Approaching Fat Loss For Maximum Results
Step by Step Process For Highly Effective Fat Loss + Downloadable Diet Guide
Generally when I give advice I try to balance the fact of what is “optimal” on paper vs what is actually practical to your average everyday person who just wants to get fitter and healthier in general.
Today I won’t be balancing this, we are going to go over fat loss from the perspective of someone who will do whatever it takes to get the best result they can.
Not to say this won’t be beneficial to the more hobbyist in the gym, there will be great lessons, but we are approaching this as more of what a bodybuilder would do leading into a competition—because I’m currently in a competition prep and thought this would be interesting to go over.
Now you don’t need to be a bodybuilder or anything like that, this is just for those who are committed to dialing everything in to really take their results to the next level. While this would work for anyone, this is really for those who are in decent shape, 16-18% body fat MAYBE 20% max, that need/want to diet for 3-4 months to get very lean, talking getting into single digit body fat percentage.
The steps we’re going to talk about here assume on the basis this is not a prolonged fat loss period, the advice here is going to be slightly different than I’d give to someone who needs to lose 50-100bs.
Now that we’ve established the intent and who this is for, let’s jump into how I would approach this and what my guidance would be if you want to maximize fat loss while still promoting performance in the gym and making this as efficient as possible.
The Overarching Goal
Anyone can lose fat really fast by just eating a lot less food and turning up their expenditure through a bunch of exercise.
However, this can come at a great loss—that loss being muscle mass and strength, along with other things like poor moods and energy, and even as far as performance at work/business and strained relationships at an extreme level (this isn’t an exaggeration, I have seen it, lose energy and focus which hurts job performance, and become very moody and irritable which can hurt everyone around us we care about, I have literally seen breakups and marriage issues from this).
We aren’t going to do this, because quite frankly it’s dumb. Why would we spend all the time putting on muscle and building strength to sacrifice it when we could’ve just done it intelligently and, through all things considered with adherence and sustainability, done it in close to the same time + all while feeling much better?
At the end of the day, our aim here is very simple:
Lose fat at the most efficient rate we can while:
Maintaining as much muscle mass and strength as possible
Creating a sustainable practice we aren’t going to slip up on all the time slowing down and temporarily reversing progress (adding time)
Feel as good as we can even as we get very lean and energy starts taking a hit
Most importantly, doing this healthy, not in a way we are physically AND mentally/psychologically creating issues (i.e. bad relationships with food and even eating disorders in the worst case)
How we do this is simple, that is simple on paper, harder in practice, but still simple:
Creating enough of a caloric deficit where we are losing fat at the most efficient rate we can but enough that muscle mass and performance in the gym doesn’t suffer
Using various tools, not just diet, to help create this caloric deficit
Employing different dieting strategies that can provide us with physiological and psychological boosts as to keep us performing well in the gym and feeling mentally sane
The end result here becomes a place we are really happy to be at. We will look great because we will have the nice muscle definition and the illusion of being even bigger as getting lean does + knowing we did so without sacrificing any more of the muscle mass we worked so hard to put on than we need to.
The last line shouldn’t scare you, when we diet and get lean, it can be inevitable that with the weight lost, not all of it will be solely fat, unfortunately, some of this will likely be *some* muscle. Not a guarantee, but a reality in many cases. However this is normal, it’s to be expected anytime we diet hard, BUT by applying the basic laws and principles of physiology we can minimize this to the greatest extent we can and hopefully even avoid it.
I only add this because it would be intellectually dishonest to say “preserve all of our muscle mass” because we can be perfect with everything but that’s just how the body works, BUT when done right, it is negligible and won’t do any meaningful damage to our previous progress and hard work.
This is why it’s important to do this intelligently and not try to rush this through more extreme and aggressive methods.
Anyway, I digress, let’s really break this down into the specifics.
