Real constraints: work, family, travel, budget

The sixty-hour working week

The floor: two thirty-minute sessions, ten thousand steps, protein at every meal, batch cooking on Sunday.

That floor is enough to lose fat and preserve muscle. It is not optimal: it is sustainable, which is infinitely better than an optimal plan abandoned in three weeks.

The thirty-minute sessions: three compound exercises, three sets each, ninety seconds of rest. Squat, bench press, row. That is all, and it is enough.

Young children

Time is fragmented, sleep is short, the unexpected is the rule.

Short sessions at home, twenty minutes, during a nap or in the evening. Walking with a pushchair, which counts fully. Shared batch cooking for the whole family, with no separate meal. Loss target revised down: 0.3 per cent a week rather than 0.7.

Through a period of badly degraded sleep, switch to maintenance rather than a deficit. A deficit on five hours of sleep mostly produces hunger and muscle loss.