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Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mini Mikkipedia on a Monday. And today I want to talk about why people quit their diet to just a few weeks after being so enthusiastic and motivated to start. And often these are the loudest voices. Now you'll probably know if you follow me on social media that I'm embarking on the accelerated program. It's my fourth edition of this.

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21 day short sharp approach to fat loss whereby I teach the tool of protein sparing modified fast and in the Facebook group people are introducing themselves and why they are there and If you have mentioned, you know, I I start with a bassist in a raw and then I just seem to fall off the wagon I can't pick myself back up get back on that and and continue with with the diet

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And I mean, there is a lot to unpack even within those couple of statements, which I just mentioned, are things that, or terms that you're likely familiar with. And you may have said to yourself over the years, I know I certainly have over, you know, my adult life and I've heard them hundreds of times, but you know, the crux of it is, is that people often do well in the first few weeks of a weight loss plan.

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They really do and they're super enthusiastic. They're super excited. They've convinced themselves that, you know, this is going to be it. But then motivation drops. Life gets busy. Potentially the scale, like the bathroom scale weight loss slows down and the plan starts to feel harder. And I've been thinking about this and I don't think it's just boredom. It's not this

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just this sort of shiny object syndrome. Although that is part of it, know, someone will start a fat loss plan and then they'll be going along, okay. And then they'll see something else and go, well, maybe that's a little bit more effective or maybe it's a little bit less strict or maybe I could, it's the different structure. You know, maybe that might suit my life more, which I mean, that is a legitimate reason to change things. But it does also imply that they're finding that what

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they're doing, it's just a little bit repetitive and boring. And it's not that excitement a lot of the novelty can wear off because of course everything that was once new is now just a little bit more embedded and that's not always a good thing. It's particularly the case, boredom, if the plan is just too restrictive or too repetitive or it's not.

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built for real life. I often think of diets like Shaw Slim, if you recall that. don't know. Were you around when Shaw Slim was a big diet? remember my mum did it back in the day. everything was built on this fasting window, if you like, of five hours and you had to have these set meals three times a day. Not necessarily set meals, but it was a very limited menu. Suffice to say, not only was it

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quite restrictive, but it was very repetitive in terms of what was allowed and what wasn't allowed. And I mean, I don't think my mum actually lasted that long on it, her. But it is because, you know, life will always intervene when you've got this rigid structure with which you have to adhere. If you can only adhere to it in a good week, then clearly it's not a sustainable structure long term. And, you know, I think what is important in this whole

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conversation of weight loss is that yes, you do need structure. Yes, you need some sort of repeatable meals. Yes, you need obviously to be in a deficit, but we want to try and move people from having this huge short term effort, balls to the wall situation where they crash and burn to something that is much more repeatable that can become more habitual and is absolutely possible. So here are a few reasons that I've got down here.

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as to why people abandon weight loss after a few weeks. And so if you think that this is you, if you recognize yourself in this whole situation, then it is worth reflecting on. And I'm going to give you some tips to help offset some of that. So I've already mentioned the novelty that it wears off. And I see this time and again with my program, like not the three week one. In fact, the three week one is brilliant because it's short, it's sharp, you're in, you're out, and you've got something that you can

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implement whenever you like. But of course, people then go on to do the eight week program, which again is amazing. But I do see that sort of by week three or week four, you're in a routine now. You've got a structure. You already know what it feels like to do a protein-spearing day, to do the food prep, et cetera. There's nothing necessarily new happening in order to keep your brain occupied by the novelty. So certainly the novelty wears off.

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Of course, the early scale loss slows down. This is a big one. But when you lose weight initially, you lose a lot of glycogen, which is your muscle carbohydrate stores, and water. Because for every gram of glycogen you store, it's bound to about three grams of water. In the initial phases of a calorie deficit, we're depleting this glycogen. We're getting rid of it as we're using it up and not replacing it.