The Intangibles
Before even diving into this, to avoid this from becoming a 10,000-word post instead of 5,000, let’s set some intangibles—some ground rules that won’t change.
Essentially, when it comes to setting up your diet, just follow this diet guide I set up:
Ignore the section on cutting, as this advice is more specific/less general so it’s different, but this is it, this is how we should be dieting in general from a macronutrient, micronutrient, hydration, TDEE, etc.
I will add that if you want to eat 1-1.5g of protein per pound of bodyweight, go for it if that helps you feel more full and keeps gym performance high. The extra protein can help you feel more full as well as improve hunger hormone signalling.
If you don’t feel like downloading for whatever reason, the TLDR is:
1g of protein per pound of bodyweight
At least .2g-.3g of fat per pound of bodyweight
30-40% protein, 30-40% carb, 20-30% fat macronutrient breakdown is usually good if you’re too lazy to actually do the specific numbers (I like 40-40-20 or 30-40-30)
Eat mostly nutrient dense whole foods to ensure you’re getting enough micronutrients
Flexibility is fine but limit it to at least 80% whole foods and 20% others
Aim for at least a gallon of water a day or use the rule of thumb of 2/3 of your bodyweight in ounces for daily fluid intake
Active people and people who eat mostly whole foods need to make sure they’re getting enough salt because salt is crucial for hydration and gym performance
If you train first thing in the AM (no meals yet), utilizing things like Essential Amino Acids (EAA’s)with Highly Branched Cyclic Dextrin (HBCD, a Carb Powder) can alleviate the negatives of training fasted by reducing muscle catabolism and putting you into an anabolic state.
PRIORITIZE PROTEIN AND DON’T EAT LESS THAN YOU SHOULD IF YOU WANT TO PRESERVE YOUR MUSCLE
These things remain constants, these are not variables that will change pretty much regardless if you want to cut, bulk, maintain, or even crossfit I guess.
Before moving onto the next section, it is assumed you will have an idea of what your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) is of which we will base our caloric deficit from, it is shown how to get this number in the guide, but to save you time, use this link to get a very accurate estimate: https://www.damnripped.com/tdee-calculator/
Now, onto things I haven’t written or talked about 10,000 times on the internet:
Step 1: Our Initial Caloric Deficit
This is our first step to begin this process and won’t differ much from what you’ve already read from me.
If we characterize caloric deficit, it would look like:
<300 calories would be very conservative and would yield around half a pound of fat loss a week, but we have very little wiggle room, a single day of just being less active, let’s say 5000 steps instead of 10,000 could offset the deficit.
300-500 calorie deficit would be mildly conservative, we could expect half a pound to a pound of fat lost a week and we have a little more wiggle room. This is a very good general place to aim for in terms of sustainability and promoting muscle preservation and performance in the gym.
500-750 calorie deficit would be right in the middle between conservative and aggressive, we could expect to burn 1-1.5lbs of fat a week. At this level we are likely still doing a good job persevering muscle mass and performance in the gym + in general sustainability will still be good, we just might end up hungrier at times.
750-1000 calorie deficit is aggressive, it would be the maximum level of deficit I would suggest for extended periods, we would be burning around 1.5-2lbs of fat a week. At this level we still should be persevering muscle mass for the most part but are nearing levels where this could be an issue, especially if smaller/less total daily calorie demands.
>1000 calorie deficit is not a good place to go for any extended period of time, while you’d be losing more than 2lbs a week, this is going to risk muscle mass and we can run into all the issues described earlier. Happens every now and then? Fine. You try to do this for 3-4 months, I suspect negatives on many levels.
Now, what is best for you?
This will depend on a few different criteria like how lean or not we are starting out, how long we plan on dieting and to what level of leanness, and what our relative size is in terms of weight and total daily energy expenditure.
In general, the less time you need to spend dieting to get to your goal, the more aggressive you can be which will allow us to spend less time in the deficit which means we can enter another growth phase or just maintain where we are for as long as you want to.
