- So if you are on a diet right now
and your goal is to get to 10% body fat
or 12% body fat, you could be making
one or multiple of these diet mistakes
which I am gonna be sharing with you in this video
and in fact, these are diet mistakes
that I personally made on my journey
when I first started out.
When I got close to 10% body fat for the first time
it was a really hard thing for me to overcome
and my hope is that now my experience
will be able to help you because I've managed
to overcome this and stayed lean
and been really happy with my progress
for the last six, seven years
and continuously making improvements
so I really hope that I can help you be more efficient
and get a lot more out of your journey
and make the whole process a lot more enjoyable for you.
And fixing these mistakes, by the way,
is gonna require work and patience and persistence
so it's not gonna happen overnight
so I gotta point this out because getting 10% body fat
is not easy, it is definitely gonna require
a lotta hard work, so get get ready for that as well.
And by the way, if you're new here, my name is Mario Tomic.
If you'd like to learn more about exercise
and nutrition and in personal development,
if you love these things and if you wanna live
a healthy lifestyle, consider subscribing below
and so make sure and hit that bell icon
to enable notifications for future videos
and now let's dive into it.
So the first diet problem that I want you to avoid
that was really holding me back for a long time
from making any significant improvements to my physique
was that I had the wrong ratio of cutting,
being restrictive, consistently thinking about fat loss
versus maintaining and gaining.
And what I mean by ratio is how much time
I've spent cutting, trying to lower my body fat
versus actually putting on lean muscle.
And for me, at one point in the journey,
what I realized is that the last three years,
most of the time I spent trying to cut.
Most of the time I spent trying to lose body fat
or preventing body fat from coming on.
I wasn't even thinking how am I gonna put on lean muscle.
I wasn't thinking about maintaining,
making this a lifestyle.
I was only thinking about how to prevent fat from coming on,
how do I never go back to being fat again,
and all was basically centered around
that restrictive type of mindset.
And the problem with that is
that I wasn't optimizing for gaining.
I was thinking too short term,
so when I would reach 12% body fat,
I was then micromanaging it so closely
that I wasn't thinking long term.
How do I put on lean muscle so next time,
if I'm cutting, it's much easier to get
down to 12% body fat or 10% body fat.
I wasn't thinking like that.
I was just thinking basically how do I prevent
that little tiny bit of fat that probably wasn't even fat,
it was just a little bit of water
that I accumulate over time as you start eating more.
How do I prevent that from happening?
And there was this constant restriction.
Most of the time, I think my ratio was basically
three months cutting, maybe one month gaining.
I would just freak out and go back into a cut.
And that was horrible.
And what I do now, and what I'd recommend you to do,
is have at least about a four to one ratio,
opposite ratio, so four months of gaining,
actually trying to put on lean muscle,
and put on as much so you can clean up
that extra body fat you gained
in those four months in about a month.
So if you have a good ratio like that,
four months gaining to one month cutting,
you're actually able to really have enough momentum
to at least put on some size
and you will never get to a point
where you just get too much body fat,
which is really one of my primary concerns.
But I went into the extreme.
I went to a point where I would get to 12% body fat
and for the first time, actually what happened
is that I would overeat massively
and I would just gain a lot of body fat immediately,
so I'd then have to cut again for another six to eight weeks
because I gained so quickly that after a while
I was still neglecting this whole idea of momentum.
Because the body does need some momentum to recover
from being restricted through eating a caloric deficit
in the regular cutting phase.
And you need that momentum to build up
so you can actually get into the good groove in the gym
with lifting weights, getting stronger,
following a good progressive, well structured training plan
that provides enough volume, good frequency,
good intensity, good program
that actually is tailored to you
so you can make a lot of progress.
In long term, having more lean muscle mass
is really what's gonna enable you
to truly make this a lifestyle.
And that's ultimately the goal
is for us to be an athlete, not to be a dieter.
And I was stuck in a dieter mindset
because a dieter is constantly micromanaging
how much body fat you have, did I gain 100 grams,
did I lose 100 grams, and nonstop obsession about that
instead of actually thinking like an athlete.
So this is one of my biggest mistakes
in my entire journey that I felt like
I have a huge gap in my 10 years of experience
where I didn't gain much because I was overly restrictive
and I call this being stuck in permacutting.
So this is the first mistake I want you to avoid.
Now the second diet mistake that I also want you to avoid
that I personally made is letting the fat loss phase
drag on indefinitely or way too long
compared to what it should be.
And this actually comes down to your mental commitment.
Are you 100% committed to losing
a certain amount of body fat in a certain amount of time?
Have you set the right deadlines?
Have you set the right goals?
'Cause a lot of people go on a diet, including myself,
I made this mistake, and you're just kinda thinking,
well, I'm gonna lose this much per week
but you're not really planning it out.
When is this gonna end and am I 100% committed.
So not 99% committed, 100% committed
to do my best in this certain period of time
so I can move on.
And instead, what tends to happen is you tend to drag on,
make a lotta mistakes because of that lack of commitment,
because of lack of planning, and then
what was supposed to be, let's say,
four to six months dieting turns into 12 or 18 months.
And again, this is crushing your gains
because you are spending all that time being restricted
and you're all the time feeling
like you really cannot relax.
