When I talk to many people about what their health goals are, most people tell me they want to lose weight. A lot of times I don’t even bring up health/fitness, but I feel like since a lot of people know I enjoy going to the gym, that it is an easy and relatable conversation to have with me. During these conversations, the types of things I hear people say they think they need to do are usually very misguided. The preconceptions they have about how lose to weight and the role food has to play with fat loss sets them up for failure before they even begin to try. There are many dieting styles that work for fat loss and I believe the best styles are ones that allow for the highest probability of adherence along with ones that are more of a lifestyle change, rather than a “fad diet” that's done for only a short period of time.
The way I like to diet works best for me out of the many methods I have tried. There are other ways people like to do things such as eating a ketogenic diet or a strict clean eating diet, but I like to follow flexible dieting. To have the highest chance to successfully pull off a flexible diet you need to understand the basics to counting calories and more specifically counting macros. So I would STRONGLY recommend you go both read and follow the directions I lay out in my other article Dieting 101. It sets a strong foundation by creating healthy eating habits and also helps you form habits that will make a fat loss phase easier. With such a difficult goal like losing fat, we are looking for adherence, not fast results. Adherence will more likely lead to you being able to maintain your lower weight once you achieve it, whereas getting fast results will likely lead to a rebound effect and cause you to end up at a heavier weight than what you are now. Half a pound to a whole pound a week is actually a pretty healthy rate of fat loss. If someone does have a really large amount to lose they will probably lose a little more than that weekly in the beginning of their process.
So before you even begin a fat loss phase, we need to ensure that were are eating an appropriate amount of calories. We want at a minimum to be eating at maintenance level, if not that even a little over maintenance. The other article Dieting 101 was all about how to get to our maintenance level and become comfortable tracking macros. So if you are directly moving on from following the directions in that article you’re ready to continue your fat loss journey. If you have taken some time off from counting your calories, that’s perfectly fine, but you should then track for two weeks or so and perform an assessment laid out below.
After tracking for two weeks to see if we are eating at maintenance level, which can be done by comparing how much we have actually been eating and compare it to the guesstimate our tracking app tells us, we want to also take a look at our protein. Since protein is the most satiating and aids in muscle retention, we want to make sure we are eating plenty of it. This means that we will feel fuller from eating extra protein, which will help when we reach a calorie deficit, along with helping us burn more fat than muscle mass. So if you are in a place where you need to raise your overall calories, a great way to add them right away is to add more protein. We would like to have our protein level to be at least a little over one gram per pound or at least right at one gram per pound.
Example: I usually weigh around 155lbs. So I will take 155 and multiply by 1.25g/lbs to put me a little over. This comes out to 193.75 grams per pound. So I therefore try to eat between 190 and 195 grams of protein per day.
If you do happen to be eating a little over this naturally, that is perfectly fine too. If I had chose to eat 210 grams in my example that would be okay too. We just don’t want to be too low or at an extreme high. Such as eating below 0.8g/lbs or something like 2/lbs. If you aren’t eating enough protein, you should take time to get to the right level. I would recommends adding 20-30 grams a week. While adding the additional protein, you may need to lower your carbs and/or fats slightly if you do not wish to raise your calories much higher. If you have followed my other article you should be relatively close to this number.
Now that our calories and protein are high enough, we are ready to start eating in a deficit, which is what should spark our fat loss. To do this, we start by looking at how many carbohydrates and fats we have been eating. This is why we tracked for at least 2 weeks, so we would have some data and know where to start. If our fat intake is low or very close to minimal fat intake levels, 20% or less of our total calorie make-up (fats are 9cal a gram), we would automatically create a calorie deficit by subtracting 50 carbs (200 calories). Then for the next week we will eat at this new calorie level and track our weight daily. In order to make this manageable, you can manually change what your calorie goal is in our calorie tracking app. When you access your profile, you can set the total overall calories, and also set up macronutrient goals. This will not only make it easier but also help keep us accountable.
After our first week of eating in a deficit and tracking our weight it’s time to see if we have any results and decide if we should change anything. When you do your final weigh in for the week you want to not only compare it to the beginning of the week, but also check to see if there has been a weekly trend your weight going down.