If you are on the higher body fat side and will need to spend more time in the deficit, then we want to hedge our bets on creating a more conservative, not totally but more, so we aren’t risking loss of mass and performance and not becoming so hungry over time we are having trouble sticking with diet.
Also, if we are smaller in bodyweight and/or our totally daily caloric expenditure (how many calories we can eat) a day is low, say 2500 calories for an example, going into a aggressive deficit, say 750 calories, can be rough as we’re not only at 1750 calories a day which may or may not be fine, but something to consider if this seems too low for you.
In general, another good rule of thumb is we can safely lose up to around 1% of our total estimated lean body mass per week before risking muscle loss, for a 180lbs man at 15% body fat this is 1.5lbs a week or roughly 750 max daily caloric deficit before muscle loss can become a real threat.
In the context of everything here and the goal of this post, I’ll say that a deficit of around 500-750 calories a day is a very good place to be at in general, however if you feel you are in a place where slightly, and I say SLIGHTLY, more is appropriate as you’ll be in and out quick, then go for. Same goes if you feel going a tad slower, around 500 calories would be my aim here.
I’ll put this more clear, for the average person with a decent build (beyond newbie gains because if you’re still in newbie gains then just focus on a recomp while it’s still possible) who is around 15-18% body fat who only needs 12-16 weeks to reach low double digits or even single digit body fat percentages that a 500-750 calorie deficit is my recommendation—not too aggressive, not too conservative, right in that happy medium, I’d go as far to even say 600-750 is a better aim.
Step 2: Creating That Caloric Deficit
Typically the first, and often only, place people think of to create a caloric deficit is immediately to lower caloric intake, which is logical and likely the best place to start but it is far from the only place we can create a caloric deficit from.
Now, getting started into a deficit, diet is the easiest place to go as it’s the one variable we can be more sure of so cutting the initial 500-750 calories here first is usually the smarter option.
Now we can go ahead and create say 400-500 calories from diet and then add 250-300 calories from expenditure like cardio, but this can be hard to dial in right away because it is less definite and has more variables than diet does.
To kick this off, just calculate your TDEE if you’re not already aware of where that is, and subtract whatever number you decided to go with. For this example I’ll use 600 calorie daily deficit because that’s what I did this cut. My TDEE was around 3300 calories so I just took 3300 minus 600 to give me a daily caloric intake goal of 2700 calories. In theory this should give me around 1.2lbs of fat lost a week, but it likely won’t be this exact and will look very drastic the first couple weeks which brings me to our next step that comes into play to help ensure we are on the right track—not going too aggressive or conservative.
Now, this is where an important step comes in because we are going to want to standardize variables like daily activity, cardio, etc. so we know what levers/variables we can manipulate as our diet goes on to ensure we keep making consistent progress and don’t stall.
Step 3: Standardizing Our Fat Loss Variables
Because our daily caloric expenditure can vary wildly depending on what our day to day looks like, we want to create an environment where this is more predictable and standardized so we can then use these different variables as tools to keep fat loss coming.
What you’re going to do is create some type of system of daily goals for these variables and try to make sure everyday looks at least similar:
Daily Steps Goal, my suggestion is start around 7000 if you are below that number on average, or 10,000 if you’re above and make sure you reach that number but try not to go too far over. If so doesn’t matter, we just want to have a standardized daily/weekly average.
Cardio Goal, if this is at zero, fine for now as zero is definitely an easy number to account for and can only be added on to
Of course Calorie Intake, probably didn’t need to say this but it’s very important
Make sure we’re getting to the gym the exact number of days we plan to because say we plan for 5 but only go 3, that starts to add up to a lot of calories we won’t be burning this week
Really the big 3 are caloric intake, daily activity/steps, and cardio as these are going to be the main movers we can manipulate to keep fat loss going. We just want to create the same conditions so we can plan and adapt properly to ensure we are losing fat at the right rate.
