Lose your first stone.
Here's exactly how.

Everyone starts with the diet. It's why everyone stops with the diet.

Here's what actually happens. You decide Monday is the day. Monday is fine, Tuesday is fine, Wednesday you're in a meeting until seven and there's nothing in the house, so you order something. Now you've "ruined it", so Thursday is a write-off too, and by Sunday you're planning next Monday.

That was never a willpower problem. It was a logistics problem. The food was fine. The week wasn't built to hold it.

So before you count a single calorie, answer four questions on paper. Not in your head, on paper, because the ones you keep in your head are the ones that move.

• Which three days are hardest? Name them. Those are the days the plan has to survive, and they're the days you'll pre-cook for.
• When do you shop, and when do you cook? Two fixed slots in the week. Not "when I get a chance", which is never. Sunday afternoon and Wednesday evening works for most people.
• When do you train? Three slots, written in the calendar like a meeting, with a named backup slot for each. See step four.
• What is your floor? The version of the day you'd still hit when everything has gone wrong. Not the ideal day, the bad day. We'll come back to this.

That last one is the whole thing. Most people set one target, miss it once, and write off the week. Set a floor and a ceiling instead and a bad Wednesday costs you a Wednesday, not a month. You can build yours here in about a minute, and I'd do it before you read on.

Nothing in steps two to five works without this. It isn't the exciting step. It's the one that decides whether you're still doing this in March.

Fat loss needs one thing: eating less energy than you use, for long enough to matter. Everything else on this page exists to make that survivable.

Your body isn't a calculator, and the "out" side isn't fixed. Eat far too little for long enough and it turns the dial down. You fidget less, you move less, you feel colder and flatter and you burn less doing the same day. That's not you failing, that's biology doing its job. Which is why the target was never the smallest number you can survive. It's the biggest one that still moves the needle.

Work out your number now: use the calorie calculator. It'll give you maintenance and a fat loss target from your height, weight, age and activity. Takes thirty seconds and it's free.

Then three rules.

• Take 20 to 25% off maintenance, not 50%. A 500 calorie deficit loses roughly half a kilo a week and you can hold it. A 1,000 calorie deficit loses more this month and costs you muscle, sleep and the will to continue.
• Give it fourteen days before you judge it. A flat week is noise. Water, salt, being due a trip to the toilet, and where you are in your cycle can hide a fortnight of real fat loss. Nine times out of ten a stall is a gap, not a wall.
• When it does stall, look before you cut. The honest checklist: the bites that stopped getting logged, the steps that quietly dropped, and the sleep. Cutting calories again is the last thing to try, not the first.

Once you've got your number, leave it alone for a fortnight. The urge to adjust it on day three is the same urge that's ended every previous attempt.

Two people eat the same calories. One loses fat and keeps their shape. The other loses weight and ends up smaller, softer and hungrier. The difference is almost always these two.

Protein is what tells your body to spend fat rather than muscle while you're in a deficit. Lose muscle and your metabolism sags, which is the mechanism behind losing the same stone three times. It's also the most filling thing on your plate by a distance.

Fibre is the one nobody talks about. It slows digestion, blunts the blood sugar swing that has you rummaging in the cupboard at four o'clock, and feeds the bacteria doing a surprising amount of work down there. Most adults in the UK get about 60% of what they need.

You don't need to hit both perfectly. You need a floor at each meal, and the floor is this: a palm of protein and a fist of plants, three times a day. Do that and the maths mostly takes care of itself.

Here's what that looks like on an actual Tuesday.

Five ways to add protein without cooking anything different: swap normal yoghurt for Greek, add a tin of beans or lentils to anything with sauce, keep pre-cooked chicken in the fridge, put a scoop of whey in your porridge, and buy the higher-protein version of bread, pasta and wraps, which most supermarkets now do.

Five ways to add fibre in the same breath: leave the skins on potatoes, swap white for wholemeal in the three things you eat most, add a tin of pulses to any stew or curry, keep frozen veg in and throw a handful into everything, and eat the fruit rather than drinking it.