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And therefore we're losing a lot of water at the same time. And then I know most of you know this about, you know, water weight loss is big part of that initial weight loss. It's not the only part, but it's a big part. But because this weight loss can slow down and that sort of weeks, three weeks, four, it can start to feel like the effort you're putting in isn't actually being matched by the reward you're receiving. And part of this is expectations actually, because

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You expect the same progress each week, but that's not physiologically possible. Yes, the water weight, but outside of that, as you drop body weight, you're dropping the amount of calories it takes that you're burning in everyday life. And that means that your energy expenditure has dropped as well. So if you've created this, let's say five or 600 calorie deficit, well, that deficit is going to be eroded by the fact that you're not

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burning as many calories. It doesn't mean you necessarily have to go and do an extra 30 minutes of cardio every day, although of course you could, but it does mean that you do have to manage your expectations about how much weight you should be losing. On that note, there are pages on internet like the Weight Loss Coaching Work pages that showcase people who have lost 20 kilos in 14 weeks or some absolutely unsustainable number for

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fat loss or weight loss, I'm sorry, because clearly there's muscle loss in there as well. And then we have it in our head that if we're not losing one to two kilos a week, then we're not successful with weight loss. And I wonder how much of this also comes up with people on GLPs as well, because they hear that weight loss is rapid and it's accelerated and you're going to lose a lot more weight. And so they expect to see this week on week, whereas in my experience,

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that weight loss still needs to be at the sustainable rate with which we can sort of manage across a long term. And that equates to about 0.5 to 1 % of body weight each week. So if you're a 70 kilo individual and you're aiming to get to say 62 kilos, then your expected rate of loss is really only 350 to 700 grams a week. Now, the bigger you are, the more weight you can obviously lose with that sort of

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buffer because you've got more of these energy stores to draw on and we're not risking losing too much muscle mass at the same time. And I will say it's not necessarily that rapid weight loss is a bad thing in all contexts, but if we have it in our head that we should be losing faster and we don't, we then can feel like the effort is more than the reward we're getting and our expectations aren't managed. And often people

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I see this a lot, people get fed up with the rate of progress and they sort of throw in the towel. Anyway, I mentioned about the plan feeling repetitive and it can. Once you've got your structure in place, once you've got these sort of meals on repeat, if you don't give yourself any variety, then it can start to feel a little bit boring, right? And it doesn't mean that the answer is to always have a ton of variety. And part of it is, again,

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assessing the place that food plays in your life. Like it shouldn't necessarily be only there to entertain you, right? And I'm not saying you shouldn't enjoy it, but if the only thing you're looking forward to is your next meal, then you need to sort of think big picture and think about other things that you might enjoy in real life. Anyway, the plan can begin to feel repetitive so you just, you know, fall off. Of course, people also abandon weight loss if the calories are too low, but within that though,

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I mentioned how the energy deficit is eroded because our metabolic rate drops and we're carrying less mass, but also there is that adaptive thermogenesis that can take place. But on the other side of it, our hunger ramps up actually. So even if the calories haven't changed, as we lose weight, our brain fights back against it by increasing these hunger signals.

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And I believe that it's about for every one kilo you lose, your brain gets hungrier for about 81 to 103 calories or a number, some number like that. Kevin Hall did this very eloquent sort of mathematical equation and came up with it. So you're not imagining that with your hunger, but you know, if you don't have good strategies in place, then it's very easy to think that it's an unsustainable approach and it's not.

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just this normal physiological response. So you can sort of throw them the towel if that happens. If your plan doesn't allow for diet breaks or metabolic reset meals or slight deviations, then you're gonna miss out on those things you really enjoy. And if you're not allowed any of these things, then that's just unsustainable. Now, I do have to add a caveat that if you are

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frigid to eat more of a food than you otherwise would because it's hyper palatable to you and you have this sort of quote unquote inability to control yourself. Leave those foods off the menu, particularly in fat loss. Maybe you can come back to them once you're at this established new body weight and your habits are better embedded. So that is a caveat there, but you shouldn't have to strip all foods that you enjoy out of your diet.

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for sustainable fat loss. Clearly, another caveat is if you're a physique competitor or you're a jockey trying to hit weight, I mean, you know, we've got to be realistic about what situation this applies to. The general lifestyle sort of person who's living a fitness lifestyle should not have to uh give up everything that they love. And alongside that, your diet needs to fit your life and not the other way around.