Now it’s important to have these standardized for other reasons as well—in the beginning you are likely going to see massive weight changes, this will be things like water, glycogen, and even some inflammation (if going from a less healthy diet to a healthier one) drop which can cause big fluctuations on the scale.
This is normal and will level off after the first full week into the second week, so as the next couple weeks go on, we get a more accurate look at what rate the weight is coming off of us. We want to make sure the other variables are standardized and accounted for so we know if our deficit is where we want it to be and not too aggressive or too conservative.
A key tip here is to weigh yourself at the same time, same state (fasted without water, preferably after you use the restroom upon waking), and even after the same type of diet the nights prior as if we had a ton more carbs than usual then it’s not surprising if we are up a bunch of weight because carboHYDRATES store water. Should go without saying but doing this after a cheat meal or refeed day isn’t smart, again we want to recreate similar conditions to get accurate data.
Step 4: Assessing Progress
At least 1 time a week, usually a Monday morning is where it naturally and logically happens, you will weigh yourself and even take a picture in the mirror (same mirror, same lighting, you’re seeing a theme here) to compare the weeks to each other.
Write this down and keep track of it somewhere so we can reference week to week.
This is where we will assess how things are going and what changes to make. Again, the first couple weeks this will be all over the place, but as things begin to normalize, this will paint the picture of where we are.
Now, let’s say you’ve created a 600 calorie deficit which should mean 1.2lbs of fat lost a week and all your variables are standardized, but the scale keeps going down only .5lbs or on the other end 2-3lbs a week, then we might need to make a change. (If you’re losing like 1-1.5lbs a week when it should be 1.2lbs, relax, this is fine, it’s why we give ourselves some margin of error and this is still a good rate for fat loss).
If you’re the latter and weight loss is coming rapidly, as great as this might seem it could be a sign we are being too aggressive. In this case I would add 200-300 calories a day into my diet and see what happens, I would keep doing this until the scale starts resembling more of what it should be to ensure you’re not dieting too hard and risking muscle loss. Now we don’t *have* to do this if we still feel great—not excessively hungry, our lifts aren’t suffering, etc.—but if they are then definitely take this approach (also, this advice as mentioned in the beginning is tailored towards people in more normal shape, if you’re overweight or obese then seeing big weight loss will happen and this wouldn’t be stellar advice as long as it’s not too excessive and you experience the negatives I stated here).
Now if you’re the former and weight isn’t coming off as fast as it’s supposed to be then we need to assess if we need to make some changes. This means lower calories, right? Not necessarily. We can if you prefer to, but I prefer to keep my caloric intake as high as I can during a cut for mental sanity and gym performance that more food gives you. But the deficit has to come from somewhere, right? So this is where we can start looking at things like adding maybe 2000-2500 steps a day to our step count or even adding a few sessions of cardio in a week.
A major key here is “minimum effective dose”, we aren’t going to add 5000 steps a day or 5, 45 minute cardio sessions in just because our progress is slower than we want. We want to get the most out of the least so start with lower added daily activity/steps with like 2000 steps a day or add 3, 20 minute cardio sessions in, or if you prefer and can go without as much food drop caloric intake 200-300 calories. Whatever it is, do small and add small until you’re back at the rate of progress you want.
We only have a finite amount of changes we can make—food can only go so low, we can only practically walk so much during the day, and we don’t want to do a marathons worth of cardio a day. For this reason you want to milk each small change for as much as you can before looking to change more variables. If you start to fast then you are exhausting the tools at your disposal.
This process will keep going on and on and on until you are at your goal.
Step 5: Manipulating Diet For Better Results
There is really not much to do after Step 4 as that is the name of the game—tweaking our caloric intake and expenditure until we get where we want, or in Army speak “improvise, adapt, and overcome”.
As things keep rolling and you keep losing weight, we can experiment with some different strategies combined with manipulating the variables I mentioned above to keep progress coming.
