The Curse of the Superwoman
Why going harder can be the fastest way to make your fat-loss plan fall to shit.
There’s a particular kind of woman I see get herself into trouble with fat loss. She’s capable. She gets shit done. She works, runs the house, remembers the appointments, organises everyone else, solves problems and generally operates under the assumption that if something needs doing, she’ll find a way to do it.
So when she decides she wants to lose some body fat?
Naturally, she approaches that like another project to absolutely nail.
Calories down. Protein up. 10,000 steps. Actually, make it 15,000. Four workouts. No, five. Meal prep Sunday. No alcohol. No takeaway. Track everything. Drink three litres of water. Get eight hours’ sleep. And while we’re here, perhaps we should meditate.
Excellent.
We have now turned looking after ourselves into another full-time job.
For a little while, it can feel fantastic. We’re motivated. Organised. Ticking boxes. The scales might move quickly.
And because we’re high-achieving humans, we think: “See? I knew I just needed to get my shit together.”
Until inevitably... we can’t keep all the balls in the air.
Work gets busy. Someone gets sick. We sleep badly. Hunger kicks up. We miss a workout. Dinner isn’t prepped.
One ball drops. Then another.
And because the plan only really worked while we were operating at 110% capacity, the whole bloody thing comes crashing down.
Welcome to the curse of the Superwoman.
The problem isn’t that you weren’t disciplined enough
The problem is that your plan required too much discipline in the first place.
Fat loss requires a calorie deficit over time. But once we’ve established that deficit, making everything harder doesn’t necessarily make the outcome better.
A larger deficit may produce faster initial weight loss, but it also means less energy coming in. Hunger can increase, spontaneous movement can decrease, training performance and recovery can suffer, and preserving muscle becomes harder if we’re not resistance training and eating enough protein.
Then there’s the psychological side.
A highly restrictive plan gives us fewer places to go when life inevitably happens. One dinner out feels like we’ve blown it. A missed workout becomes a bad week. A hungry afternoon becomes evidence that we’re “failing”.
Eventually the effort required to maintain the plan becomes greater than the result is worth.
And that’s usually when Superwoman says: “Fuck it.”
Not because she lacks willpower.
Because the system was built to fail the moment she stopped being superhuman.
Faster isn’t always faster
Imagine two approaches.
One person creates an aggressive deficit, dramatically changes her food, starts training five days a week and vows to be “really strict” for the next eight weeks.
She lasts three.
Another person makes a smaller change. She eats mostly the same foods, but adjusts portions. Gets enough protein and fibre. Strength trains twice. Walks regularly. Still goes out for dinner.
Her weekly fat loss might be slower.
But three months later? She’s still doing it.
So who actually took the faster route?
Slow and steady isn’t about deliberately making fat loss painfully slow. It’s about choosing a pace you can sustain long enough for consistency to compound.
Your body isn’t a spreadsheet
On paper, it’s tempting to think: if a 300-calorie deficit works, surely a 700-calorie deficit works better.
Biologically, things are more complicated.
As body mass decreases and energy intake stays lower, energy expenditure can decrease partly because there’s less body to move and partly through adaptive changes in spontaneous activity and other components of expenditure. Hunger signals can become stronger too.
This doesn’t mean your metabolism is “broken”. It means your body is responding to reduced energy availability like a body is supposed to.
This is why I prefer the smallest useful deficit: enough to produce progress, not so much that your entire life becomes about surviving your fat-loss phase.
We also want to keep the good stuff
Fat loss isn’t simply about making the scales lighter.
We want as much of the weight we lose as reasonably possible to come from body fat while preserving lean tissue. Resistance training and adequate protein are enormously useful here.
But we also need enough energy to train and recover.
If we slash calories and add a mountain of exercise, we might technically be “working harder” while making it harder to perform, recover and hold onto muscle.
I don’t want you simply smaller at the end of a fat-loss phase.
I want you strong. Capable. Well-fed.
We’re building stronger people, not just smaller ones.
So what does “not going too hard” actually look like?
Let’s put some numbers around it.
Imagine a 40-year-old woman weighing 75kg. Her exact energy needs will depend on height, muscle mass, occupation and movement, but let’s say she’s reasonably active: around 8,000–10,000 steps most days plus two strength sessions each week.
For many women around this size, a rough maintenance intake might land somewhere around 2,000–2,300 calories per day.
That isn’t a prescription — it’s a starting estimate we’d test against what actually happens to her weight over time.
Now Superwoman might look at that and think: “Excellent. I’ll eat 1,400.”
Please don’t.
If her maintenance were around 2,200 calories, I’d much rather start somewhere around 1,750–1,900 calories per day.
That’s roughly a 300–450 calorie daily deficit, or around 15–20%.
Enough to create meaningful progress without immediately making food the most interesting thing in her life.
We’d then watch her average weight trend over several weeks, alongside waist measurements, hunger, energy, training performance and how sustainable the whole thing actually feels.
If it’s working?
Don’t touch it.
We don’t get extra points for making an effective deficit bigger.
And what should she actually do?
This is where I want Superwoman to resist turning fat loss into the Olympics.
Her week could simply be:
· Around 8,000–10,000 steps most days.
· Two proper strength sessions.
· Protein across her meals — roughly 100–120g per day could be a practical target for our 75kg example.
· Plenty of plants and fibre.
· Approximately 1,750–1,900 calories in this example, adjusted from real-world results rather than blindly trusting a calculator.
· A life.
Dinner out. Birthday cake. Rest days. A missed workout. A Wednesday where everything goes to shit.
These things don’t sit outside the plan.
They have to fit inside it.
Have a minimum version
This might be the most important skill for a Superwoman.
Before starting, decide what your minimum successful week looks like.
Maybe it’s two strength sessions, regular walking, mostly nourishing meals, enough protein and fibre, and staying somewhere around your weekly calorie budget.
Then when work explodes, someone gets sick or you’re simply exhausted, we don’t fall from PERFECT PLAN to FUCK IT.
We fall back to the minimum.
That’s how we keep the important balls in the air without trying to juggle seventeen of them.
Your biggest challenge might actually be doing less
If you’re a high achiever, you probably already know how to push.
So your fat-loss challenge might be learning to hold something back.
Not adding another workout because the scales didn’t move this week. Eating enough even though cutting another 200 calories feels productive. Having dinner out without compensating the next day. Letting a good-enough week count.
A plan feeling manageable isn’t evidence that it isn’t working.
It may be evidence that we’ve finally built one we can keep doing.
The best fat-loss plan isn’t the one that produces the most impressive first fortnight. It’s the one that’s still quietly working six, eight or twelve weeks later when motivation has worn off and normal life has resumed.
You don’t need to be Superwoman to lose body fat.
You need a plan that still works when you’re not.
If your fat-loss plans keep ending in a spectacular crash...
You probably don’t need a stricter one.
I can help you work out what’s actually enough — an appropriate calorie deficit, food that keeps you fed, movement that fits your life and a strategy with enough breathing room to survive a normal week.
No gold medal for suffering. Just a plan you can actually keep doing.