Fat Loss… Organised

Opening

Welcome to Fat Loss… Organised: Guide.

I’m Ravi Sandhu. This is the short edition of the book. It is written for you, the person leading this change. It takes under an hour, and it gives you everything you need to start.

This book is the ebook version of the audiobook. It is written to be read aloud, so you may notice short sentences and plenty of signposts.

Here is how this fits together. The book is one of a series called “…Organised”. Each book takes one part of life and treats it as a process. A process is something that happens in steps, over time. You can map it. You can test it. You can improve it.

Each book has three editions. The Full edition is for leaders who want the research and the reasoning. This Guide is for leaders who want to get going. And the Support edition is for the people around you. It takes under ten minutes. It tells them what you are doing and how to help, without any blame.

Throughout the series, Todoist is the command centre. It holds your tasks, dates, notes and sharing in one place. The principles work with other apps too. If you prefer another one, adapt the steps.

A few words before we begin.

First, this is not medical advice. I am not a doctor or a dietitian. If you have a medical condition, please involve your clinician. That includes diabetes, kidney disease, heart disease, high blood pressure, and any eating disorder, past or present. It also includes pregnancy, breastfeeding, and being under eighteen. Some medicines may need adjusting if you change how you eat. Please do not change a medicine on your own.

Second, some of the science here is debated. The idea that insulin is the main driver of fat storage is one of those things. Researchers disagree. So I will present the approach in this book as one design to test. Not as settled fact. You will decide what the evidence in your own life shows.

Third, and most important, this book asks you to track without obsession. You will keep a light diary for two weeks. You will not count every calorie. You will not weigh yourself every day. If tracking ever starts to feel like punishment, stop. That is a sign to change the method, not to try harder. If you have had an eating disorder, skip the food parts of the diary and talk to a clinician. In the UK, the charity Beat offers support at beateatingdisorders.org.uk.

Here is the plan for the next hour.

Section one: your goal and your new identity. Section two: setting up your Todoist project. Section three: the four Ds. That is the method, one short section for each stage. Section four: the six Cs. That is the shared language for you and your people. Section five: leading your people. And section six: next steps.

Let’s begin.

Section One: Your Goal and Your New Identity

Every change needs a destination. Here is the destination for this book.

Your goal is this. You no longer treat “calories in equals calories out” as the whole story. You do not blame people for their weight. You see fat as a human superpower, and you are in control of it.

And your new identity is this. You are confident and in control of your body. You are free from blame and shame.

Let me take those phrases one at a time.

“Calories in equals calories out” is not wrong. Energy matters. But it is not the whole story. Hunger, sleep, stress, hormones and the food around you all shape what happens. When advice ignores those, it quietly blames the person. Eat less. Move more. Try harder. Then, when it does not last, the person feels they failed.

Here is some evidence that the failure is not personal. In a well-known 2011 study in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers followed people who had lost weight. A year later, their hunger hormones had not settled back to normal. Their bodies were still pushing them to eat. Other research suggests that many people regain much of the weight they lose within a few years. That is not a lack of character. That is a body doing what bodies evolved to do.

“Fat as a superpower” means this. Fat storage is an ancient survival skill. It kept our ancestors alive through lean times. It is not a moral failing. It is a feature of being human.

“In control” does not mean as lean as possible. This is not a book about getting as thin as you can. It is about understanding fat storage well enough to reach a healthy level on purpose. Not by chance. Not by force.

And “free from blame and shame” applies to everyone. You. Your family. The person at the next table. Individuals did not design the food environment they were born into. If I am critical in this book, I am critical of systems. Not of you.

Before we move on, take a moment. Say your new identity out loud, or in your head. I am confident and in control of my body. I am free from blame and shame.

You will write that down in a moment. It goes at the top of your project.

Section Two: Setting Up Your Todoist Project

Now let’s build the command centre. This takes about ten minutes. You can pause the audio and do it as we go.