One of these things is I suggest having a refeed day once every 7-10 days once we have gotten beyond the initial fluctuation stages and know where we are at/have a better idea what our true TDEE and deficit are.
On this day you will simply bump your calories up to maintenance by increasing your carb intake. We can even look to slightly lower fat to around .1-.15g per pound of bodyweight while increasing our carbs to maintenance (use your estimated TDEE calculations based on the progress you’re seeing or if you want to be lazy just take your bodyweight in pounds times 14-15 and eat that in calories).
What this will do is replenish the body, namely muscle glycogen, which is carbs/glucose stored in muscle that muscles use for fuel. This can do a few things:
Make our muscles look full and much better through not just replenishing glycogen back to normal levels but rather because we will have supercompensation of glycogen, holding more than we usually do as a natural defense mechanism of being depleted.
This can take subcutaneous water (ugly kind under our skin) and draw it from subcutaneous areas into the muscle because all the carbs (glycogen) stored will bind to that water (1g of glycogen uses 3-4g of water) and by doing so can make you look MUCH better and leaner because subcutaneous water can make us look fatter than we are.
It can help preserve and spare muscle mass as depleted glycogen stores put us in a state where we are more prone to muscle loss + it can help improve performance in the gym which is also important for preserving muscle mass.
Now, the reason we keep fat lower and don’t want many calories coming from fat is because all the extra calories from carbs are at virtually no risk of being stored or slowing down process due to the fact they will go to replenish muscle glycogen + the fact that carbs are not likely to undergo de novo lipogenesis, meaning those carbs being converted and stored as fat.
So if fat is lower and not the main increase in calories, we won't store any fat at all, likely, and will likely even still achieve fat loss this day, but at the very minimun do zero harm to progress even with the big increase in food.
I prefer this over a cheat meal as it’s actually beneficial while still providing the mental relief, however if you must insist, then we can just call this 1 cheat meal (not day, meal) every 7-10 days.
Now another tool we can use is a concept called carb cycling. There are many ways to do this, linked here, but the one I want to bring up is the concept of reducing calories by around 200 calories via reducing carbs on our rest days to compensate for the fact we aren’t working out and burning those calories that day.
This is not necessary, but as we look for new tools to keep fat loss going, this can be a relatively simple change that can help keep the progress coming along. Instead lowering our weekly food or adding in expenditure, this can be an intermediary solution to see if it can keep us at our desired rate.
Step 6: ??? Profit? (I hope you got the meme reference)
So after we apply all these variables to keep our fat loss going at the rate we want, inevitably (hopefully) we reach our end goal, whatever they may have been.
As you get to this goal, we now face a question of “now what?” which is a question with many answers.
While this can be a good time to actually jump right back into a surplus and grow as we can take advantage of the “rebound effect” because our bodies are primed like a sponge to soak up the extra food and grow (due to things like increased insulin sensitivity), some people might want to stick around and enjoy where they are and maintain that for however long they please, and for others they may need to do a very controlled, reverse out of the deficit to avoid going off the rails and eating everything that exists because their hunger hormones are out of whack.
This becomes a matter of your goals and what you want to do next, I cannot answer this for you. This also comes down to knowing yourself, if you know you’re going to struggle with overeating all the time if you go from a restricted place to total freedom, then something like a reverse diet is very smart, even for those who don’t have this issue but want to maintain where they are this is a good idea too.
The key here is to have a good plan because you do not want to work this hard to get this lean just to throw it all away because you had zero plan. Left to our own devices it typically becomes a place where we eat whatever we want because we’re always hungry, we don’t realize we are gaining weight because it happens gradually, quickly, but gradually, then by the time we realize we’re starting to gain too much fat it can be too late.
Ideally you will start by gradually eating more food, gradually reducing the amount of daily activity/steps you’ve added, and gradually reduce cardio until you’re back to levels that you want to sustain or support your next goal.
