The warm-up phase: what I learned by deliberately regaining weight

Weight loss is a strange thing to give advice about. Everyone reading this is standing at a different point, so almost anything I say will land perfectly for one person and completely wrong for the next. You're half shooting in the dark, hoping a sentence catches someone at the exact moment they can use it.

So here's the thing I keep coming back to.

If losing weight has come easily to you before, you probably think it's simple. Here's the recipe, follow the recipe, the weight comes off. And factually, that's true. The recipe works. The problem is that the recipe is only half of it. The other half is getting yourself to actually do what it says, every day, for long enough to matter. That half is the hard one, and nobody hands you a clean set of instructions for it.

The recipe is the easy part

The mechanic isn't complicated. Eat under your number. Fewer carbohydratesCarbohydrates are a macronutrient used by the body as a primary source of quick energy.Full definition →, if that's how you get there. More water. Move every day. Give it sixty to ninety days. You can do it in sixty if you're extremely strict, but the back end of a ninety-day stretch still moves a lot, so I think in ninety.

None of that is the hard part. The hard part is the state you have to be in to run it.

Two things have to be true before you start

The first is discomfort. You have to genuinely not want to be where you are. Not as an idea, but in how your clothes fit and how you see yourself. If you're honestly fine with your weight, there's no reason to put yourself through a strict deficit, and you won't stick to one anyway.

The second is a willingness to change what you eat for a while. A real deficit can clear out the bulk of what you normally reach for. That's a real sacrifice, and it's worth being honest about its size.

And losing a lot of weight is a bigger event than you'd expect. It's a transformation, inside and out. It changes how you look, how people look at you, how your nervous system reacts to all of that. Your body composition feels different. You can get strange muscular sensations because your body hasn't caught up to carrying less fatFat is a macronutrient that provides a concentrated source of energy at 9 calories per gram.Full definition → yet. A deficit is also a form of stress. Even once you're good at it, it's still stress. Some mornings you wake up flat. Some afternoons you hit a slump and spend willpower getting through it. You drink more water. When you're hungry, you cook something instead of falling into the old ritual. That's the actual texture of it, and you have to be willing to sign up for the texture, not just the result.

The in-between

Some people switch from one day to the next. They've had enough, or they've got an external driver: a wedding, a health scare, a strong emotional reason, and they're ready to commit. Good. They don't need this.

But a lot of us are in between. Uncomfortable with our weight. We've tried before; some things worked, some didn't. Interested, but not activated. What happens to us? We stall. This is for that group, because I've been sitting in it myself.

I ran the experiment on myself

I lost about thirty kilos. Then, partly because I was building this and genuinely wanted to know where the floor was, I started letting things back in.

Potatoes first, just to see how my body would react. I enjoyed them, and I saw straight away that I'd eat far too many. The weight started creeping back, and I could read it in my measurements. So I did a short water fast, roughly two days, and went back down.

Then I got curious again. If it's that easy to hold this range, maybe I can allow something else. Bread. Pasta. Chocolate. And I watched the weight climb over the next two to three months.

You can feel the body start to ask for the chocolate once it's had it. Then it asks for a little more than last time. It turns into a constant, low-level renegotiation.

The negotiation you eventually stop having

You start negotiating with yourself. You already know you're going to give in. The only open question is how much, and what story you'll tell yourself about it afterward.

That conversation is unpleasant. Losing it is worse. So you avoid the whole thing. You stop measuring. You file it under "just for a short while," and the weeks go by. You're still buying chocolate. At night you cook pasta with a big chunk of butter in it. You're still eating proteinProtein is one of the three macronutrients and plays a central role in appetite control and body composition.Full definition →, still walking, and that protects you a little. But the carbohydrates and the calories are coming in.

Then one day you buy the first loaf of bread, put butter and sausage on it, and it's genuinely incredible. The textures, the whole thing. You realize you could eat the entire loaf. And that's the moment something clicks. The capacity never left. Train the body to want carbohydrates again and you can walk all the way back.

I lost thirty and put eight or nine back on. I can still wear most of the trousers, but they're tight, and I can feel exactly how narrow the line is.

