Ep 67: The 5 Things You Need to Burn Fat Sustainably

Trainer Tips

Jun 16

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If you’ve ever struggled to stay consistent with your workouts, nutrition, or overall fitness routine—you are so not alone. In this episode of The Coaching Corner, I’m sharing the five key habits that make the biggest difference when it comes to achieving real, lasting results.

After over a decade in the fitness industry, I’ve noticed that the people who succeed long-term don’t rely on motivation—they build systems that support them even on the hard days. In this episode, I cover:

Why discipline matters more than motivation
How mentorship and coaching can fast-track your progress
The role community plays in your fitness journey
What it means to take full responsibility for your growth
How to embrace the struggle and use it to your advantage

Whether you're trying to lose fat, build strength, or just stay on track with your routine, these five principles will help you shift your mindset and stay committed.

🎧 Listen now and learn how to stay consistent—even when life gets chaotic.

👉 Interested in working with me? My online coaching program is designed to give you structure, support, and accountability.

Apply to work with me!

Links:

Jayd (00:00):
As a personal trainer, one thing that I notice a lot of people really struggle with staying consistent in their fat loss journeys and in their fitness journeys in general. So this episode is for people who aren't necessarily stuck on getting started. You've gotten started, but you're like, how do I stay consistent? Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I've been a personal trainer for about 10 years and I've created this podcast to share with you some of the tips and tricks that I teach my clients to help them to stay consistent on their fat loss and on their fitness journey as a whole. In today's episode, I'm going to share with you the five things that I've noticed that people who are able to stay consistent on their fat loss and on their fitness have working on getting these five things into your life and into your mindset will help you to reach your fat loss goals and keep them for good. Now, real quick before we get into the episode, make sure to like this video if you're watching on YouTube and follow the channel if you are listening to this podcast so that you never miss a new episode. And if you are looking for an online personal trainer to keep you accountable on your fat loss journey, check out my coaching program I am currently taking on clients. So you can apply in the link that is below this video or that's in the show notes. Without further ado, let's get into the episode.
(01:36)
So what I've noticed over the years as a personal trainer, there are five main things that really mark the people who stay consistent on their fat loss and on their fitness versus people who have this on again, off again relationship with their fitness and with fat loss and having these five things in place. If you get them in place early on in your journey, you will have so much greater success and staying consistent and ultimately reaching your goals and keeping your goals right, because it doesn't matter if you lose a bunch of fat, if you lose a bunch of weight, but you can't keep it off for good, right? Or if you end up only being able to lose a little bit and then you plateau and you just can't seem to get that last 20 to 30 pounds or maybe 15 pounds, whatever it is, off to stay off for good.
(02:32)
The five things that people who stay consistent and reach their goals ultimately have are number one, discipline. Number two, they have a mentor or multiple mentors, but that usually is me. Number three, they have a community that's more than just their mentor or me as their coach. Number four, they are responsible for their own gains. And number five, they are the type of people who embrace the struggle and they have a really good relationship with failure and trial and error. They have a good mindset around that. So I wanted to go a little bit more into detail about these five things and how you can implement them into your own life and in the way that you approach your fitness and in the way that you approach your fat loss so that you can reach your goals and stay consistent. Because as you know, for most people, fat loss, fitness building muscle is a long journey.
(03:34)
It's not a sprint, it's a marathon, right? It's a journey that takes often years and we are going to live in our bodies for our whole lives. We're going to have to maintain our bodies for our whole lives. So getting good habits around how you think about taking care of your body and around your actual practices that you have for taking care of your body is so, so important. So number one, let's talk about discipline. What we mean by discipline, because discipline is kind of a fuzzy term, right? By discipline, what I mean is the type of people that stay consistent on their fat loss and make progress on their fat loss. These are the people who aren't overly relying on the feelings of motivation to show up and get their workouts in or to show up and actually eat the way that they're supposed to eat.
(04:26)
These people know that their feelings are going to come and go, and their feelings are like weather that can change very quickly and you just can't rely on that motivation to keep you going. And they also know a step further that you can't just rely on this inner force of willpower to keep showing up as well. The people who have the best discipline combine two things. Yes, they have the willpower to be able to push themselves to show up even when they don't feel like it. But number two, which I think is even more powerful, is they build structures into their lives to support their goals. So what that means is they're often the type of people who are on a schedule for their workouts. They don't wait until whenever they feel like going to the gym to go to the gym. They have set times and set days that are dedicated for them to do their workouts, whether they're working out at home or at the gym.