New to Todoist? I’d really appreciate it if you signed up for Todoist through my affiliate link, which you’ll find on my website, ravi8.com. If my introducing you to Todoist helps you become more organised, using my link helps make all the effort I’ve put into these books worthwhile. Disclosure: this is an affiliate link, so I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Step one. Create a new project. Name it exactly: Organise Fat Loss.

Step two. Add four tasks to the project, in this order. Discovery. Dream. Design. Defend. Those are the four Ds. You will meet each one in the next section.

Step three. Under each task, add the items I give you in that stage as subtasks. I will read them out as we go.

Step four. Set a rough date for each stage. Give Discovery two weeks. That is the length of the diary.

Step five. Under Discovery, add a comment called Personal Process Charter. This is a one-page summary of your plan. It has these headings. My goal in twelve months. My new identity. The process I am mining. What already works well, and why. How I will measure progress without obsession. Things I will not track. The approach I will test. Evidence that would make me change or stop. People involved. Medical check. Review date. And my warning signs. The Full edition has the template ready to copy. For now, simply create the comment and put your goal and your new identity at the top.

Step six. Enable Todoist’s Habit Tracker integration. Please do this now. It tracks your check-ins and streaks on recurring tasks. To turn it on, open Settings in Todoist, choose Integrations, then Browse, select Habit Tracker, then add and confirm it. To use it, open a recurring task, choose the three-dot menu, and select Track habit. It works on tasks that repeat daily or on set days. It shows your streak in the task description, and keeps a history in the comments. If a tracked task goes overdue, or you move it, the streak resets. Menus and plans can change, so check Todoist’s help centre if anything looks different.

A word of care about streaks. Track routines, not food. Never use a streak for restricting what you eat, or for weighing yourself. A broken streak is information, not failure. And if a streak ever feels like pressure, stop tracking that task.

Step seven. Add three recurring items. A ten-minute weekly review. A short daily diary prompt. And a review every three months. The daily diary prompt is a good one to track as a habit.

One last thing. If this project ever becomes a burden, delete tasks. The project serves the process. It is not the process.

That is your command centre. Now let’s use it.

Section Three: The Four Ds

The four Ds are the method. Discovery. Dream. Design. Defend.

They adapt a well-known cycle from Appreciative Inquiry, created by David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney, with process mining added to the first stage. Appreciative Inquiry starts by asking what already works. So do we.

Behind the four Ds are two ideas.

The first is process mining. It compares the process people believe they run with the process the evidence shows they run. The gap between the two is where the change lives.

The second is organisational change management. It starts from a plain fact. Knowing what to do is not the same as doing it. People need reasons, support, practice and reinforcement.

For this book, the process we are mining is your metabolic day. A case is one day, or one meal cycle. The activities are these. Waking. The first meal. Any snack. The fasting window. Exercise. Sleep. And any hunger or energy signal.

Let’s start with the first D.

Discovery

Discovery is about finding out what actually happens, with a record and not a memory. It also asks what already works. And it looks for where the routine breaks.

Memory is unreliable. Almost everyone misremembers what they ate and when. Researchers have shown, again and again, that we fail to notice things that are right in front of us. A famous experiment had people count basketball passes. Nearly half of them did not see a person in a gorilla suit walk through the scene. We all have blind spots. A simple diary shows you yours.

Your body also keeps its own log, in signals. Hunger. Energy. Sleep. Mood. Those are events. They have times. They are data.

Here are your Discovery tasks.

One. Note what already works well, and why. Two. Keep a two-week food, sleep and activity diary. Three. Add wearable data, if you have a wearable. Four. Compare your planned routine with your lived routine. Five. Note the times of hunger and energy dips. Six. List your constraints. Sleep, stress and time. Seven. Find snacking loops. Eight. Link hunger and energy dips to timing, sleep and stress. Nine. Rank your constraints by impact. Ten. Check the claims you rely on against the evidence.

Let’s take them in four groups.

Start with task one. Before you look for problems, note what is already working. Maybe you sleep well. Maybe you cook at home most evenings. Maybe you walk every day. Write it down, and ask why it works. These are strengths you will protect and build on.