It is okay to spend some time returning to homeostasis, maintaining where you are, and not rushing into another bulk or whatever. You do not have to rush from cut to bulk and back all the time, it is not illegal to enjoy some time where you’re happy at.
Additional Steps:
As you have come to see, fat loss is literally just a game of having a decided outcome/rate of fat loss, creating the conditions to achieve that, then manipulating the variables that create these conditions as needed to keep fat loss consistent and moving forward.
While we covered the big ones, let’s look at some additional levers and tools we can play with to make this happen even better.
One key note to consider is that in terms of training, as we start to get deeper and deeper into our diet, we might have to slightly reduce our volume to allow adequate recovery to keep happening.
While the key is to keep training very hard and to fight like hell to not lose any reps or need to decrease weight on any exercises because the same training that put on the muscle is the same training that will force us to try to keep it (reduce the stimulus too much and your body will be like “wait, why do we need to carry all this energy expensive tissue, we aren’t even really using as much anymore”), the reality is we will likely need to make some changes.
Training Techniques
A place to start is by dropping any intensity techniques like drop sets we might be doing as these create additional recovery demands as they are taking your muscles beyond normal failure, so they won’t be serving us any real advantages.
We can also look to swap out some of the exercises that are less safe and/or more fatiguing than others with movements that are safer with better stimulus to fatigue ratios. As you get more and more depleted/fatigued as you diet, risk of injury goes up as well, so we need to be cognizant of this.
Now back to the more fat loss side of things.
Supplements
Another set of tools we can consider as we get leaner and leaner is utilizing supplements like thermogenics to help aid us along the way. Thermogenics are what are otherwise known as “fat burners” which get a bad rap but actually can have some uses if we are completely dialed in and starting to push fat loss to greater levels.
Now, for the most part what makes these things work is caffeine as it gives us energy, which we are typically lacking as we go deeper into our diet, and because we are lower on energy because we’ve been in a literal energy (calorie) deficit for a while.
We naturally burn less energy through subconsciously doing less and less things (things like slouching more, sitting more, not getting animated, etc.) throughout the day to try to preserve energy (your body doesn’t know you’re trying to get shredded, it lowkey thinks you’re starving and dying and wants to avoid that).
This is where caffeine can actually become a great “fat burner” because if it gives you more energy it will overcompensate this and you’ll be increasing the part of your TDEE called NEAT. Caffeine also increases things called catecholamines (epinephrine and norepinephrine) which can help aid in fat loss. This is not to say this effect is huge, but as you get deeper into a diet, you’ll take whatever help you can get.
While still remaining on the “light side” aka “things you can buy at GNC not the Dark Web”, we have things like yohimbine that also influence catecholamines, specifically the ones associated with more stubborn fat areas(alpha-2 adrenergic receptors). Again, not a drastic effect but it can potentially help.
Something to consider is many, many people don’t handle things like yohimbine well so this is not a recommendation but rather bringing up the point that there are things out there that can potentially aid us in fat loss that you can research (I’ve written about many things on my Substack) and make informed decisions, SAFELY.
Within the supplement world we can also look for things to help with fat loss by making us less hungry—appetite suppressants.
Caffeine/coffee actually fills this role too, as do many stimulant type compounds, but there are things out there that we can safely use to help blunt appetite as well. Take this for what it’s worth, we have things from as simple as yerba mate, green tea, coffee, to things like nicotine, all the way to things like semaglutide or other compounds.
I’m not telling you what to take or to take anything, just providing things people can do to improve the process (personally I shy away from things outside coffee and nicotine being my worst which I don’t suggest starting just to lose fat, but alas I’m just here to call it how it is, we have many tools depending on your risk/experimental framework).
Diet Tips
Stepping away from supplements, as you get nearer to the end, things get worse, it is what it is. Feeling hungry and tired at times is the price you pay when getting very lean in a prolonged deficit. Likely you will need to find some type of diet relief that can help bring some sanity. This is where things like low calorie popcorn, different low calorie snacks, very high volume foods, and things like diet soda come into play big time.