(05:29)
They also have set days and times where they go to the grocery store, buy groceries, and then meal prep. Okay? So they have really good routines around their self-care that support their fat loss and their fitness. So they also tend to have little checklists or some kind of journal that they use to track their progress, which helps them to stay disciplined, helps them to stay on track. So it's not just about have the willpower, right? They actually have structures that I've helped them build in their life based on what structures have helped me and the structures that I know have helped other people, and they have created a routines in their life that support the body that they want to achieve. So number one, discipline is the number one thing to cultivate and to begin cultivating. And if you want to begin cultivating discipline, what I would recommend is sitting down with your Google calendar or whatever journal or get a journal where you have your schedule and take a look at where you're spending your time on a day-to-day and on a week to week basis.
(06:41)
Time blocking is a really great way to see where your time and your energy is going. And then you can block out 30 to 60 minutes for your workouts a couple times a week or for some kind of activity that gets you up and moving. You don't necessarily have to go to the gym and do a workout. You could go for walks, you could go swimming. You could do something active outside like bike riding or even kayaking, something that's going to get your body moving. Try to dedicate a couple times a week and put them on the schedule three to five days a week, 30 to 60 minutes on your schedule, and then keep them the same every week and try as much as possible to stick to your schedule and treat those times as very important appointments that you cannot cancel or reschedule and only every once in a while cancel or reschedule because you want to get yourself to the point where that schedule is inherent within you, right?
(07:40)
You just go to the gym because it's part of your routine. That's just what you do on Monday afternoons instead of like, oh, I got to go. Let me go wait until I feel like it, right? You just show up and you do something and you're not always going to have to do a really hard workout. Sometimes just showing up and stretching or walking on the treadmill is enough or going outside. Just do something for 30 to 60 minutes. Keep that on the same time, same days. So build discipline into your life. Use journals. Use whatever types of organizational strategies that you need to help yourself build that routine. Number two, have a mentor. The people who stay consistent, the people who best stay consistent. What I've seen is they have mentors. They have people who are further along in their fitness journey or who are further along in their fat loss journey and they're looking up to those people.
(08:32)
When I was in mixed martial arts and I used to practice, there's a Brazilian jiu-jitsu, one of my coaches told me, in order to be really good at this sport, it's really important that you have three different people that you practice with on a weekly basis, that you have someone who is on your level who's at the same skill level as you because you can learn together. It's also important that you have people who are below you who have less skills than you because you can teach them. And when you teach things, you learn them at a deeper level. But then it's also incredibly important to work with roll with spar people who are above your level because they give you something to look up to, that give you something to look forward to, and they can teach you and help guide you when you have questions.
(09:18)
So having a mentor is incredibly important because this is a person that you can go to when you have questions. This is a person who can notice things that you don't know you may be doing wrong, or maybe you're doing them in a not so efficient way. So hiring a personal trainer is a great way to get yourself a mentor, but you also can have gym bros that you look up to. If you go to a gym, a community gym that has a really good community, and there are people who've been doing it longer than you, and you can maybe get in a workout with them every once in a while or ask them questions, just be careful. People who don't have certifications or education might not be the best source of information. So it is ideal to work with somebody who has some kind of certification or education in exercise science or how to train or nutrition.
(10:10)
So just keep that in mind when you're looking for a mentor. You want somebody who actually knows and has the know-how and the certifications. And so the people who actually work with me one-on-one, have more success and staying consistent on their fat loss because they have me checking in with them on a regular basis and checking over their workouts, maybe designing their workouts, helping them create a meal plan. And that extra accountability, someone that you can go to ask questions and be held accountable to is so important. And by the way, side note, I am taking on clients right now. You can apply to work with me one-on-one from my website. If you are watching this on YouTube, you can click the link that is in the description below this video if you are on social media. The link for that is in my bio.
(10:58)
And if you are on Twitch right now as I'm live, the link for applying to work with me one-on-one is in my profile. Page. Number three, the people who are able to stay consistent are the people who have a community, which is more than just having a mentor, having someone beside you. Like I was saying before, it's important that you have in mixed martial arts, it's important that you roll with somebody who is above you. That would be the mentor. It's also important that you roll with people who are on your same skill level or thereabouts people that you can learn together with. This is another group of people that can help you to stay accountable, but it also can be extremely helpful to see other people who are dealing with the same kinds of struggles that you're dealing with. Because one of the things that hurts people a lot in their fat loss journey is comparison to other people.
