phase. But most people don't see it that way. Instead, they tell themselves one of three lies, or maybe all three of them. Lie number one, this is no longer working. This is the most common one. The scale hasn't moved in a week, or it's up 400 grams.

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and suddenly the entire plan is in question. And again, I talk about this a lot, the scale is not the signal, the trend is the signal. If you weigh yourself every day and look at every single data point, you're reading noise. But if you weigh yourself every day and average your weight over the week and compare that average to the week before, that's a signal. And even that, fat loss is not linear. You might have two flat weeks followed by a whoosh of about one and a half kilograms.

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That's pretty normal for a lot of people. It's just how the body works, especially for women and especially with hormonal fluctuations. So when somebody says it's not working, what they usually mean is the scale didn't do what I expected today. But slow is not the same as stalled. And stalled for a few days is not the same as stuck. Line number two, I've lost motivation, something must be wrong. This one is sneaky because it kind of feels true, right? You were so motivated in week one.

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You couldn't wait to get started. You were energized by the plan. And now it just feels like a slog. But the reality is motivation is not the driver at this stage. Structure and identity are. Motivation is a spark. It gets you started, but it doesn't sustain you. What sustains you is the systems that you've built, the repeatable meals, the non-negotiable training sessions, the habits that don't require a pep talk. And this is actually a good thing, but once...

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Because once you've built the system that works, even when you're not feeling it, you've built something sustainable. The middle is where motivation becomes irrelevant, really. And that's something that you have to remember. Line number three, I should try something new. And this is the most destructive one. Because the progress feels slow and motivation is low, the brain goes hunting out for novelty. And the diet industry is so happy to provide it. So you start scrolling, you see a new protocol.

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a new supplement, a new macro split, a new fasting window. And you think, maybe that's a missing piece. But here's what is actually happening. You are changing the plan right when your consistency is about to pay off. You program hop, you restart, you chase novelty instead of trusting the process. And every time you switch, you reset that clock. You go back to week one. You never get to see what the middle turns into.

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And this is why people can try everything and still not get results. They're not failing because the plan doesn't work. They're failing because they never stay in the dip long enough to break through it. So if you take nothing else from this episode, take this. Changing the plan in the middle is almost always a mistake. Unless there is a genuine red flag, there's injury, disordered patterns, true misalignment, the answer is not a new plan. It's staying in the current plan long enough to see what it does.

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So if the middle is where most people quit, what do the people who don't quit do differently? And this is important. They focus on the things that matter and they stop focusing on the things that don't. The first one, repetition over intensity. In the beginning, people often go hard. They cut calories aggressively, they train six days a week, they track every bite, but intensity is not what wins in the middle. Repetition is.

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As I said, repeatable meals, the same breakfast, the same snacks, the same dinner rotation. And this isn't because you lack creativity, but seriously, decision fatigue is real and consistency is more valuable than variety. Same with training. You don't need heroic sessions, albeit some of us love them, or our brains love it. That's not what you need. You just need to show up three or four times a week, hit your volume and go home. Adequate.

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is better than optimal if optimal isn't sustainable. The second thing is adequacy over restriction. And this is especially true for, I would say, women or perfectionists. The instinct in the middle is to cut more. If progress is slow, maybe I need to eat less. But often, the opposite is true. Often, as I've talked about a couple of weeks ago, I believe, if you're underfed, especially carbs around training, the body will down regulate.

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the body does drop its non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Fatigue does rise, hunger increases and adherence crumbles. So the question isn't, can I eat less? The question is, am I eating enough to support the process and avoid even more of a metabolic downturn? The third thing is managing stress, sleep and life load. Because of course, fat loss doesn't happen in a vacuum. So if your sleep is wrecked, if your stress is unmanaged,

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If your work is chaotic and your home is demanding, your body is not going to prioritize fat oxidation, it's going to prioritize survival. And this is where the middle gets hard, because often life is still just life. You can't pause your job or your kids or your aging parents to lose that 10 kilograms. But if you can acknowledge that external load affects internal capacity, then you can adjust your expectations accordingly. So maybe this isn't the phase for aggressive fat loss.

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Maybe this phase of life is about maintaining structure while life settles and that is still progress and the progress will still happen. It just doesn't seem to happen as fast as we would want. And I do see this a lot in my members of my plans. And number four, can you reframe success as showing up rather than quote unquote seeing progress? This is the mindset shift that really is so important. In the beginning, success is measured by the scale.

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But in the middle, success is often measured by adherence. Did you eat protein at every meal? Did you train three times this week? Did you not emotionally eat when things got stressful? Because if you did, that is success, even if the scale didn't move. Because it's those behaviors repeated day after day and week after week, they create the conditions for fat loss. And when you reframe success around behavior, the middle stops feeling like failure. It starts feeling like the work.

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I do just want to address though that the dip is not an excuse to ignore red flags and I did mention earlier about red flags. There is this difference between the dip and true misalignment. So the dip looks like progress is slower but it's still there when you zoom out. Adherence is good, motivation is low, the process feels boring but it's not punishing. You're tired of the plan but you're not breaking under it. True misalignment looks like

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No progress for 4-6 weeks despite high adherence. Disordered thoughts, food anxiety or obsessive behaviour. Physical symptoms like missed periods, wrecked sleep, constant fatigue or injuries. And you genuinely hate the process and it's making your life worse. If you're in the dip, the answer is to stay the course. If you're misaligned, the answer is a strategic adjustment. More food, less training, a different structure,

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or a conversation with someone who can help you recalibrate. Because it's not about gritting your teeth through something harmful, it's about building the skills to distinguish between discomfort and damage. And most of the time, that's what separates people who yo-yo from people who sustain. So as you know, anyone can lose weight when motivation is high, but the middle is really where you build things that actually matter. So you've got to build habits.

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The meals don't require a pep talk. The training sessions happen even when you don't feel like it. You've got to build self-trust. The evidence that you can keep a commitment to yourself even when it's not exciting anymore. You have to build realistic expectations. The understanding that fat loss is not a linear graph, that slow weeks exist, that you don't need perfection to make progress. And this is where people learn they don't need a perfect week to get results. They just need a consistent one. And that realization

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is what makes fat loss sustainable. So when you know you can navigate the middle, you can stop quitting when things slow down. You can stop looking for a new plan every time the dopamine drops and you just stay and you finish. So in closing, the dip is not a warning sign. Just think about it like a sorting mechanism. It separates people who were casually interested from people who are strategically committed. And if you're in the middle right now, if progress feels slow,

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If motivation is low, if you're wondering whether it's working, I want you to zoom out. Look at the trend and not the day. Look at your behaviors and not just the scale. Ask yourself, am I actually doing the things? If you are, you're in the dip. And the dip is where success is decided. Fat loss doesn't fail in the middle. It's just that people leave too early in their plans. So don't be one of those people, people. All right, team.

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Hope you enjoyed that. I love thinking about this mindset stuff. if you've got any questions or feedback or experiences you want to share, hit me up. I'm over on threads.x and Instagram @mikkiwilliden, Facebook @mikkiwillidenNutrition, or head to my website, mikkiwilliden.com. Book a one-on-one call with me and we can chat about it in person. All right, guys, you have the best week. See you later.