Consult this for a bunch of different ideas:
This one is actually my favorite “hack” of all time:
Realistically, your diet is going to naturally end up very clean and healthy because ironically clean, healthy whole foods are more satiating and filling than anything else (probably a lesson there…). Things like chicken, lean beef, potatoes, greek yogurt, certain fruits, vegetables, egg whites, and other high volume/low calorie foods are fantastic for letting us eat a lot more than otherwise more calorically dense foods.
In general, spreading your meals out as much as it makes sense and still allows satisfying portion is small, for this reason + other aspects like muscle growth/recovery/performance I like to spread this out into 4-6 meals. I find if I try to do less but bigger meals it can trigger a binge in some people. It’s nice to have more meals to look forward and more frequently to mentally push through.
At the end of the day, find the system that works for you, but ensure that you’re fueled properly and hydrated around your workouts + hitting your protein requirement daily + adhering to a proper caloric deficit and not trying to rush it by being super aggressive because that = preventing anything more than negligible muscle and strength loss.
Lifestyle
Wrapping this up, I will emphasize the fact that you should develop a routine and structure to your day that works completely for you rather than against you. This is the concept of Lifestyle Design:
This is one of my better, more useful posts if you have not read it. This is the one I get the most “thank you” emails from. It is simple, yet profound because so many people realize they are reactive, not proactive with their lifestyle/schedule.
You should try to fit things into a way in your day that it adds nearly zero conflict or really any extra time, things like walking during phone calls to increase daily activity/reach steps goal, watching/listening whatever entertaining stuff you do while doing cardio, etc.
Make fitness fit into your life, not the other way around. It is supposed to improve and enhance our lives, not become your life.
Putting It All Together
I’ve pretty much spilled my brain out onto paper on this one. This is probably my longest ever email and taken me the longest to write because I wanted to leave zero stones unturned.
These are the answers to the test.
Like I said in the beginning, this is exact playbook I use as a competitive bodybuilder to get extremely lean. This isn’t just my findings, this is from learning, coaching, and experience from countless other bodybuilders and fitness professionals I have worked with, been coached by, or just consume their content.
Also like I said in the beginning, the target audience is for the gym bro beyond newbie gains who wants to spend 3-4 months to go from the upper end of what is remotely fit/healthy (15-20%) body fat to lean, very lean (5-12%) pushing into single digit body fat lean if you so desire to push there (can be a great learning experience and challenge, but there is no need to get below 8ish percent body fat if you’re not competing, doing a photoshoot, or just sick in the head… 9-11% is a great spot where you look great, most non-bodybuilders/normal people would call you shredded, and you can actually reverse diet into a maintenance phase and maintain for long periods without feeling horrible and tanking your testosterone).
With that said, anyone can learn from this, even complete beginners because many things here are timeless principles that simply work. The specifics like what size deficit and other nuances might not apply, but the overarching themes of adapting and adjusting until you’re getting the results you want, getting the most results from the least, aiming to make your fat loss as seamless as we can, and other process-oriented principles that apply to everyone.
The concept here is simple: find the right deficit, set up your diet to try to achieve this, standardize as much as you can to have control of the variables, adjust and adapt to get in the deficit/rate of fat loss you want, use the tools at your disposal to make your time easier, and rinse and repeat until you’re where you want to be.
I won’t lie, this simple concept can be VERY hard in practice, but you found yourself on this weird side of the internet which means you’re serious, so I have faith in you.
- Ox
DISCLAIMER
This is not Legal, Medical, or Financial advice. Please consult a medical professional before starting any workout program, diet plan, or supplement protocol. These are opinions from a Cartoon Ox.
Just wanted to say that everything in this article is 100% true. :) Great guide.
really 💯💯💯