(11:51)
And they feel like, oh, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm doing it wrong. I'm wrong. Or I'm messing things up. And seeing other people dealing with the similar struggles to yours can be so helpful in putting your mind at ease and keeping you on track. Because the last thing that we want to do is have you go off on a shame spiral where you just feel like you are so wrong and you are just not good at this, and maybe you should just give up, right? When you have a community of peers who are dealing with the same kinds of struggles, you can go to those peers for validation. It can be very helpful to validate each other's struggles. And if that community also includes or refers to a mentor or a coach, then you also have a person or people that you can ask questions.
(12:43)
And sharing your gains with other people, growing together with other people is a great way to stay motivated. You'll more often feel have the feelings of motivation if you're sharing the experience with other people who are going through similar things. So I have a client who has struggled for years. I've worked with him for almost 10 years now, and when we first started working together, he made a lot of gains really fast, those newbie gains. But then after a certain point, I really struggled to get him to eat the way that he needed to eat in order to reach his ultimate physique goals. And a large part of this was that his wife was also on a fitness journey, but had a lot of issues, a lot of mental hurdles when it comes to eating plenty of protein, eating lots of veggies. She liked to treat herself a lot, and she was also the type of person that if she was doing it, she wanted him doing it as well.
(13:45)
And it was just really hard on their relationship for him to set those boundaries. And recently, I got to say, maybe a couple months ago, she finally hit that point where she was ready to make the changes in her diet and she wanted him to do that with her. And he was like, great, I'm ready to go. So they have been consistently for a few months now, eating lots of protein, eating regularly. He wasn't eating enough and he wasn't eating often enough before, and then they're not like eating a ton of junk food like they were before. And for the first time in a couple of years, he's actually making consistent progress on his fat loss. His belly is going down. I mean, he was continuing to build strength because we were working out. He was building muscle and he was getting fitter, but he had this stubborn belly that just honestly wasn't going to go away until he cleaned up his diet and stayed consistent on it.
(14:45)
But now that he and his wife are working together as a team, it is just boom, they're both taking off and they're making amazing progress. So you see, this is one of the ways that having a community can be so helpful because you have another person who's going through it with you and another person who's learning with you. But that also brings me to number four. There are as great as that has been, that story of my client and his wife getting their stuff together and working together as a team. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to have your romantic partner or the other people in your house alongside you on your journey to make progress. I have plenty of clients who have significant others who don't exercise, who don't work out, who don't eat healthy, and they're able to make progress, and they're able to make consistent progress in their gains.
(15:41)
And the reason for that is because number four, that number four, they are responsible for their own gains, and they have internalized that they own their journey, and they have created a very strong sense within themselves that they, and they alone are the best people to take care of themselves. So as great as it is to have a community and a team, it's even better or just as good, and it works really well. Those two things in place. Having a team and also having a sense of ownership over your journey can really accelerate your fat loss and really accelerate your progress towards your muscle building goals. So what does it mean to be responsible for your own gains? That means that you have a sense of responsibility. Nobody is going to do it for you. Nobody is going to force feed you to eat healthy.
(16:36)
Nobody is going to make you show up and do your workouts. That's on you, and it's on you to stay accountable to your community, to your mentor, and to get on that schedule in the first place. If you wait for someone else to just pick you up and put you in places that you need to be, pick you up and put you in the gym, pick you up and put you in the kitchen, that's just not going to happen. You're not a child. We're not children, and we need to take ownership and also set boundaries in our lives. That's also part of being responsible for your own gains. And by boundaries, I mean saying no to things. You are the one you and you alone are the one who's able to say no to the things that threaten your progress. So own that. Set boundaries in your life.
(17:28)
And what I would've loved to see from this client with his wife, I would've loved to see him set more boundaries and be more responsible for his own gains to make progress on his own without her. But at the same time, I'm happy that they're working as a team now, but he would've made progress if he had been more responsible for his own gains and decided, you know what? I'm not judging you. Do what you want to do. This is what, these are my goals and this is what I'm trying to do. Not judging, not saying that you should do things the way that I'm doing, but just this is what I'm doing and I need you to be okay with that. So having those kinds of conversations with the people in our lives when we have that friction in our relationships, when people don't necessarily support us or they're not going along with us on the journey.
