Hey there Muscles,

I had a conversation with a client recently that I keep thinking about, and I figured it was worth sharing here.

He's been working with me for about six months. When he came in, he wasn't exercising consistently, wasn't paying attention to what he was eating, and the weekends were basically a write-off. His whole ecosystem, as I like to call it, just wasn't set up to support the goal. We had a lot of ground to cover.

Fast forward to now: he's lost around seven to eight percent of his body mass, he's stronger, he's moving more, and he's got real routines built around food and training. By any measure, that's a win. But when we sat down recently, he was getting discouraged. Plateaus, a few inconsistent weeks, the usual stuff that shows up when the initial momentum starts to level off.

Before he could spiral too far into it, I stopped him.

You Don't Know What's In Your Hand

I used an analogy with him that I want to share with you, because I think it applies to a lot of people reading this.

Think about poker.

• don't do this,
• combine these,
• play it this way

... but none of it feels natural yet because you haven't actually lived through enough hands to understand why.

It's overwhelming.

And the people around you at the table?

• Some of them will give you bad advice because they don't know any better.
• Some of them, and this is the part nobody talks about.... will subtly steer you wrong because if you figure out how to play well because it exposes the fact that they never tried.

That's not just poker. That's what it's like when you're trying to change your habits around food and training while the rest of your life stays the same. Friends who say they support you but don't want to adjust their Friday night and Saturday morning routine. People who say "you're going to the gym again?" in a tone that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with them. It's real, and it makes an already hard game harder.

But here's what I told my client, and here's the part I want you to sit with.

The Game Doesn't Get Harder. You Get Better.

I asked him to look at everything he'd actually learned to do in six months.

• He knows exactly what to eat during the week.
• He knows which meals are his go-tos when things fall apart and he needs to get back on track fast.
• He's navigated weekend parties without letting one off-plan meal turn into a lost week.
• He's had a big Saturday brunch, had a protein shake for a midday snack, and gotten a workout in that same afternoon.
• He's wearing a step counter at work and hitting his movement goals without thinking about it.
• He trained through a rough stretch and kept showing up.

He knows how to play those cards now. He's seen those hands before.

And that's the thing about fat loss, or really any long-term physical goal, that most people miss.

In regular poker, the other players keep getting better too, so the game stays hard. But when your opponent is your own lifestyle, the hands start repeating. The holiday season comes around every year. The work trip that throws off your routine. The vacation where you let yourself breathe and come back feeling like you've lost all your progress. The person in your life who still hasn't decided to get out of their own way.

You've seen these before. You know what to do. And every time you navigate one successfully, you get a little better at it. The difficulty of the game stays roughly the same. Your ability to handle it compounds.

That's not motivation. That's just how skill acquisition works.

The Takeaway

If you're in the middle of a tough stretch right now, take a minute to actually look at what's in your hand. Not just the scale or the numbers, but the habits you've built, the situations you've successfully navigated, the version of yourself that shows up even when you don't feel like it. That stuff doesn't disappear when progress slows down. It's still there, and it's more valuable than you're giving it credit for.

If you want help figuring out what's actually in your hand and building a plan around it, that's exactly what I do. Reply to this email or head to the link below, I'd be happy to talk.

Stay strong, stay durable,

Mike

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