Now the diary, tasks two to five. Keep it light. For each day, note the time you woke. The time of each meal or snack, and roughly what it was. When you felt hungry. When your energy dipped. How you moved. And when you went to sleep. That is all. A few lines. You do not need to weigh food. You do not need to count calories.

A practical tip. Write each entry as soon as you can after the event, even if it is only two words. Your phone is the easiest tool. A quick note in a Todoist task will do, or a voice note you tidy up later. The longer you wait, the more your memory edits the day. And on a day you forget, do not try to rebuild it. Skip it, and carry on tomorrow. Twelve good days of notes are worth more than fourteen reconstructed ones.

If you have a wearable, add its sleep and activity data. Treat it as a rough guide. Wearables can be wrong, and they are not a verdict on you.

Some people ask about glucose monitors. These are small sensors, often used by people with diabetes, that show how blood sugar moves through the day. Some people without diabetes use them too. The evidence on whether they help people without diabetes is limited. Readings vary widely between healthy people, and a spike on a screen is not necessarily a problem. If you have a medical condition, speak to your clinician before using one. For most readers, a diary is enough.

One more caution. If keeping a diary makes you anxious, stop the food part. Record sleep, energy and movement only. And talk to someone. The diary is there to help you. It should never hurt you.

When the two weeks are done, lay your plan beside your life. Where did they match? Where did they part? That gap is what the rest of Discovery studies.

Now tasks six to ten: reading the diary and asking where the routine breaks. In process mining, you look for four things. Variants, which are different routes through the same day. Loops, where you go round the same steps again. Bottlenecks, where one step limits everything else. And gaps between the plan and what really happened.

Snacking loops. Look at your diary. Is there a time of day when you snack, feel better for a short while, then feel hungry again? That is a loop. In process language it is called rework. You keep doing a step that does not move you forward. Rework is not a character flaw. It is a clue. Often the hunger is real. It may come from a long gap, a short night, or a meal that did not keep you full. Ask what the loop is trying to tell you.

Link the dips. Put your hunger and energy dips next to what came before them. How long since you last ate? How did you sleep? Was it a stressful day? Poor sleep is a good example. In small studies, short sleep has been linked with higher hunger hormones and lower fullness hormones. That is a signal, not a lack of willpower. Stress works in a similar way for many people.

Rank your constraints. Take the list you made. Sleep, stress, time. Which one has the most impact on your day? That is your bottleneck. Fixing a bottleneck helps more than polishing everything else. For many people it is sleep. For others it is time.

Here is a worked example, so you can see what a diagnosis looks like. Imagine a diary shows a snack at half past three every afternoon, and a dip in energy just before it. Next to that, the diary shows a short night, a rushed lunch, and a long gap since breakfast. The loop is not about the snack. It is about the night before and the lunch that did not last. So the fix is upstream. A better lunch, or a slightly earlier bedtime, will do more than any rule about the snack itself. That moves your attention from the symptom to the cause.

Check your claims. We all hold beliefs about food. Some are true. Some are marketing. For each belief you rely on, ask three questions. What is the statement? What data lies behind it? Is that data real evidence, or just a story? The economist Alex Edmans calls this the ladder of misinference. A statement is not data. Data is not evidence. And evidence is not proof. Climb the ladder one rung at a time. Apply that to this book as well. Check what I say. I will tell you where the science is debated, and you should keep checking.

A word about the food environment, because it shapes what you find. Many foods are designed to be hard to stop eating. Food companies test combinations of sugar, fat, salt and texture to find the point where people want more. In one carefully run trial from the US National Institutes of Health, people given ultra-processed food ate about five hundred more calories a day than when they were given unprocessed food, and gained weight over two weeks. It was a small trial, but it fits a wider pattern. This is a designed system. If you find yourself eating more than you meant to, the design deserves some of the credit. That is not an excuse. It is context. It means you can stop blaming yourself and start changing the setting.

Discovery is finished when you know what already works, and you can name your top constraint and your main loop. Now we decide where you are heading.