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So if social events crop up and weekends and holidays mean that you are unable to stay on track and that makes you throw in the towel, then there's something unsustainable about that approach. In addition to that, any sort of pivot or deviation from the plan, if you view that as a catastrophe and that you've ruined it all and you have this all or nothing thinking around that, you're much more likely to abandon your diet. So that really sort of rigid

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Thinking around your diet often backfires, even if you feel like you have to be that way in order to stick to it. What we know is that a flexible mindset that allows for deviations is much more sustainable for fat loss in the long term and for adherence. Another important aspect with why people abandon weight loss after a few weeks is that they expect that motivation that they have at the start of the plan to extend weeks.

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on into the plan and this is not how motivation works. Motivation is a great tool in the initial phases but it's a feeling and you know it's fleeting at the best of times. I am a runner. I identify as a runner. It's a big part of who I am. I will always run but I don't get up every single day and feel like running. I'm not motivated to run every single day. In fact I run like five or six days a week but regardless

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I train every day and I get up every day and probably about 60 % of the time not that motivated to get out the door, particularly this time of year. So if I had to rely on motivation, I would be half as fit as I otherwise would be. So we can't rely on motivation and we have to have systems and people who only rely on motivation and not systems are much more likely to abandon their fat loss efforts. I'll also add to this that

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You know, even having some cues, you need some external cue there to get you to do the behavior. And to go back to my example, my cue is waking up. If I'm waking up in the morning, I'm getting out the door. Like, do you have something like that in place that just means it's a non-negotiable for you? And you're not relying on this fleeting feeling that is only there half the time. You need a plan, folks.

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You need a plan for the busy days when life will intervene in your best laid plans to follow your diet. So you absolutely need a plan because if you don't, I mean, what next? You give up basically. People also abandoned weight loss if they focus only on the scale and they ignore behavioral consistency. So if your sign of success is seeing that scale drop week to week, that's, mean, fine if it's dropping.

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but not every week it's going to drop. Weight loss is not linear. You absolutely want to be looking at the trends over time and not at the data every day. But even then you can plateau, particularly because of that shift in that dynamic energy in energy out equation I referred to in a couple of points earlier, you will have some weeks where you won't lose weight. So you have to remember that it's the behavior and the consistency of your habits that you should be

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looking to as your measure of success and not just what the scale says. And finally, why people abandon weight loss after a few weeks, the plan is often too aggressive to sustain. If you have to eat small bites of protein every 90 minutes and go for a 90 minute walk in the morning and buy hundreds of dollars of supplements a month, probably not sustainable for most people. So you have to find something that sort of can be implemented into your real life and is robust enough

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that when your life intervenes, you've still got the main principles that you can action every day. So most people do not quit because they're not worthy, they're not good enough, they don't want it enough, they don't have enough discipline, they quit because the plan is not repeatable, it doesn't have enough structure to create progress, doesn't have enough flexibility, and we need to remember that the best plan is one that someone can keep coming back to when

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other things in their life intervene. So if you're someone that gets stuck and you've noticed that you go with a hiss and a roar for the first few weeks and then you fall off, here's some practical tips. Right? I've got 10 of them. The first thing is, this is definitely a great one for a lot of you, stop changing everything at once. Right? Start with two to three key behaviors. And what often I find in people is that it may be exercise, it may be diet.

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But we all have this sort of thing that we anchor towards. Once that's in place, in fact, other behaviors can sort of fall in behind it. And then we're much more likely to have it stack in that regard. But you've got to find your anchor behavior. So for some people, and I'm just going to call out my sister on this one, she needed to get her food in place first before she started the exercise. She was already walking her job and tells her walking several

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thousand steps each day, hitting 10K no problem most days of the week, but her food wasn't dialed in. So the walking was up there, but she wasn't exercising and wasn't looking at her food. And the exercise thing is a key piece here too, because walking for her is something she did. So it's not actually training. Once we dialed in her diet, after about sort of eight to 10 weeks, then we started with the exercise and we started those conversations. And she had to dial the diet in first. Whereas my brother, he's

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the opposite. He needed to dial in the exercise piece and get those endorphins coming from there, the feeling of self-worth and confidence that comes from that, to then approach his diet. So we are all different in that regard. Similarly, you can even take one part of that, like the nutrition, and do two or three things. Like, can you put protein in at breakfast? Can you add a fruit to your lunch? Can you have two vegetables at dinner? Like, what are some

