Lose 30 Pounds in 3 Months, Here Is Exactly How I Did It

Coming from a boxing background, losing weight has always been a trivial endeavor for me. I never quite understood the difficulty and that’s because losing weight is a very big part of competing in boxing events. Fighters often have to cut 10-20 pounds in a few short weeks in order to not be outsized by their opponents. Lucky for me, after a few dumb weight cuts of trying to lose 10 pounds in a couple of days, I eventually learned how to do it ina sustainable fashion when my coach passed on a century of boxing knowledge over to me. 

In this article, I will detail how I cut from 186 pounds to 156 pounds, in a little less than 3 months. The best part, I didn’t do anything extreme, I just took the basics of what fighters do to lose weight, minus all the extreme exercises, and was able to cut successfully. 

How to Lose 30 Pounds in 3 Months 

In 2019, I spent the majority of the year bulking from 140 pounds to 186 pounds, and as soon as quarantine kicked in, decided that without access to heavyweights, it’s the perfect time to jump on the cut. 

When I was bulking, I was eating more calories than I should, and all my training was a low rep and high rest time. To cut the weight, I simply flipped that on its head. 

My biggest surprise was that I did not have to train that hard to lose weight. 

Of course, you can’t have any discussion about weight loss without talking about diet and exercise, so let’s knock down exactly what I ate, and what I did for exercise. 

How Much to Eat

I focused on eating about 1,500 calories a day for this cut. If you don’t want to count calories, that’s about 5 fist-sized meals a day. If you don’t have time to eat 5 times a day, then do a fistful for breakfast, two fistfuls for lunch, and two fistfuls for dinner to keep things simple. The problem is if you eat fistfuls of donuts or pizza, then you probably will be overeating, you want to stick to eating about 1,500 calories, in order to hit those numbers you’re going to have to eat the right things. 

What to Eat 

A lot of people know what’s good and what’s bad. I’ll go as far as to say that most people who’ve tried to lose weight have more awareness than the average joe or jane. You want to use your common sense for the most part. 

Candy, cupcakes, cheeseburgers, and pizza are really bad, and vegetables and lean proteins are going to be really good. 

Exactly What I Ate 

For me personally, and what I recommend, is to cut out three things during this cut completely out of your diet: 

1. Sugar
2. Wheat
3. Alcohol 

By doing this you eliminate just about every “bad” or really caloric food you can eat. I would even throw dairy out the door as well because it’s fatty and can make the calorie spike of any meal. 

Here is what a typical day of eating looked like for me: 

Breakfast

For breakfast I would have: 

• 1 cup of oatmeal
• 1 cup of Oatley Low Fat Milk 
• 1-2 Tablespoons of Hemp Seeds 
• 1 Banana or some blueberries
• Drop of Maple Syrup 
• Cinnamon

This is a quick and easy breakfast to make and comes out to just about 500 calories. It gives you your vitamin C for the day, has about 20 grams of protein, plenty of fiber, and really good for you.  

Lunch 

For lunch I would have a breakfast wrap or some sort of protein wrap because let’s be honest, oatmeal is not real breakfast and if you’re like me, you can eat breakfast at any time of the day.

As an example I would do: 

• 1 BFree Wrap 
• 1 Beyond Sausage (or any protein of your choice, turkey burger is a good substitute) 
• 1 Just Egg Folded Egg 
• Half Slice of Cheese 
• Mayo 

Dinner 

Dinner was some sort of rice and protein combined with some vegetables. 

I would either do curry with rice or lentil loaf or meatloaf with mashed potatoes and some fresh vegetables. With this part, you really want to load up on the veggies and only have moderate portions of the rice or potatoes, stick to fistful portions of the potatoes or rice. 

Snacks 

I never really snacked while doing the cut because it can really help the calories add up, so I tried to prevent doing that. The only thing I would do occasionally is throw in a protein smoothie into the mix when I felt I needed an extra boost, but I would make sure to be more active that day. 

Cheat Meals 

I did not do any cheat meals or days during this cut. If I had a piece of dessert, it was really small and a cheat meal consisted of just eating a little more than I normally would, but I would still eat the right things, just more of them. Try to steer clear of really dirty food. 

The Workout 

First  I want to preface by saying that I did not really train every day during this cut and on days I did not train I still would manage to lose a significant amount of weight considering that lack of activity. 

As I mentioned during my bulk, I did a lot of low rep, long rest weight lifting. During my cut, I simply flipped that on its head. I did a really high rep and short rest workout using the EMOM method and applying it to calisthenics. 

EMOM stands for every minute on the minute. The way it works is you simply set your stopwatch, and as soon as it starts, you get down for your first set, you do as many reps as you can, and when you stop, your break is, however, many seconds there are left on the clock until it strikes the minute mark again. 

So let’s say you’re doing pushups, you’d start your set at 0:00, let’s say you do about 35 pushups and you stop at 0:30, you have 30 seconds until the clock strikes 1:00, and then you get back down for your next set. If you stopped your set at 0:55 seconds, then guess what, you only get a 5-second break. You keep doing this for multiple sets and try to get close to failure on each set. 

This starts off being a cardio workout but ends up feeling like a powerlifting workout towards the end. Your breaks will get longer the more you go as you won’t be able to do as many reps. 

It’s one of the most efficient workouts there is and you can bang out 30 sets in 30 minutes, which is intense! So time is definitely not an excuse, if you only have 20 minutes to train then do 20 sets, no excuses. 

Here is how I did it: 

• 20 sets of pushups daily 
• 10 sets of pull-ups every other day 
• 10 sets of squats every other day that I wasn’t doing the pull-ups 
• 10 sets of leg raises 
• Jump rope or heavy bag occasionally

Everything outside of the cardio was done EMOM. 

One thing I will say is if you need a day off from strength training, then jump rope. It’s much more efficient than running if you count calories burned per minute. It’s possible to burn something like 300 calories in 15 minutes which is INSANE! It’s also much better than doing nothing that day. 

When it comes to rest, you want to rest as needed. Don’t worry about having a format, if your body is telling you to rest, then rest. If your mind is telling you to rest, workout anyway. 

I had a little less strength during the cut but when I trained I made sure to do at least 30 minutes of EMOM training. If I was really gassed, I would rest an entire minute between exercises (i.e. going from pushups to pullups) before I went back to EMOM for the entire workout. 

This Works if You Work 

The best way to lose weight is consistency, it’s how you gained the weight, by consistently eating the wrong things or just too much, and that’s exactly how you will lose it. The reason I like this method of losing weight is that it can build a habit and create a sustainable weight loss routine. Remember, if what you do to lose weight is not sustainable, then the weight loss won’t be either. You want to build habits of eating the right things, in the right quantities, and having workouts that enable the burning of fat without sacrificing muscle (muscle helps burn fat at rest). 

Try it for 30 Days 

All I ask is that you give yourself a disciplined approach of 30 days and see what kind of results you can get. Track your progress through an app like the chronometer, and make sure you’re hitting the calorie goals. By the end of 30 days, you will not want to stop after you see how your body changes. Don’t cheat, keep the vision of the body and health that you want in mind, and move forward!