The Weekly Deficit TARGET
My Approach
How I Actually Do It
The three rules are the system. This section is what the system looks like running inside one actual life — mine. None of it is required. All of it is honest. Use what fits, skip what doesn't.
What My Wife Tells People
When people hear about the miles I'm walking and hiking, they tell my wife: "I can't do what Don's doing — he walks 10 to 20 miles a day. I can't walk 2 miles." So they don't even start.
Rita's answer shocks most: "The walking and the gym is not how he's losing weight. He's losing weight by monitoring what he's eating. He hasn't cut out delicious food — we have buttermilk pancakes, pizza, Klondike bars regularly — but he absolutely monitors how much. In fact, the hiking and the gym are building muscle, which makes him GAIN weight, not lose it."
She's right on every count. The big miles are my hobby and my durability project — I'm training for a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, not for weight loss. The scale moves because of what happens in the kitchen. The muscle I'm building actually works against the scale.
So if you can't walk 20 miles, good news: neither could I when I weighed 315, and it didn't matter. Your goal might be two miles. It might be 20 minutes. Activity scales to you — it's the tuning knob, not the engine. The important part is knowing what you're putting in your mouth.
Identifying My Calorie Bombs
I told you in Rule 3 that I haven't cut out a single food. That's true at the level of categories — nothing's banned forever. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't pull a few specific things almost all the way out, on purpose, for now at least.
Everyone has trip-wires — the handful of things they love that quietly wreck the budget and tend to trigger more bad days. I know mine are beer and fried foods. I've cut all of them 99-plus percent — not by white-knuckling, but because I looked at each one honestly and admitted it works directly against what I'm after right now. So, now, I drink non-alcoholic low-cal beers and I'll still steal a fry off Rita's plate vs. ordering my own. Sorry, Rita.
Your trip-wires won't be mine. For a lot of people in North Carolina it's sweet tea — basically liquid sugar. At 200+ calories per 20 oz. cup, it adds up really fast. The framework isn't "give up your favorite thing." It's: find the few things actually blocking you, be honest about whether you can have them in moderation or not, and decide what they're worth right now.
And sometimes the answer isn't cutting — it's swapping. Beer was a bottleneck for me, so I went from 250-calorie Belgian Pale Strong Ale to 25 to 60-calorie NA beer. Still beer, still enjoying it, just sized to fit. If sweet tea's your thing, here's an easy swap: go with unsweetened tea and a few drops of lemon-flavored liquid stevia. Sweet tea taste, zero calories. That's not abstinence, and it's not deprivation. It's knowing your own numbers and your own weak spots well enough to make the trade-off on purpose.
A Reset Day
Usually once a week, on a Sunday, I'll take a day that's deliberately different: a rest-and-recovery day where I eat half of my maintenance calories, or sometimes don't eat at all.
Caution: If you have any underlying medical issues, consult with your medical doctor before you attempt a fast of any kind.
I'm not going to hand you a science lecture about fasting — there's plenty of that online and a lot of it is just hype. I can only tell you what it does for me: it reminds my brain that a little hunger isn't going to kill me.
These days my reset day is usually softer than water-only: the 50% day. Eat if your body asks — just keep it to something super easy to digest and super hydrating. For me that's watermelon. Watermelon is my favorite food on the planet, so "eat watermelon all day" isn't punishment — it's a treat. Pick whatever works the same way for you.
Why I keep it in the rotation:
- It forces an off-day. You're not fueled for a workout, so you shouldn't talk yourself into one.
- It keeps the mental edge. One day a week of proving that not eating won't actually kill you.
- It's a weekly deficit safety net. Week got away from you? One reset day quietly catches the week back up.
- It sets the weekly tone. Starting Monday at your lowest weight of the week gives you a real psychological win.
Skin Health and Why It Matters
Sodium, potassium, magnesium, fat — your body needs all of it to keep running. If your macros are dialed in and you're eating mostly whole foods, the micronutrients come along for the ride.
The only supplements I take regularly: collagen in my morning coffee, backed up with vitamin C, and omega-3 with dinner. The omega-3 is joint support and the collagen and vitamin C are part of something I think about constantly — my skin.
Here's the honest truth nobody pushing a lose-weight-fast program likes to talk about: lose 100-plus pounds fast and you risk loose, hanging skin at the end of it. For me that's been a real, ongoing concern, and I've purposefully been losing the weight at a measured pace, taking collagen and vitamin C daily, no smoking, no sun tanning, sunscreen every day. None of it's a magic fix, but together I'm hoping that it gives my skin its best shot at keeping up.
Skin elasticity only goes one direction with age — it gets harder to bounce back every year you wait. The best time to take it off was a year ago; the second-best time is right now.
That's It
I'm not a dietitian or a coach, and I'm not selling you anything. This is what worked for me — simple enough to share because it isn't unique enough to keep to myself.
Weight loss isn't complicated. It isn't magic. It's calories in, calories out, and showing up.
The Reality
You didn't gain the weight in a month. Don't expect to lose it in one. Weight loss is hard — not because it's complicated, but because consistency is hard. Showing up every day, riding out the weeks that don't go your way, trusting that progress isn't a straight line — that's the actual work. I tell people all the time... this is just math and patience now.
But it's doable. It's sustainable. And a year from now you could be a different person — lighter, stronger, moving through your life instead of being limited by it.
Somewhere along the way I read four words that stopped me cold: simple doesn't mean easy.
That's this past year. None of it has been "easy" — not the first week, not the wall at 265, not the nights I wanted to eat the whole kitchen. I get emotional about that, because it has NOT been easy.
Simple is what makes it doable. Not being easy is what makes it worth something.