If it is lower, that’s great!!! We have made some progress and finally see the weight moving in the right direction. We want to continue eating at the same level for the next week to see if we are able to continue losing weight with what we have been doing.
If your weight is the same as at the beginning of the week, that’s okay too. But… here is where you have to assess and decide. If the scale didn’t go down from that first day compared to the beginning of the new week, the first thing you should do is go to your weight log and see if your weight was down for any of those days. Maybe something you ate the day before caused you to hold onto a little extra weight, or maybe you are retaining a slight amount of water. If the scale was down for other days, odds are you have lost weight, but for some reason you just had a high weigh in. In this case I would probably continue to eat at that calorie level for at least one more week before I change calories. If your weight didn’t change at all over the whole week you have a decision to make, you can either continue to eat at the same level for one more week or go to the next step of cutting out more calories. There is a chance your body just hasn’t caught up with the calories you have been eating and the fat loss hasn’t started yet or the deficit we started with was not enough to initiate fat loss. Both situations are very plausible, so either one you make is perfectly fine.
So now that we know how to perform our weekly assessment, this is how we are going to decide what to do every week during our diet phase. Each week when we do our assessment we will decide whether to repeat our calorie goal or cut out more calories. When cutting out calories here are our options
Take out carbs
Take out fats
Take out protein (as a last resort)
When we cut our calories, a good standard would be about 200 calories each drop. So like I used in my example earlier that would be 50 grams of carbs or about 22 grams of fats. You don’t have to exclusively subtract from just one, you can do a combination as well. Such as 25 grams of carbs and 11 grams of fats would equal our 200 calories (close enough). This is because
1 gram of carbohydrates = 4 calories
1 gram of fat = 9 calories
1 gram of protein = 4 calories
If you do ever decide to drop your protein, it should be after you have cut out a majority of your carbs and fats, and you will not be doing many more drops. When/If you do cut out protein, I would still recommend to keep your protein at a minimum of 1 gram per pound of bodyweight.
Once we know how many calories we want to drop, we can go into our calorie tracking app, and manually enter what our new calorie goal is. This will allow us to easily track and stay accountable to our new goal.
Now we obviously can’t continue to drop calories until our macros hit 0, this would be total starvation and our bodies would do some crazy stuff. So when we cut calories, there also has to be a stopping point.
If you are getting to a point of where you are eating 9 or calories per pound, you are dipping into some low numbers. An example of this would be a 155lb person eating 1395 calories per day. Eating in this much of a deficit would be more common for people training for a bodybuilding competition.
You should not have to drop calories every week. Hopefully you can go 2-3, or even more, weeks at a time when your current calorie level allows for you to lose fat. It all depends on where you start, how much weight you want to lose, and other genetic factors. As we get closer to hitting our minimum macro numbers we might not be at our goal bodyweight, or maybe when we get to those low calorie levels our bodies begin to fight us on our fat loss. This is totally normal, and it is our bodies adapting to our calorie restriction. Therefore we may have to do a reset, and allow for our bodies to recover from our fat loss phase for a short amount of time before we continue.
Reset:
To perform a reset we need to go to our handy calorie tracking app and access our profile. In our profile, rather than manually change our calories like we have been, we want to input our new weight that we are at, set our goal to maintain, and see what estimate we are given. The new calorie goal given will be a good maintenance level estimate and is what we are going to eat at for the next week. If you would like, you can stay on the conservative side and either round down to the nearest hundred calories or even just subtract 100 calories from that number. During this time, we also want to make sure our protein level is back up at 1.25 grams per pound. You can allot the remaining extra calories you have back to carbs and fats as you would like.
Example:
Fat Loss Current Calorie Goal 1600 Total: 155 grams of protein, 35 grams of fat, and 155 grams of carbohydrates.
Reset Calorie Goal: New App Estimation 2200 Calorie Goal: 185 protein, 65 grams of fat, 220 grams of carbohydrates. I may eat closer to 2000 calories to be on the conservative side.
By eating at a close estimate to our current maintenance level, it will allow for our bodies to realize we are feeding it again. Sometimes, not always, people may even experience additional weight loss during this period of increased calories.