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anchor behaviors that you can then build your diet approach around. If you're someone who feels too restricted by too many rules, you're way better off having two or three rules and embedding them before implementing the eight other things that you feel would be helpful to do. um You don't want your meals to be boring, but my second tip is you do want to use a simple meal structure. So don't use starting a new diet as another

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is a reason to now have to cook these elaborate meals that fall within your macros. Keep your meals predictable. Have your protein, a hand-sized protein. Have a couple of serves of veggies or a fruit. Potentially add some carbohydrate if you're a bit more active or add a serve of fat if that's what you'd prefer, but then shift the sauce or the seasoning or the flavor.

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but keep the structure the same. That way it takes that decision fatigue out of it for you and you're not constantly distracted by what am I gonna eat now? Or what should I eat? Or you're not having the same boring Tuscan chicken rice and broccoli meal that you've had for like three straight weeks. So you can keep the same structure but just change those seasonings and those flavorings. And within that, maybe what you do every couple of weeks is you

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Rotate in another meal to your repertoire and you start building it up. tip is to plan your weekends in advance. Many people do super well Monday to Thursday, but then they lose that structure over the weekend. So decide ahead. Are you drinking alcohol? Are you eating out? Are you having dessert? And if you are having dessert, maybe we ditch the alcohol that night. Which meals will stay consistent across the weekend and which will you have a little bit more flexibility and freedom? So

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you still have a plan and you have that consistency, but you've got a bit of flexibility there and you don't feel like you're giving everything up. Tip number four, and I mentioned this in the whole maintenance webinar, is to plan the sort of minimum effective day. So create a backup plan for busy days. So you're never either on plan or off plan. Instead, you're on a backup plan if you're not entirely dialed in. Cook chicken.

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Bagged salad, know, Uncle Ben's microwave rice, if that's your jam. Grab some of those tuna pouches, pop them in, I don't know, a pit of bread, so make sure you've got your protein source there. Go to grab my supermarket survival guide off my resources page. Do something so you've got the backups available, that if the best laid plans don't go to plan, you've got something else there that's your sort of minimum effective day.

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And you know, maybe what you also do within the exercise realm here is think, right, well, I can't get my 10,000 steps in, but I know I can do 6,000. Or I can't get to the gym today, but I can spend 10 minutes doing some squats, doing some press ups, doing some jumping jacks, doing something so that habit is still implemented. Tip five, I say this a lot, stop reacting to the daily scale changes. So you know that body weight

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fluctuates for so many reasons. Salt, carbohydrate intake, training inflammation, poor sleep, stress, a high fiber meal, eating late at night, menstrual cycle changes, constipation. It's a big one when you're in a calorie deficit. Often we are more constipated. So you want to ignore the noise of the daily weigh-in, but just keep an eye on that signal. And again, remember that weight loss will...

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fluctuate week to week. You only ever really want to look at the average across a week or across a month. And particularly looking at that trend across that longer timeframe gives you much more accurate data than the noise of the daily weigh-in. Number six is, as I mentioned, why we abandon fat loss because we try to avoid everything we love in terms of the foods that we eat. Try and keep some of your favorite foods in the plan.

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Polluting your favorite foods in planned amounts only works if they're not triggering your appetite to eat more. mean, ideally, having these planned indulgences in amounts that make you feel satisfied and not stuffed will reduce overeating and that feeling of deprivation over time. However, if it doesn't and you can continue to overeat them, then yes, you do probably need a period of time.

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abstaining from that food. what I suggest you do, I've said this before, is write down all of your favorite foods and then put a tick beside the ones that help buffer your appetite, put a cross beside the ones you think triggers it. Then you know that you've still chosen to include foods that you really love, the ones with the tick, and you know you're sensibly avoiding

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for the most part, the ones that have the cross, particularly when you're in a fat loss phase. Now, number seven, it actually relates back to your simple meal structure, changing the flavors. So what I mean is you may well cook up a kilo of mince at the start of a week or a kilo of ground beef, then you make a taco bowl out of it. You turn that mince into Italian, an Italian bowl. You stir fry some vegetables and put some Asian flavors in it. You have a...