Dream

Dream is where you set out what success looks like, how much effort it will take, and who needs to know. In this book, success is your Goal and New Identity from section one.

Here are your Dream tasks.

One. Write the new identity in your own words. Two. Define what feeling in control looks like in twelve months. Three. Estimate the time needed for shopping, cooking and tracking. Four. Decide who needs to be involved. Family. Your clinician. Five. Agree how you will measure progress without obsession. Six. Set a date to review. Seven. Communicate the dream to your family and supporters, including your clinician.

Let me say a little about each.

Task one. Write your new identity, starting with the words, I am someone who. For example, I am someone who understands my body’s signals and plans around them. Identity matters because people tend to act in line with who they believe they are.

Task two. What does feeling in control look like? Try to describe it without a number on the scale. Maybe it is having steady energy in the afternoon. Maybe it is not thinking about food all day. Maybe it is clothes that fit comfortably. Write two or three sentences. Be concrete.

Task three. Be honest about time. Shopping, cooking, and a few minutes of diary each day. A plan that needs more time than you have will fail, however good it is. Better to plan for the time you really have.

Task four. Who is involved? If you share meals with other people, they are involved, whether or not they asked to be. And if you have any medical condition, your clinician is involved. Write down both.

Task five. How will you measure progress without obsession? Pick things that are kind to you. Energy. Sleep. How your clothes fit. How often you feel out of control around food. Many people choose not to weigh themselves daily, or at all. That is a good choice. Write down what you will not track, as well as what you will.

Task six. Set a review date. Pick a date about three months ahead. On that day, you will look at what happened and decide what to do next.

Task seven. Tell people. Share the dream with your family and your clinician. This is not a confession. It is a briefing. People support what they understand.

Dream is finished when you can say, in a few sentences, what you are doing and why. That is also where your Personal Process Charter comes together.

Design

Design is where you choose a to-be process. In plain words: a better routine, built to fit your real life.

Here are your Design tasks.

One. Set a routine that fits your real constraints. Two. Choose one approach to test. Three. Define what evidence would change the plan. Four. Check with a clinician if you have a medical condition. Five. Plan meals around family routines.

Let’s start with a principle. Design around constraints, not willpower. Willpower is limited and unreliable. A plan that needs superhuman discipline on a busy Tuesday is a poor design. A plan that makes the easy thing the right thing is a good one.

Some design moves. Shape the environment. Keep the foods you plan to eat in view. Keep the foods built to be hard to stop eating out of sight, or out of the house, if your household agrees. Prepare in batches. Cook once, eat several times. Plan the hard moments. If four in the afternoon is your slump, plan something for a quarter to four. Choose a default breakfast and lunch. Fewer decisions means less fatigue. And plan for travel, parties and busy weeks. They will happen.

Choose movement you enjoy. Movement that needs willpower tends to fade. Movement you enjoy tends to stay. For me, that is bhangra, the Punjabi folk dance. It is lively and social, and I hardly notice the effort. For you it might be walking with a friend, swimming, or dancing in the kitchen.

Now, task two. Choose one approach to test. Notice the word one, and the word test.

The book offers one design. It is a cyclical plant-based approach, built on the carbohydrate-insulin model. Let me explain it simply. The idea is that when you eat a lot of refined carbohydrate, insulin stays high, and high insulin tells the body to store fat. So the design has three parts. A release phase of about four to six weeks, eating whole plant foods that are low in net carbohydrate. A storage phase, when carbohydrate-rich whole foods such as beans, whole grains and fruit return. And a review at the end of each cycle, where you look at your diary and decide what to do next.

Now the honest part. This model is debated. Some trials fit it. Others do not. In careful studies where people ate the same calories, the difference between lower-carbohydrate and lower-fat diets was small. This particular pattern is my own design. It is not a standard clinical protocol, and there are no large trials of this exact approach. Treat it as one idea to try and measure. If you prefer a different approach, such as a Mediterranean pattern or a steady plant-rich diet, you can use the same process and test that instead. The method is the point. The menu is yours.

