Brian Keane - The Keane Edge: Mastering The Mindset For Real, Lasting Fat Loss

Losing weight is a lot like baking a cake.

Yes, you read that right. Im starting this healthy eating book talking about baking a cake. As youll see over the coming chapters, this book is unlike anything you have ever read before. Im not going to be preaching the fat-burning capabilities of some random food found deep in the Amazon jungle, or selling you on some quick-fix solution that massively reduces your calorie intake by eliminating an entire food group. Nope, you wont get that here. What you aregoing to get in the following pages is a mindset shift.

Youre likely going to hear some uncomfortable truths about the sole contributing factor as to why you dont look the way you want to look. Ill give you a clue. When it comes to every single diet or nutritional plan youve followed unsuccessfully over the years, what has been the common denominator? Have you been too restrictive and then pressed the f*ck it button and binged on everything in sight? Possibly. Have you eliminated entire food groups in your desire to lose weight, e.g. six weeks gluten free, no dairy? Yeah, you might have. But none of those is the common denominator. Want to know what is? Its YOU! Yes, you, or more accurately your mindset and how you approach the diet or nutritional plan. But dont worry, were going to fix that. But first, back to my cake.

Surely cake is off limits if youre trying to lose weight or reduce your body fat? Well, yes and no. Yes in the sense that in Part One of the book youll see that calories domatter and food portion sizes areimportant. Eating a whole cake is unlikely to support your weight-loss goal. Equally though, one slice a few times a week probably has the opposite effect. It gives you the psychological and metabolic boost you need to stick to your nutritional plan over the space of a week, a month or even a year. But thats not why I bring up cake. The reason I bring it up, apart from the fact that cake is delicious, is the baking element.

If youve ever baked a cake (or any other oven treat), you know that you have to follow a recipe. You need to do things in the right order, following a step-by-step process to end up with an appetising baked good. But you also need the ingredient list. Forget the flour and you have a pile of mush, forget the sugar and it tastes horrible, forget the eggs and it doesnt stick together you get the idea. Developing the Keane Edge is exactly the same. To lose weight, you need the recipe, and you need to follow a step-by-step process. In Part One, well go through that: how calories work, what you need to know about macros the foods that make up your calories and food choices and the order of priority or fat-loss pyramid of prioritisation that comes alongside them.

At this point, you might be thinking, Oh God, not another diet book on clean eating, or To lose weight, consume fewer calories been there, done that oh no my friend, thats just the start of it. Similar to baking a cake, you can know exactly how to make it but it still might taste like crap if you dont know what ingredients to use. Which brings me on to the meat and potatoes (pardon the pun) of this book the ingredients, aka your mindset tools.

The educational side of the weight-loss process is broken down into everything from calories, macros and food choices to using the correct metrics to track your progress. Randomly following dietary advice without context or knowledge is a recipe for misery. You might hit your weight-loss goal, but you might not. You always want to be able to replicate what you do. For instance, If you lost 4 kilos to look your absolute best for a wedding or other event, you want to be able to replicate that any time you need to in the future. I only use the word diet as an adjective. Its a skill you acquire to use when you need it. You diet to slim down for a date in the future. And unless you are morbidly obese or seriously overweight and youve been dieting for more than a year with no result, you are doing it wrong! Over the course of our journey together, you will acquire the dieting skill but our primary focus will be on the nutrition side of things. That means finding a plan that is specific to your goal and then approaching it the right way. The ingredients come next and the first one on that list is discipline.

When I say discipline, Im not talking about gruelling workout sessions in a gym, or even avoiding your favourite foods to hit a weight-loss target.