Strip the fat.Build the frame.

Body analysis

Read from four photos at 110 kg and 180 cm. Front, both profiles, rear. A photo estimate is worth about ±4%, so treat every figure here as a starting bracket, not a measurement.

What the numbers say

What the photos say

The fat is central. It sits on the abdomen, the flanks, and the lower chest, with comparatively little on the arms, forearms, and lower legs. That is the classic male android pattern and it is the pattern that responds fastest to a calorie deficit. You will see the difference in your face and shoulders before you see it anywhere else.

Underneath it you are not a small person. In the rear shot the lats have a visible outline, the forearms are dense, the calves are developed, and the quads carry real mass in the profile shots. Your frame is broad through the clavicles.

Be careful how you read that. Your estimated lean mass of 72–78 kg is genuinely high in absolute terms, but a large part of it is structural: carrying 110 kg all day builds bone, connective tissue and postural muscle whether you train or not. It is not a hidden physique waiting to be uncovered. The honest version is that you start with a real base and a broad frame, which is a better hand than most beginners get, and you still have to build the actual muscle. Expect to look lean and solid at the end of this, not to discover you were already built.

Three things to correct

• Forward head and rounded upper back. Visible in both profile shots. It costs you an inch of apparent height and makes the chest look softer than it is. Face pulls and rear delt work are in the plan for this reason, not as filler.
• Possible anterior pelvic tilt, not yet diagnosable. The lumbar curve looks exaggerated, but at this body fat the abdominal mass alone pulls the pelvis and spine forward, so a photo cannot separate posture from load. The glute, hamstring and bracing work in the plan addresses it either way. Reassess properly at 95 kg.
• Fat in the chest, not breast tissue. What you see in the front photo is almost certainly pseudogynecomastia, which is simply subcutaneous fat over the pec. It resolves with fat loss. If a firm disc of tissue is still there at 90 kg, see a doctor, because that is a different condition with a different fix.

Before you start

Your fat is central, which is the pattern most associated with metabolic and cardiovascular risk. Get a baseline blood panel and a blood pressure reading in the first two weeks: fasting glucose or HbA1c, a full lipid panel, and liver and kidney function. It costs very little here, it tells you whether anything needs a doctor rather than a gym, and repeating it at month six turns an invisible improvement into a number you can see.

What is realistic

At 84 kg you would be a visibly muscular man at roughly 14–16% body fat with a flat midsection. Where you land in that range depends on your true starting body fat, which is why the first measurement is worth taking. It is not a stretch goal. It is roughly a year of not quitting.

Where this ends up

Rate of loss is set at 0.7–0.9 kg per week, which is the fastest you can go at your size without shedding muscle.

Your daily numbers

Same targets every day, training or not. Do not cycle calories. It adds complexity and buys you nothing at this stage.

Maintenance is roughly 3,100 calories once you are training five days and walking thirty minutes daily. Eating 2,200 puts you about 900 under, which is 0.8 kg of fat per week.

The sample day in the next section lands at 2,227 calories and 188 g of protein. That is inside the target zone, not a contradiction. These four numbers are the aim; the meals are one way of hitting them.

Rules for each number

• Protein is a floor, not a target. 185 g minimum. Going over is fine and costs you nothing. This is the single number that decides whether you lose fat or lose muscle, and with laban in the plan instead of Greek yoghurt it is the one you are most likely to miss. If a day goes wrong, protect this and let the rest slide.
• Calories are a ceiling. Landing between 2,150 and 2,300 is a hit. Do not eat back your cardio.
• Carbs and fat can trade. If you want more fat in a meal, drop 20 g of dry rice and add 10 g of olive oil. Keep carbs above 150 g so you can still train hard.
• Bolero is not free, but it is close. Roughly 15 to 30 calories per 1.5 litre sachet, so about 40 to 80 a day at your intake. Log it as 60. Everything else about it is fine.
• Weigh raw and dry. Every gram in this plan is uncooked weight. Cooked chicken weighs about 70% of raw. Cooked rice weighs three times its dry weight. Weighing cooked food is the most common way people quietly eat 400 extra calories.
• Fluid, 3.5 to 4.5 litres a day, and Bolero counts toward it. It is water with flavouring, not an extra. Do not drink your normal water on top of 4 litres of Bolero and end up at 7. More than about a litre an hour is faster than your kidneys clear it, which is where diluted blood sodium becomes a real risk rather than a theoretical one, especially on days you sweat through thirty minutes of cardio.