If you do test the release phase, a few safety points. Plant-based eating needs attention to five nutrients. Vitamin B12, which you should supplement. Vitamin D, which is low in most northern climates. Iron. Calcium. And omega-3 fats. Ask your doctor or a registered dietitian whether blood tests would help. The first days of cutting carbohydrate can bring headaches and tiredness. That often settles. But if you feel dizzy, faint, or breathless, see a doctor.

And some people should not do a release phase at all. If you are pregnant or breastfeeding, under eighteen, have had an eating disorder, or take medicine for diabetes or blood pressure, speak to your clinician first. That is task four. Show your clinician your Personal Process Charter. Ask what they think.

Task three. Define what evidence would change the plan. Before you start, write down what would make you stop or change course. For example, if my sleep gets worse for two weeks, I will stop and review. Or, if my energy is lower after four weeks, I will end the release phase early. Or, if my clinician advises against it, I will stop. This turns the plan into an experiment. It makes it easier to be honest later, because you decided in advance.

Task five. Plan meals around family routines. You share a table. If you plan alone, you will have a battle every evening. Sit down with the people you eat with. Agree what is cooked, when, and by whom. Where everyone eats the same thing, keep it simple. Where they want something different, agree that too.

Before you move on, plan only week one. Do not plan the whole trial. Choose five dinners, one batch-cooked lunch, and one default breakfast. Write the shopping list. Put the cooking sessions in your calendar as tasks, with a time. A small, specific plan for one week is far more useful than a perfect plan for three months. You will adjust it at the weekly review anyway.

Design is finished when you have a one-page plan: your routine, your approach to test, your stop rules, and your meal plan for week one.

Defend

Defend is where the change actually happens, and where it stays happening. The first person to move is you.

This is the stage organisational change management was built for. Companies know that a good plan fails if people do not move with it. The same is true at home. And because order drifts without effort, this stage also includes watching for drift, and returning to Discovery when you need to.

Here are your Defend tasks.

One. Run ADKAR on yourself. Two. Manage the identity shift. Three. Involve family and cultural food rituals. Four. Start the trial period. Five. Keep the diary light. Six. Monitor without obsession. Seven. Review the trial against your evidence criteria. Eight. Build flexibility into the routine. Nine. Plan for the maintenance phase.

Let’s start with moving.

Task one. ADKAR is a model from a firm called Prosci. It has five steps. Awareness, that there is a reason to change. Desire, to take part. Knowledge, of how to change. Ability, to do it in practice. And Reinforcement, to make it stick. Ask yourself about each. Do I know why I am doing this? Do I want to? Do I know how? Can I actually do it, with my time and my energy? What will keep me going?

ADKAR is also a good way to understand past attempts. Where did the last diet stop? For many people it was at Ability. They knew what to do. They wanted to. But it did not fit their week. That is a design problem, not a personal one.

Task two. The identity shift. The writer William Bridges said that every change has three phases. An ending. A neutral zone in the middle. And a new beginning. The ending is giving up the old way. The neutral zone feels strange and uncertain. The new beginning comes last. Many people quit in the neutral zone, because it feels uncomfortable. Expect it. When it comes, remind yourself that this is the middle, not the end.

Your new identity is confident and in control of your body, free from blame and shame. Practise it in small ways. Speak kindly about your body. Notice when an old story arrives. Say what you would say to a friend.

One more point. Be careful about identity-protective thinking. When a belief is tied to who we are, we defend it even against good evidence. That works both ways. Ask yourself what you would need to see to change your mind. And when talking to others, do not tell people they are wrong. That tends to make them dig in. Ask questions, and listen.

Task three. Involve family and culture. Food is not just fuel. It is love, memory and belonging. Birthdays, festivals, Sunday lunch, your grandmother’s cooking. A plan that treats those as enemies will lose. Plan for them. Decide in advance how you will handle a celebration. And talk to the people you love without preaching. Share what you are doing. Ask what they need. Invite, do not instruct.