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burger bowl and have like a fried egg and some mustard and ketchup, all lower fat of course. uh Or you do some curry style vegetables to go along with inside it. So add that variety with the herbs, the spices, the sauces, dressings and the different textures. Plan in advance and look forward to it. My tip eight, before you quit, ask yourself these questions. So make yourself up a little checklist. Am I sleeping poorly? Am I under eating protein?

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Are my calories too low? Is my period due? Have I trained harder than usual? Am I stressed? Am I actually hungry or am I just bored with my meals? Have I had one bad day and have I turned that into one bad week? This will help you separate an actual problem from just this temporary dip that we will all experience. And if any of these are true, then that's what you want to focus on and

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build an action plan around, you don't want to just then abandon your weight loss because it feels hard. Now I mentioned habit consistency and so tip number nine is probably no surprise. You want to track your behaviors, which you can control, not just your weight, which in essence you can control, but that daily variation you can't. So are you hitting your protein intake? What about tracking your steps?

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taking some detailed info on your training session or just the fact that you did it. Are you meal planning? Are you actually optimizing as much as you can your sleep? What about your alcohol intake? Are you accounting for those additional calories there? Are you having enough fiber? 14 grams per 1,000 calories, for example. What about your water intake? Are you actually dehydrated? If you're nailing all of these things, every day you're going to be seeing these winds and we need to celebrate these winds.

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because these are the things that allow for that fat loss to occur. Fat loss doesn't occur without any of this. You need to celebrate the things that are really important. And number 10, I want you to shift the focus from just losing weight to becoming a person who has better routines. And that's about identity. I talked about motivation at the outset and I heard this on one of Eric Helms' podcasts and I really loved it. And he was, can't remember who was talking to, but he talked about motivation and he talked about

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the origin of the word is motive. Like, why are you even doing this? And your why is really important and is something you need to continue to come back to as you go along this journey and really just in life in general, right? Because your motive relates to your values and what's important to you. And your values and what's important to you relates to your identity. And that's the person you are trying to become. So.

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you need to shift from the fact that you're trying to lose weight as being wholly your identity to a person who plans their meals, who prioritizes protein, who walks daily, who lifts weights, who doesn't let one off-plan meal become a full week off. You want to become someone who lives a fitness lifestyle. You are a person that lives a fitness lifestyle and that's what all of this

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That's what this entails. That's what that really means. So you need to shift your focus from the losing weight aspect to the identity of someone who is living this type of lifestyle. Because essentially that's what successful fat loss is. It's embracing these as part of your identity. So if you're feeling that you're just, you know, two to three weeks in and you're just absolutely over it,

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have a think about some of these things and what you may be able to implement. You should not judge the plan based on your motivation alone because that is just fleeting and you need to find something else. However, if you think about motivation from that motive perspective and tying it back to who you are and who you want to be, it's a better way to frame it. Put into place some systems that are just bulletproof for you. It doesn't mean you're always going to nail every single meal, but it means that if you

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deviate from the plan, you've got a plan to get back on track because it's just who you are and it is just what you do. We just need to be consistent over time and that is a much bigger priority than perfect adherence every single day. So if you put into practice these things it becomes repeatable and enjoyable and you start to really value the person you're becoming by repeating

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all of these things day in day out. Anyway, that is, I mean, I say that because it's what I value. Health is a huge value of mine and it's something I'm hugely passionate about, which doesn't mean that I do everything that health gurus would say I was an eight plus on at all, but it means I'm consistent over time and that's what you need to be working towards as well. So I mean, hey, did this resonate? Maybe, maybe not. That's fine too. But if you recognize yourself,

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or someone you know in any of this, share it with them. And while you're doing it, hit subscribe on your favorite podcast listening platform. Give me a five star review. I'd wholly appreciate it because it does increase the visibility of Micopedia. And as always, I really appreciate your feedback. So let me know if this landed. I'm over on Instagram, X or Threads @mikkiwilliden, Facebook @mikkiwillidenNutrition, or head to my website, @mikkiwilliden.com.

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Alright guys, you have the best week. See you later.