I lost 30 pounds, and made this mistake anyway

Last May I dropped 30 pounds in four months. I went from 255 down to 225, finishing around 8% body fat. It was hard…genuinely hard. But, something unexpected happened about six weeks in. Right as the hunger dial was turning up the intensity, it stopped feeling like a struggle and started to feed my drive. I was waking up feeling better than I did before the cut. Little nagging injuries that I had at the beginning started clearing up. Despite the hunger, I was thriving. The challenge fed the desire to keep pushing and, using that challenge, we built out Hammer 90 and pushed to the public to see similar results across the cohorts.

We just wrapped our second iteration of Hammer 90 this past weekend. Thinking it had been long enough since my first cut, I jumped in alongside our members with the hopes of pushing from 230 down to 215. I knew what hard felt like, but I was excited to feel the rush of doing the hard stuff like I did before.

It didn’t go the same way.

From the first weeks of the cut, moving the needle was a grind. I was cranky, I was sore, I was straight up not having a good time. The difference between the two cuts wasn’t an effort issue. I had calculated my calories and macros just like I had before. The X’s and O’s were all in place for another go, but the timing wasn’t right. After the first cut, I ran a reverse diet to slowly climb back to maintenance. But, with a bit of fear of gaining weight back, I decided to settle just below maintenance thinking a slight deficit would keep me lean. I never fully took the foot off the gas which meant I never fully recovered from the first cut. When I went back into a real deficit in March, I was asking a system that hadn’t recovered to get back to work.

My nutrition clients have shared similar stories with me. They’d spent months and sometimes years living in some sort of deficit trying, and struggling, to get the results they wanted. Riding a rollercoaster of energy and consistency thinking the problem was just discipline. Their bodies hadn’t had time to recover from the stress of a prolonged restriction so their restriction stopped working.

In the Greek myth of Icarus, the son of Daedalus escaped Minos’s labyrinth using wings made of bird’s feathers and wax. Daedalus warned Icarus that if he flew too low to the sea, the feathers would get soaked and he wouldn’t be able to escape. However, if he flew too close to the sun the wax would melt and he’d plunge to the depths of the sea below. People see this as a cautionary tale. Play it safe, right down the middle, a life of mediocrity is a safe life. But what they forget to mention is the feeling that Icarus felt flying high. The altitude, the view, the feeling of having pushed hard enough to actually soar. It wasn’t the climb that was the problem, it was Icarus’s lack of planning to come back down. Nothing felt better than looking in the mirror and seeing the change that had taken place. But nothing felt worse than continuing to chase that high while all the signs were there that I was plummeting.

The Three-Phase Year

When we think of training, periodization is in the front of our mind. We set a known target, pursue it intelligently, and regroup post competition. Nutrition works the same way. Twelve weeks of hard dieting, eight to ten weeks of controlled reversing back to maintenance, and then four to five months giving our bodies the fuel it needs to build.

Phase 1: The Diet (12 Weeks)

This is where you soar towards the sun. It’s supposed to be hard. Lean into it.

Your target here is 0.5 to 1.0% of your bodyweight lost per week, with a full-compliance goal of ~10% loss over the 12 weeks. If you weigh 200 pounds, that’s 20 pounds. Life will interfere, starting body composition may alter that target a bit, but that’s the goal for most people. With that in mind, calculate your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE). There are plenty of calculators that will get you there, some better than others. Find the one that fits you the best and use it as a starting point to create your deficit.

Your deficit doesn’t need to be aggressive. A moderate reduction from your TDEE gets this moving but at some point you’ll hit a plateau. If your weight loss falls below 0.5% of your bodyweight over a two-week window, your body has adapted. Changes in adaptive thermogenesis, non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT), and certain hormones means your old deficit turns into your new maintenance. That just means you need to fly a little higher and feel the sun burn a little hotter.

Like I said, the first cut went for four months. Based on what was learned there, three months of a deficit is all you need. The last month produced diminishing returns and the fatigue started to accumulate in ways it didn’t in the earlier months. Twelve weeks is enough to get the job done and get out before your wings melt.

Phase 2: The Reverse (8 to 10 weeks)

After twelve weeks of flying into the sun, you can’t just pull the brakes and fall to the sea. This phase isn’t a reward phase, it’s a slow descent.

Your body spent 12 weeks under prolonged caloric restriction and compensated to survive it. All those things I mentioned that cause the plateau are sending even stronger signals. You’ve got to come out of the deficit completely but the way you do it is just as slow and methodical as the cut itself. Recalculate your TDEE at your new bodyweight. You weigh less now, so your maintenance calories are lower than they were at the start. Take that difference, divide it by 10, and you’ll now have your weekly caloric addition. So if you finished the diet at 1,800 calories per day and your new maintenance is 2,300 calories per day, that’s a difference of 500 calories. Divided by 10, that means your daily caloric allotment will increase by 50 calories per week.

Reversing out is guided more by the scale than the calendar. The first week or two you will see a bump in the scale. That’s just glycogen and water getting back into your muscles along with a little more food in your gut digesting. It’s expected, no need to panic. After that, your weeks should look relatively stable as you continue adding calories back. If body weight jumps by more than 2% in a single week after the initial bump, hold your calories stable until the scale does the same. 

Full recovery is when you settle into maintenance. Don’t try to hack the system like I did and sit just below or the sun will keep melting your wings.

Phase 3: The Lean Bulk (4 to 5 months)

You’re now at a leaner starting point than you were 5 months ago. Your metabolism is back in full swing. There’s no better time to start adding muscle to the frame. The term “lean bulk” is a little mythical in and of itself. What this is, simply, is a modest caloric surplus which ensures that your body has enough energy to build lean mass. This needs to match your training output, because we need stress to progress. Now we’re no longer worried about flying too close to the sun.

The Sisyphus Problem

In another cautionary tale from Ancient Greece, Sisyphus refused to accept death from the gods. Being able to outwit the limits placed on him, he was forced into a task where his cleverness would be of no use. He was condemned to perpetually roll his boulder to the top of a hill, watch it roll down, and start over again. Forever. The same effort, the same result. Sound familiar? That’s the perpetual dieter. Always restricting, never finishing. 

Periodizing your nutrition is your Sisyphean task. You start with a task at hand, to lean out. Once reaching your destination, there is no settling because the boulder rolled down the hill and you need to climb back to maintenance. Arriving at maintenance, the boulder rolls back down. Time to build.

The climb is the point.

Ready to Fly?

Most people don’t fail because they lack effort. They fail because they try to fly into the sun without a plan for the journey back. Hammer 90 was built to solve that problem.

Over 90 days, we guide you through every phase of the process, nutrition, training, accountability, and the habits required to make real change stick. No guesswork. No crash diets. Just a proven system designed to help you lean out, perform better, and avoid becoming another casualty of the perpetual dieting cycle.

Most people reading this will nod their head, close the tab, and tell themselves they’ll start later.

A few will take action.

The next Hammer 90 wave isn’t open yet, but the waitlist is. Join the list today and you’ll get 24 hours of priority access before enrollment opens to the public.

That matters because each wave is capped at just 50 participants. When those spots are filled, enrollment closes.

When the doors open, be ready.

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