Day One puts your calorie starting point, shopping list, tracker, checklist and beginner gym guidance in one free PDF. No email, no signup, no catch.
Day One is a free practical starter pack for adults who want to get organised: straightforward shopping, beginner training and a routine you can repeat. It is general education, not a medical weight-management programme. You do not have to start by logging every calorie. Pick your goal below, use the checklist, and choose the tools that help you.
Choose your starting point: read how to start losing fat or how to start building muscle. If a calorie estimate would help, the TDEE calculator gives you a starting point, not a number you must hit perfectly.
Finished week one? Track the rest of your first month with a simple weekly table.
Hungry between meals? Build a meal that actually fills you up.
Want the workouts first? Start with the three-day beginner gym plan, or use the free gym splits for 3, 4 or 5 days a week.
The pack is free. The planned subscription mobile app is a separate product.
Starting is the hardest part, and the fitness industry makes it worse by burying you in conflicting advice. Day One strips it back to the steps that actually matter, in the order you should do them — built for Irish shoppers, busy weeks and real life. Here's what the free guide covers.
Back for another week? Continue your saved checklist.
Choose a PDF below, or read the guide and use the saved checklist on this page.
Download Day One — Free PDF
Reading on your phone? Get the phone-formatted version →
You can't out-train a bad trolley. Aldi or Lidl for the basics — chicken breast, eggs, oats, rice, frozen veg, tinned beans, Greek yoghurt, mince. Frozen veg is not a downgrade: same nutrients, no waste, cheaper. Own-brand everything — the branded version isn't doing anything extra.
A list beats willpower in the impulse aisle. All of this is own-brand in Aldi, Lidl and Tesco:
The list keeps the basics visible, so you can compare the trolley with the plan before you reach the till.
A calorie deficit means eating and drinking less energy than you use over time. For fat loss, use the free TDEE calculator to estimate maintenance first. Never crash it — a small deficit you hold beats a big one you abandon by Friday. For muscle gain, do not automatically choose a cut: maintenance or a small surplus may fit your starting point better. The result is a starting estimate, not a prescription. Review your longer weight trend, energy and training before adjusting it. If you want to build muscle while losing fat, the recomposition guide explains how to choose a starting approach.
Want the reasoning behind a protein target? The daily protein guide explains how to estimate your needs and put them into ordinary meals.
FoodSussed (coming soon; barcode scanner, Irish foods) will do the maths for you. Week one: log a normal day without changing anything — just see it. Protein first: roughly 1.6g per kg of bodyweight daily, about 30g per meal. For comparing labels, our benchmark is 10g of protein per 100 calories. It compares protein with energy; it does not rate the whole food. Weigh anything easy to overpour (oil, rice, cereal) for the first couple of weeks — a weighed portion can differ from your estimate.
Busy day, zero interest in cooking — these still hit your numbers: eggs on toast, Greek yoghurt with oats and frozen berries, tinned tuna with microwave rice, rotisserie chicken with a bag salad. The assembly rule: one protein + one carb + one veg = a meal, no recipe required. Batch a tray of chicken and rice on Sunday and the mad days are covered. A boring meal you actually eat beats a perfect meal you never make. If it's a school run and a full-time job you're working around, staying fit as a busy mum applies the same idea to short sessions as well as quick meals.
Walking is an easy way to add movement — park at the far end, take calls walking, stairs every time. A budget fitness band (Xiaomi or Amazfit) tracks it accurately; nobody needs a premium watch. The gym isn't required to lose weight — but training while in a deficit tells your body to keep muscle while burning fat, so you look different at the end, not just lighter. Grab the free gym splits — 3, 4 and 5-day versions, beginner-friendly. Wondering how anyone fits that in? Training around a job and two kids is my own week, written down honestly.
Weigh daily, judge weekly — the 7-day average is the signal, any single morning is noise. Photos every two weeks, same spot, same light. One waist measurement, same place each time. Clothes don't lie — the belt notch is data. Any two of those moving the right way means it's working, whatever the scale says today.
“Two kids, a full-time job and I’m 18 kilograms down. That comes with no 5am, no twice-a-day gym sessions, no six-hour meal prep on a Sunday. All I did was weigh food, walk, keep the protein high — and that’s the whole thing. When I first started I didn’t know what a calorie was. So I built the Day One pack, and it’s exactly what I’d have given myself three years ago.”
Honest answer: it depends on the gap between what you eat and what you burn, and on how many weeks you actually hold it. Nobody can give you a date from a headline. What you can do is work it out for yourself in two minutes with the calorie target calculator, then track for one week to see where you really are — most people are further from their guess than they think.
My own numbers, so you know who is talking: I went from 90kg to 72kg around a full-time job and two small kids, and I have held it for three years. I quit twice before it stuck. I am 37. No meal plan, no cutting out bread, no giving up the takeaway forever. The difference the third time was not willpower — I finally looked at what I was eating instead of guessing. The oil in the pan, the milk in the teas, the Friday spice bag: none of it feels like eating, all of it counts.
The thing that catches most people is not the weekday. It is five good days and a weekend: two days out of seven is a lot of days, and the scale reads it. Week six looks the same as week one. That is not the plan failing; that is what the timescale looks like from the inside.
There is no fixed number and anyone giving you one is guessing. It is set by the size of your calorie gap and how many weeks you hold it. Work your starting target out with the calculator, track one honest week, and you will have a far better estimate than any article can give you. Mine was 18kg, and the part that mattered was keeping it off for three years afterwards.
No. I did not. You need to know what they cost you and fit them inside the budget. The Irish supermarket calorie pages exist so you can see the numbers on the food you actually buy.
Knowing is not obsessing. It takes about a week to learn to read a label and log a meal, and after that it costs you nothing. You never go back to guessing.
Check the weekend first, then check the week. The scale is one signal — step 7 above lists the others. If everything is in place and it is week three, it is not broken; it is slow.
All of the above, on a plate: a full example week. 3 meals a day, every item from Aldi or Lidl, macros computed from the labels. Two versions (2100 and 1200 calorie), full shopping list, swaps table and a cook-once-eat-twice plan:
→ See the full free 7-day meal plan (2100 & 1200 kcal)
All 18 steps from the pack. Your progress saves on this device — no account needed. Come back and keep ticking.
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At the end of your week, use the first-month progress table to review what you managed and choose one thing for next week. Bookmark this page to return to your checklist on this device.
Download Day One — Free PDF
Reading on your phone? Get the phone-formatted version →
Already past the beginner stage? Get the Year Two advanced guide for building muscle and losing fat at the same time, grab the free 5-day gym split, set your targets with the free macro calculator, or build a free AI meal plan in 30 seconds.