Even the days that you do eat more and prolong your diet,
you're still not enjoying that gaining process
because those are instances that just happen
in a short period of time, but then you're back on dieting.
So you have to really think about it
from a perspective of committing 100%
and really getting it over with
instead of letting it drag on for years.
And I've seen people that have been basically dieting,
but for about four years, four, five years,
but they haven't been in a caloric deficit all this time.
They've been mentally dieting, because mentally
they've been obsessing with everything,
thinking about it all the time,
constantly dealing with micromanaging calories,
all this stuff for four to five years
without being a caloric deficit, even to see the result,
but they are still dieting in here.
And that's the mistake that I made as well.
I'd been doing this for about a year like this
and I'm realizing wow, I need to really clean up my act.
I need to really commit 100%.
Otherwise this is gonna drag on for another year
and that's what I did.
I committed, I set my deadlines,
I set my goals, I set my targets.
I got leverage and accountability and I just got it done.
And that was probably the best decision
that I ever made in terms of my dieting
is to really commit to a set phase.
Just make it a priority, let's get it done
so I can finally move on to gaining.
Now the third diet mistake that you must absolutely avoid
on your fat loss journey that I personally also made
is something I call chasing marginal returns.
And in the context of fat loss,
how this usually plays out is that
when someone reaches 12% body fat,
or maybe you're at 12% body fat right now
and you're in this situation,
you're looking at your physique
and you really aren't happy
with how the physique looks like right now.
You're close to 10% body fat.
You're a couple of pounds away,
but then you look at your physique.
You're like wow, I thought it would be much better.
Maybe you underestimated how much it's gonna take.
Or maybe you overestimated how much muscle mass you have.
Or many reasons, but you're looking at your physique
and you're not really that impressed.
It's not really what you imagined.
And you're thinking, and I was thinking at this position
of being at 12% body fat is there's gonna be
some kinda drastic change from 12 to 10% body fat.
And we guys kinda tend to think like that,
like 10% body fat is some kind of magical number
that is gonna completely transform how you look
compared to 12% body fat.
Realistically, the difference is marginal.
There's not that much difference.
There's only a tiny bit of difference in terms of body fat,
but it's not that big.
And we tend to think that if we're not happy at 12,
that all of a sudden at 10, it's gonna be a drastic change.
And when I say not happy, I mean
really overall size, appearance, aesthetics,
and how you wanna look at it,
that's really the most important part.
Why you're trying to get a better looking physique,
it's not just a tad bit of body fat,
like a little gram here or there.
It's really the overall appearance that you're projecting
and type of physique that you can be really proud of.
So if at 12% body fat, you're there
and you're not happy with how that physique looks
in terms of lean muscle and overall aesthetics,
well it's not gonna get that much better at 10.
You will get definitely leaner, but not that much leaner
because 10 and 12 is pretty close.
I mean, again, we're talking about a couple of pounds.
So in this position, I wish that I just went into gaining.
I wish that I didn't go back and forth,
back and forth, and trying to get to that 10,
falling off track, rinse and repeat.
Try to do it again and just again, prolong that
one little step into another six months
or even a year in some cases
that you're trying to go from 12 to 10,
bounce back to 15, go to 12 to 10,
and just kinda bounce back.
Instead, look, if you're at 12 right now
and if you feel like your body just doesn't look
the way you want it to look overall,
like it's far from your goal and you need
to put on lean muscle and to actually
reach your physique goal, switch to gaining.
Don't wait, there's no point.
You can get to 10, of course,
like if you have a lot of momentum,
but you've been struggling at 12,
down to 10, there's really no point.
You can just switch to gaining now.
Put on more lean muscle.
Go back up to 15 or 16 and then go down to 10 again
and it's gonna be much easier.
'Cause that's the thing.
We get so caught up, we sometimes get delusional.
We think there's this drastic difference
between a couple of pounds,
but it's never really a couple of pounds.
It's overall how much better do you look
and being that 12% body fat at your appearance,
you've already gained 95%,
the 98% in your overall appearance
of how you're gonna look even at 10% body fat.
So the difference is very, very minor.
Of course, most guys completely underestimate
how much body fat they have
or overestimate how much muscle they have.
This is a bit of a reality check.
When you start to actually properly
going through a fat loss phase
you realize that you have less muscle than you thought.
You realize you have more fat than you think.
This is normal, this will probably happen to you.
It happened to me many times.
But again, look, if you're at 12% body fat,
realistically you can see your six-pack,
it's just a matter of a little bit of a difference,
and that's really 12% body fat.
You can still see a six-pack.
The difference is only a little bit of extra fat
that you carry, look, there's not gonna be
that much of a big deal if you're stuck there.
If you really can't, if you're too fatigued
to get down to 10, switch to gaining
and you should be good to go.
Also if you wanna get down to 10% body fat,
I'm gonna leave a video here at the end
which is gonna help you with some more fat loss mistakes
that I want you to avoid on your journey
to make your journey much more effective.
Also if you wanna work with me as your mentor
and as your coach, I'm gonna leave a link
in the description below where you can
check out more details about that.
And I will see you in that next video
(upbeat music)