Task four. Start the trial. Name the start date and the end date. Give the approach its full trial period before you judge it. Do not judge it on day four.

Task five. Keep the diary light. A few lines a day. If it takes more than a few minutes, it is too much.

Now staying power. In physics there is an idea called entropy. Without work to maintain it, order drifts towards disorder. A room gets messy. A garden fills with weeds. A skill fades. The same is true of a new routine. It does not hold just because you once reached it. This is part of why weight regain is so common. It is not evidence of a weak character. It is what happens when the effort that holds a pattern stops. So the rest of Defend is about staying alert, gently.

Task six. A good rhythm for monitoring looks like this. Daily, almost nothing. A line or two. Weekly, a ten-minute review in Todoist. Each cycle, a longer review. Watch for warning signs. Checking numbers many times a day. Letting one reading decide your mood. Restricting more because a number did not move. If you notice those, stop and change the method. Tracking is for occasional checking. It is not a permanent audit.

This is where the Habit Tracker earns its place. Track your daily diary prompt, a regular bedtime and a daily walk. Watch the streaks as a nudge, not a score. If a streak breaks, that is information. Ask what got in the way, and restart without guilt.

Task seven. Review the trial. On your review date, open your Personal Process Charter. Look at the evidence you said would change the plan. Did it happen? Be honest. Then decide. Continue. Adjust. Or stop.

Your first weekly review deserves a word. Set aside ten minutes, with a drink, and ask three questions. What went well? What got in the way? What is one small change for next week? Write the answers in a comment on the Defend task. After a few weeks, those comments become a record of how you learn. They also show, in your own words, which of your constraints keep returning. That is valuable information for the next cycle.

Task eight. Build in flexibility. A system that bends survives. Allow for holidays, illness and bad weeks. Decide in advance what your fallback is. A good fallback is small. Go back to your default breakfast. Take a walk. Go to bed on time.

Task nine. Plan for maintenance. It is quieter and kinder than the trial. A weekly review. A regular wake time. A daily walk. One planned review each season. A fallback plan for hard weeks. And a person who notices if you drift.

When things slip, and they will, do not read it as failure. Go back to Discovery. Look at what happened. Then redesign, and move again. That loop is the method.

Those are the four Ds. In a moment, we look at the six Cs.

Section Four: The Six Cs

The four Ds are your method. The six Cs are your shared language.

They are the six qualities that you and the people around you bring while the change happens. The words are the same for you and for your supporters. That is deliberate. When tension rises at home, you can name what is missing without blaming anyone.

The six Cs are Compassion, Communication, Capacity, Commitment, Consideration and Consistency. Here is what each means for fat loss.

Compassion

Compassion means no blame or shame about bodies, including your own.

Assume good intent. A setback is information, not a verdict. Do not comment on other people’s bodies. Do not call foods good or bad in front of children. Speak to yourself the way you would speak to a friend who had a hard week.

How you model it. When you have an off day, say so calmly, and carry on.

Communication

Communication means sharing what helps and what doesn’t, and agreeing how food is talked about at home.

Say what you need early and clearly. For most households, the best place is the shared Todoist project. Agree some ground rules. No food policing. No weight talk at the table. No surprises about meal plans.

How you model it. Ask for what you need, and ask others what they need.

Capacity

Capacity means fitting the plan around real sleep, stress and time.

Be honest about the time and energy you have. A plan that needs more than you can give will fail, however good it is. Agree what is realistic this week, not what would be ideal.

How you model it. Say, this week I can manage two batch-cooked meals. Do not say, I’ll do it all.

Commitment

Commitment means giving the chosen approach its full trial period.

Do what you said you would, or say early if you cannot. Decide the length of the trial in advance, and the evidence that would change the plan. Then give it a fair run.

How you model it. Keep your review date. If you need to stop, stop on purpose, and write down why.

Consideration

Consideration means that shared meals affect everyone, so you plan with the household.

Food is shared. Ask what others need from the table. Do not make family members eat differently without agreement.

How you model it. Plan the week’s meals with the people who eat them.