After a week, or even two, we will start the cutting process all over again starting from our new maintenance level that we have been eating at. So it is back to our weekly assessments with our decision we have to make of either cutting more calories or eating the same for another week.
I wouldn’t recommend people to follow this process for more than six months at a time, and even this may be a little excessive. After a few months of dieting/cutting calories, resetting, then continuing to diet, our bodies really start to take a toll. So after dieting for a long period of time, we should eat at our maintenance for a few months. This will allow for our bodies to fully recover from our fat loss phase. After a few months of eating normally again, we can start the whole process over again if need be.
This may seem like a long process that takes a long time to see results, and that's because it is. But when you diet slowly like this, it actually makes it much easier for you to keep weight off. So the longer you diet like this, the easier it will be to maintain the body weight level you want. It also allows for us to become comfortable with how we look. Many time people fantasize about looking a certain way, when in reality it isn’t manageable or reasonable. When you spend the extra time to lose the weight in a healthy manner, you realize how comfortable you can actually be in your own skin. Back when I started bodybuilding I had the idea I was going to get to the point where I would be shredded all year long. Then after training for a few years and learning some of the basics to nutrition, I learned that it would be pretty difficult. So instead I started focusing on being healthy and being at a good bodyweight that allows for me build muscle effectively. Now my goal may be related to bodybuilding, but even if yours is to look good in a bathing suit for a vacation, or to be a weight that makes it easier to play with your kids… you have to make sure you are comfortable with you.
Some additional tips and tricks while dieting/cutting
Pick one day to eat at maintenance level. There is no need to do this, but you certainly can. I wouldn’t call it a cheat day, because this isn’t a day to binge and go crazy. Instead it is a day to take small break from the diet and replenish our bodies a little. I would try first dieting without doing this, then you can always implement it in later. And even though this should not hinder your fat loss, there is a chance it will not happen as quickly.
One thing you want to do all the time, but especially while dieting is ensure you are staying hydrated. I have a method that I like to use as a really simple guide. What I do is take my body weight, divide it in half, then drink that many ounces of water in a day. An example would be, I usually weigh around 155 lbs, so half of that is 77.5 (I would round to 80 to make it simple), so that means I would aim to drink 80 ounces of water in a day. This is a method I learned so long that I can’t even remember where I learned it, but I use it all the time and really like it because it is so simple.
Falling off track is something almost all of have face or will face when dieting. The most important thing is to not dwell on it, or allow it to make you spiral out of control. If you cave and have a cheat meal, don’t let it turn into a whole cheat day. And if you do have a bad day, don’t let it turn into a whole week. It’s kinda the mentality of, don’t slash the other three of your tires just because one has a flat. If you mess up, it is what it is, you just gotta keep moving forward.
So in this article I don’t talk about exercise along with dieting. I wrote the recommendations for this article under the assumption some sort of training regime is being followed. If you need help with setting up a training plan, all you have to do is go to one of my other articles to help get you all set up. But one thing people can do to burn a few extra calories, and help stimulate fat loss is extra cardio. This can be in the form of low intensity steady state (LISS), such as a brisk walk, bike ride, or using an elliptical on a low setting. Or high intensity interval training, which can be traditional interval training or something like tabata. The one thing to remember with cardio is it is easier to add in than take away, so you should not start doing a bunch all at once. Most people also only have so much time in the day, so it would really be hard to keep adding in more at a certain point. So I would recommend adding extra cardio in once your calories start to get low and you don’t want to take more food away quite yet. For LISS you can start as low as 15 minutes 3 times a week, and increase it in terms of days or add time in 15 minute intervals. For HITT, you would usually add full sessions, so with this as well start with maybe 2-3 times a week and add more days as you feel can be handled.
Losing fat is not an easy endeavor to take on. It is a long process that takes a lot of work and persistence. By doing it this way though, we drastically increase our chances for keeping the weight off and staying healthy. Hopefully this guide will also make it more manageable to accomplish. Just remember, living healthy is a marathon not a sprint. We want to live long happy lives, so a few months or even a year or two to reach our goals is nothing in terms of looking at the time span of our whole lives.