The day, in grams

Four meals. All weights raw or dry, on the scale, before cooking.

Meal 1 · Breakfast

Meal 2 · Lunch, after training

Meal 3 · Dinner

Meal 4 · Evening

Meal timing does not matter for fat loss. Move these around your day however you like. The one worthwhile rule is to put the largest carb meal after training.

On oats

Not necessary. Oats are a carbohydrate with some soluble fibre, nothing more, and there is no nutrient in them you cannot get elsewhere. Between the lentils, the vegetables and the fruit you are already well past the fibre you need. They have been removed from the plan. If you ever want them back, 50 g dry replaces one loaf of Arabic bread almost exactly.

Swaps and substitutions

Eat the same four meals every day and you will quit by week six. Swap within a column and the numbers hold.

Protein · swap for 300 g raw chicken thigh

Target to match: 363 kcal, 59 g protein. Salmon is the awkward one. It cannot be swapped gram for gram because its fat calories are nearly triple thigh’s, which is why it costs you rice as well.

Carbs · swap for 95 g dry white rice

Dairy · if you want to change the laban

If you ever go back to Greek yoghurt, take 100 g off the dinner chicken. That is the whole trade.

Legumes · swap for 70 g dry lentils

Cooked-weight conversions

Weekly shopping list

One trip. Cook protein and grains in batches on Sunday and Wednesday.

This is 600 g of raw meat or fish a day, 4.2 kg across the week: thigh at lunch every day, and a rotation of thigh, beef and fish at dinner. It is more meat than the old list because laban carries so little protein. Buy to that number and nothing spoils. Nothing on this list is expensive per gram of protein. If the budget tightens, shift toward eggs and lentils, and buy thighs bone-in with the skin on and strip them yourself, which is usually the cheapest protein in the shop.

The training split

Five gym days, seven cardio days. Lower and upper body each get hit twice, plus a fifth day for the muscles that change how you look fastest.

The Wednesday break is deliberate. Five consecutive lifting days is how beginners accumulate joint pain in month two and stop. Two rest days placed inside the week let you train each session hard.

Session structure

• Warm up 8 minutes. Five on a bike or treadmill, then two light ramp-up sets of your first exercise. Never stretch cold and never skip the ramp-up sets on compounds.
• Rest 2–3 minutes on compound lifts, 60–90 seconds on isolation work. Short rests do not burn more fat. They just make you weaker.
• Sessions run 55–70 minutes plus cardio. If yours runs to 90, you are resting on your phone.
• Cardio comes after weights, always. Never before.

The five sessions

Exercise order matters. Do them top to bottom. Sets are working sets and exclude warm-ups.

Cardio protocol

Thirty minutes every day, no exceptions, including rest days. This is the requirement you set and it is the right one.

The default session

Incline treadmill walk. Set the incline to 10–12% and the speed to 5.0–5.5 km/h. Do not hold the handrails, they cut the work by about a third. You should be breathing hard but still able to speak in full sentences. Heart rate lands around 115–135.

That burns roughly 250–300 calories at your bodyweight and does not interfere with lifting or recovery the way running would. Running at 110 kg is a knee problem waiting to happen. Revisit it at 90 kg.

Two additions

• Steps. 10,000 a day, counted separately from the thirty minutes. Everyday walking burns more over a week than any cardio session does, and it does not need recovery.
• Intervals, from week 9 only. One session a week, on a bike, on Tuesday, after Upper A. Five rounds of 30 seconds hard and 90 seconds easy following your steady work. Tuesday is the only slot that leaves a full day before Thursday’s deadlifts. Do not add these earlier and never put them the day before a leg session.

How to add weight

Double progression. One rule, applied to every exercise, forever.

The rule

Each exercise has a rep range. Pick a weight you can lift for the bottom of that range while stopping two or three reps short of failure. Stay on that weight until you hit the top of the range on every working set. Then add the smallest increment available and start again at the bottom.

Increments: 2.5 kg on upper body, 5 kg on lower body, or one pin on a machine. If the jump costs you more than three reps, the jump was too big.

Effort

• Weeks 1–4. Stop three reps short of failure on everything. You are learning movements, not testing yourself. Soreness is not the goal.
• Week 5 onward. Last set of each exercise goes to one or two reps short of failure. Earlier sets stay at two or three short.
• Never go to true failure on compounds. Squats and deadlifts to failure buy you nothing and cost you the next session.

Your first four weeks

The failure mode for a beginner is not doing too little. It is doing too much, too heavy, too soon.