So food intake was never only about calories. It's also the psychology around it. Measuring, avoiding measuring, letting things back in, trying to grab control again after you've let it slide. Once you've lost the clear goal and already regained a bit, it's a genuinely hard place to stand. You lose a little faith that you still know what you're doing. And at that point it can honestly feel less painful to let it go than to take control back. If you're reading this and nodding, that's probably where you are right now.

Coming back without a cold start

I sat there too, even after doing the whole thing successfully. I let it run on purpose because I wanted to see the floor. If I let go now, how far do I actually fall? All the way back? Where's the point where I get uncomfortable enough to act again?

What I found surprised me a little. Now that I have the tools, I get uncomfortable a lot earlier than I used to. I've also gotten used to carrying less weight, and to the version of myself that comes with it, and I don't want to give that up. So the urge to re-engage came back. Starting again became possible.

So how do you come back? Some people open the app, log their food, start a ninety-day stretch, stay under their number every day, walk, drink the water, drop the foods that bring in too much, and they're off. For them, straight in is the path. Others find the emotional energy for a sixty to seventy-two hour fast and reset that way. That's a powerful lever if you can reach it. I can sometimes get myself into a water fast after a round or two of procrastination, and I know it works.

But there's a big group between those two. They need easing in. And that's the part almost nobody names.

Warming up the discipline muscle

Before the serious stretch, you prepare and sharpen the tools. You prime your body and your mind. You let yourself know you're about to enter something that will feel good and produce results, and that will also be hard, especially early. You have the tools. You may have done it before. You just have to get back into that state, and for a lot of us it works better to do it slowly, so nothing snaps back against it.

In practice it's unglamorous. Say you've let bread, pasta, butter, fruit and chocolate back in. Take out the chocolate first. Next week, the bread and pasta. Maybe keep the fruit for now. The specific foods are mine. Yours will be different, because you set what you eat, not me. The point isn't the food anyway. The point is that you're practicing removal. You take one thing out and keep it out. Then the next. You stack small wins. That's what warms the muscle. Not discipline in the abstract, the actual one you'll need on day one of the real thing.

Keep the walking alive

For me, walking was the thing I never stopped, and I think that was crucial. If you're in this in-between stretch, reintroducing foods, maybe overshooting, keep the walking going.

Two reasons. First, psychologically, one part of the structure stays intact. You never fully put it all down. Second, the calories. Ninety minutes of walking a day, or every other day, softens the landing. Even while you're gaining, it reduces the damage, keeps your fitness, helps your head, and keeps the system alive. If you're going to experiment, walk through it.

Logging before it counts

I used to think incomplete logging was nonsense. If you don't track everything, how can it help you? You can't measure anything properly off half the data. I was wrong about the purpose. You're not logging those days to measure. You're logging them to warm up the tool. You learn how it feels to track, how restriction feels, which foods you'll actually eat and which you'll skip, and you build a little capacity to say no before the day it counts.

Which raises the obvious objection. Isn't this just procrastination with a nicer name? It can be, if you never start. But done honestly, it's the opposite. A cold start on day one is the thing that trips up the in-between group every time. Give yourself thirty days to prepare. Log some days, do one full honest day even though it's dull, walk what you can, write things down, use the app, all with no weight target attached. That isn't avoiding the work. It's the work that makes the rest possible. When the ninety days start, you start with awareness instead of shock.

You wake up as a slightly different person

The ninety days are radical. That's long enough to change weight class, and it's not wrong to prepare for something that big. Preparation here isn't failure, it isn't cheating, and it isn't meaningless procrastination. For some, it's a real part of the program.

And there's something underneath all of it I keep noticing. Every time you sleep and wake up, you come back as a slightly different person. Like a machine rebooting in the morning, with yesterday folded into the new start. You feel like the same person, but you've been quietly updated by what you just did. So when you practice removal, log a day, walk, drink the water, you're editing yourself in small increments. Thirty days of that and you can already be a different person, even if the scale hasn't moved much. That's the part that matters most.

This is why FastNow has room for both halves, the quiet preparation and the serious ninety-day stretch. The app runs during the warm-up, not only the dramatic part. And once you've warmed up, the start stops being a question of whether you can. It's just this: do you want to change weight class, or not. You already know what you're committing to by then. That's a much easier thing to say yes to.

— Feraz