Consistency

Consistency means small daily routines matter more than perfect days.

Keep doing the agreed thing, especially when no one is checking. A regular wake time, a daily walk and a ten-minute weekly review beat a perfect week followed by a collapse.

How you model it. Pick routines so small that you can keep them on your worst day.

Using the Cs together

When there is tension at home, check the Cs in order. Was there Compassion? Did we Communicate? Did we respect each other’s Capacity? Were we clear on Commitment? Did we show Consideration? Did we stay Consistent? Most conflicts trace back to one of the six.

Section Five: Leading Your People

You are the leader of this change. But you are not doing it alone.

The people who share your meals and routines are affected by what you do. That is why the Support edition exists. It is written for them. It takes under ten minutes. It explains what is changing, what it gives them, and what you are asking of them. It does not ask them to understand the theory. And nothing in it blames them.

Who is Support for? Family members who share your meals and routines. A partner. Children old enough to follow. A parent who lives with you. A flatmate who cooks with you. If you eat with someone most days, they are a supporter.

Here is how to bring them in.

First, give them the Support edition. Ask them to listen or read it before you start the trial. Offer to talk afterwards.

Second, share the project. In Todoist, use the share option on your Organise Fat Loss project. Invite each supporter. Then choose what to share. The Dream tasks and the weekly meal plan are a good start. They show your supporters what you are doing and where they can help. Keep your diary and your health notes private if you prefer. That is your right. The Support edition shows your supporters how to see, add to and tick off what is shared with them, and how to enable the Habit Tracker.

Third, agree the ground rules together. No food policing. No weight talk at the table. No surprises about meal plans. You covered these under Communication.

Fourth, ask for specific help. Not “support me”. Instead, “could you cook the batch meal on Sunday?” or “could you leave the biscuits out of the weekly shop for the four weeks?” People help more when the ask is small and clear.

Here is how that first conversation might sound. You say: I have started something, and I would like your help. It is not about you, and it is not about what you eat. It is about how I plan my days. Could we spend ten minutes this weekend planning meals together? Then you stop talking and listen. Notice how that opens with the purpose, makes a small and specific ask, and leaves room for their answer.

Fifth, say thank you. Often and specifically.

Now a word about how you speak to your supporters. Do not preach. Most of us hear advice about food as criticism, even when it is kindly meant. Share what you are doing, not what they should do. Ask what they need. Listen to the answer. Respect the answer.

And be ready for resistance. Some people will tease. Some will worry. Some will feel judged, even though you said nothing. That is normal. Go back to Compassion. Go back to Communication. And give it time.

If a family member has their own history with food or body image, take extra care. Do not enrol anyone in your plan who has not agreed. Children in particular should not be put on a plan. Keep family meals relaxed and varied, and talk to your child’s doctor if you have concerns.

Section Six: Next Steps

We have covered a lot. Here is what to do now.

Today. Create your Organise Fat Loss project. Add the four stage tasks. Enable the Habit Tracker integration. Write your goal and your new identity at the top.

This week. Start Discovery. Note what already works well. Talk to your clinician, if you have a medical condition. Give the Support edition to the people who share your meals.

Next fortnight. Keep the diary. Keep it light.

After that, move through Dream, Design and Defend, in your own time. There is no deadline except your review date.

If you want the research and the reasoning behind this Guide, read the Full edition. It has eighteen chapters, a worked example for each stage, and a full list of sources. It is the place to check my claims. And I would like you to check them.

To keep learning, visit ravi8.com.

Before you go, remember this. You do not need to do everything at once. Pick one task from Discovery, and do it today. Small steps, taken in order and checked along the way, are how a process changes. That is the whole method.

And one more request.

New to Todoist? I’d really appreciate it if you signed up for Todoist through my affiliate link, which you’ll find on my website, ravi8.com. If my introducing you to Todoist helps you become more organised, using my link helps make all the effort I’ve put into these books worthwhile. Disclosure: this is an affiliate link, so I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Thank you for listening. You are not the problem. You have a process, and you can understand it. Go and organise it.