Not sure what your number is? The protein calculator works it out, and the cheat sheet underneath shows you what 30 g actually looks like on a plate.

The four o’clock drawer.

Meals are the straightforward bit. What actually breaks a week is four o’clock at your desk, or nine at night on the sofa, when you’re not really hungry but you want something. Willpower is a terrible plan for that moment. Having the right thing already in the fridge is a very good one.

These are the ones I put in front of clients. Nobody pays me to list any of them, and almost all of them are in Tesco, Sainsbury’s or Lidl this week. Filter by whatever you’re short of.

The line at the bottom of each card is the one worth reading. Protein per 100 calories tells you what you’re actually buying. A protein bar at 220 calories for 20 g is perfectly fine. A pot of skyr at 51 calories for 9 g is doing much the same job for a quarter of the budget, and you could have two of them.

Three rules for using this list. Buy the portion, not the multipack, because a 40 g pack is a decision you make once in Tesco rather than eleven times on the sofa. Pick two, not twelve, so the fridge always has the same two things in it and there’s nothing to decide at four o’clock. And these are still calories: they sit inside the deficit from step two, they don’t sit on top of it.

Figures are as printed on the pack when this was written. Manufacturers reformulate, so glance at yours.

The point of lifting during fat loss isn't the calories it burns, which is less than you think. It's that it gives your body a reason to keep the muscle rather than spend it.

Diet alone and a meaningful share of what you lose is muscle. Diet plus resistance training and you keep almost all of it, so you finish smaller and the same strength, with a metabolism that hasn't sagged. That is the entire difference between losing a stone and losing a stone that stays lost.

Three sessions a week, thirty to forty-five minutes each. These are the actual sessions I give clients, lifted straight out of the app rather than written for a website.

The two plans are shaped differently on purpose. In a gym you get lower, pull and push, because the machines let you work things separately. At home it is two lower body days and one upper, which surprises people until you think about it: the lower body holds most of your muscle, so it is where the most is at stake while you are losing weight, and it is the half that bands can genuinely load.

Two rules that matter more than the exercise list. Leave one or two reps in reserve on every set, meaning you stop when you could have done two more, not when you fail. And add something every week: a rep, a kilo, a better range of motion. That's progressive overload, and it's the only reason any of this works.

Everyone asks me what cardio they should do. Almost nobody asks about their steps. That's backwards.

You don't want to spend your life catching up on inactivity with cardio you resent. The movement that matters is spread across the day, and steps are the simplest measure of whether you're getting it.

The target isn't 10,000. It's more than you're getting now. Find your actual average from your phone, which will be lower than you'd guess, and add two thousand. Then add two thousand again a fortnight later. 6,000 a day is base camp, and 8,000 to 12,000 is where you want to end up. Past 15,000 you're into diminishing returns and burning yourself out.

If your day makes that sound impossible, it's because you're picturing a walk. It isn't a walk, it's fifteen small decisions:

Then sleep, which is the one that quietly decides the rest. When a client's stuck, the first thing I ask about isn't their food.

Cut sleep to around five hours and people eat 400 to 560 extra calories the next day, reaching for the quick sweet stuff and never feeling any fuller for it. At 5.5 hours instead of 8.5, on the same diet, 55% less of what you lose comes from fat. This was never about willpower. A tired brain wants fast energy.

Four rules tonight, and they're the ones that do most of the work:

• Anchor your wake time. Same time daily, weekends included. This sets everything else.
• Ten minutes of outdoor light before 10am. Overcast counts. It's how your body clock knows it's morning.
• Caffeine curfew eight hours before bed. That lunchtime coffee is still about a quarter active at midnight.
• A 45-minute wind-down. Lights low, screens dim, something boring. You can't go from 100 to asleep.

There are three more, and a bedtime planner that saves your times. The full sleep protocol is here, and it's free like the rest of it.