(18:22)
Also, setting boundaries on yourself, that's goes back to the discipline, creating structures and habits in your life that support the habits that are going to yield that fat loss. So getting more active, building more activity into your life, taking the stairs instead of the elevator parking further away so that you have to walk more to the store and back. And just like going for walks more, getting up and moving instead of staying sedentary all the time. These are all ways that you can build habits into your life to be responsible for your own gains. Build those structures, the best person to do them. You know how you feel, right? You are the one who has to go throughout your whole day. So having that responsibility for your own gains is incredibly important. And then finally, number five, the thing that the people who are able to stay consistent on their fat loss do is they embrace the struggle.
(19:16)
They have a really good relationship with failure. They are able to respond with grit and perseverance, and they have a growth mindset around failure. So when they aren't able to do something consistently, the people who embrace the struggle, they know that if it doesn't challenge you, it doesn't change you. So they are down for the struggle. They are down to fight those mental battles to change how they see food, to change, how they see themselves, to change their relationship with movement. And they know that doing hard things is what will yield the results that they need. They know that it's not going to be a walk in the park, and there are things that we can do to make it easier, and I definitely help my clients to make their fat loss journey easier for them. But at the same time, change is just hard.
(20:13)
Our bodies, our brains do not like to make changes even when those changes are good for us. And I know that better than anybody, right? As a business owner, I've had to make changes to how I do things and how I see things so often, and every time I have to make a change, even when I know that it's a good one and it's going to push me further along in my career or in my athleticism, I go into it and my brain freaks out. But I know that if I stick with it, if I get myself into that space and the struggle, I'm going to learn from it, learn. I'm going to take skills from that struggle, and I'm going to be able to apply them to my business and apply them to my fitness. And that's going to make me better, even if I get my ass kicked right?
(21:01)
Even if I get my butt kicked by whatever the struggle is, I know that I'm going to yield gains from that. And it's just like if you spend time in the gym trying to build muscle, you know that if you don't challenge your muscles and make them approach failure, you're not going to grow. You're not going to get stronger. You're not going to build muscle. It's the same thing with your overall journey. It's instead of avoiding and running from struggle, if you embrace it as part of the process, you are going to be able to stay consistent and you're going to make so much better progress in your fat loss. And my business coach uses an example from anime that I think is really universal, because if you play video games, it's the same kind of process. The way that you move forward in a game or the way that in Dragon Ball's Goku gets stronger and becomes more powerful is there's a boss fight.
(21:57)
And in your fat loss and in your fitness, you're going to have multiple boss fights, which are things that are going to challenge you. Mindset shifts that you're going to have to make to change your relationship with your body, to change your relationship with food. And those struggles, they're going to suck. It hurts mentally, psychologically. You are going to take some psychic damage when it comes to sitting down and confronting the fact that, oh, man, I kind of have a shame complex around food. Or, oh man, I really have been really mean to myself when I look in the mirror. Those are all things that are going to have to grow and change if you want to reach your goals. And so embrace the struggle and know that when you get to the other side of that struggle, you're going to have gains from that.
(22:48)
Every battle that you have to fight and overcome, you're going to get skills from that, and those skills will transfer to you being better able to tackle what you need to do to burn fat and ultimately reach your goals. So those are my five things that I've noticed really make the difference for people who reach their fat loss goals, reach their physique goals, those five things are what I recommend you work on kind of cultivating in your own mind and in your own life. If you have a big dream of a certain fat loss goal or a physique goal or a strength goal, having these five things is going to help you to make more progress towards that and be more consistent in the long run, and also keep your results sustainably.
(23:44)
That is the podcast for today. Thank you for joining me. My name is Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I'm a personal trainer. I've been working in the field for 10 years. I grew up in the fitness industry. I love this, and I'm so happy to share with you guys the tips and tricks that help my clients and the things that I've noticed as a personal trainer. If you're interested in working with me on your fat loss, let's get started. Click on the link that is in my bio. Or if you're on Twitch, click on the link that is in my profile page. And if you're watching on YouTube, click on the link that is in the description below, and I look forward to hearing from you, and I will see you in the next episode.