• Machines before barbells. Where a session offers a choice, take the machine version for four weeks. Machines hold the path for you so you can learn to push hard without learning to push wrong.
• Leave three reps in the tank. Every set, every exercise, all month. You will feel like you are undertraining. You are not.
• Three sets wherever the plan says four, and skip the last arm exercise on Upper A and Upper B. That takes a 23-set session down to about 18, which is where a beginner in a 900-calorie deficit should start. Add the fourth sets back in week 5 and the arm work in week 3.
• Half the calf and ab work in week 1. These two get sore out of proportion to their value. Ramp them in.
• Progress to the harder leg variations at week 9. The Thursday split squat becomes a Bulgarian split squat and the plank goes weighted only once you can hold the easier version cleanly. Single-leg balance work at 110 kg in week 1 is how beginners hurt a knee.
• Film your squat, deadlift, and press once each. From the side, whole body in frame. Watch it. Compare it to a reference video. This is free coaching.
• Expect week 1 to hurt and week 3 to feel easy. That is not the plan getting easier, it is you adapting. Add weight.
• Do not add exercises. Not for twelve weeks. The plan works because of what is in it and what is left out.

Week one calibration

Your first session of each lift is for finding loads, not for training hard. Start light, add weight set by set, and write down where you finished. That number is your week two starting point. Nobody progresses from a session they had to bail out of.

Supplements

Four things are worth money. The rest is marketing aimed at exactly your starting point.

Fat burners, carb blockers, BCAAs, testosterone boosters, detox teas, and anything with a proprietary blend on the label do nothing measurable. At 31% body fat with a beginner's training history, you have more room to progress on the basics than any supplement could give you.

Tracking and stalls

Four measurements. Two of them matter more than the scale for the first three months.

What to measure

How to measure your waist

Find the top of your hip bone: press your thumbs into your sides and slide down until you hit the bony ridge. Run the tape horizontally around your body at that level. That is the landmark, not the navel.

The navel is what most people use and it is the wrong choice for a year-long cut. It is soft tissue. On a large abdomen it sits low, and it travels upward as the fat comes off, so the tape ends up somewhere different every month and quietly understates what you have done. Bone does not move.

• Morning, after the bathroom, before eating or drinking. On bare skin.
• Stand normally, feet together, arms at your sides. No posing.
• Keep the tape level the whole way round. Check the back in a mirror, it always rides up.
• Measure at the end of a normal breath out. Do not suck in and do not push out.
• Snug, not tight. It should not slide, and it should not dent the skin.
• Do it twice and average. More than 1 cm apart means do it again.

No tape measure yet is not an excuse. Wrap a shoelace or a charging cable around, mark the overlap with a pen, and lay it flat against any ruler.

When it stalls

A stall means the weekly average weight and the waist measurement are both flat for two consecutive weeks. One flat week is noise. Do not touch anything.

When it is a real stall, make one change and hold it for two weeks:

• First stall. Cut 150 calories. Drop 40 g of dry rice from lunch. Nothing else changes.
• Second stall. Add 15 minutes to daily cardio instead of cutting food.
• Third stall. Cut another 150 calories. Drop the almonds and 20 g of oats.
• Floor. Never go below 1,900 calories or 180 g of protein. If you are stalled at that floor, take a full week at maintenance, around 3,000 calories, then restart. This is a tool, not a failure.

Also check the obvious first. Most stalls are not metabolic. They are cooking oil that never got weighed, restaurant meals that got estimated, and a scale that has quietly stopped being used.

The short list

If you remember nothing else from this document, remember these.

• Hit 185 g of protein every single day. Miss calories occasionally, never miss this.
• Weigh everything raw. The scale in your kitchen is the difference between a plan and a hope.
• Zero liquid calories. No juice, no soft drinks, no sugar in coffee. This one change is worth several hundred calories a day for most people.
• Sleep seven to eight hours. Under six and the deficit starts pulling from muscle instead of fat. Sleep is a training variable.
• Alcohol is the most expensive thing you can drink. Empty calories, and it flattens the next two days of recovery.
• One social meal a week is planned for. Eat it. Protein first, halve the carbs, skip the bread. Then go straight back to the plan at the next meal, not the next Monday.
• Never skip legs. Half your muscle is below the waist. Skipping it halves the plan.
• Compare months, not weeks. Nothing visible happens in seven days. A great deal happens in ninety.

Built 3 August 2026 · Review at week 12