Losing “weight” effectively

Losing weight, well, that’s an ambiguous term. It doesn’t really specify your goals efficiently. What are you trying to do? Lose muscle mass? Not retain as much water? Lose fat free mass? It’s probably the end one isn’t it? So the correct terminology is losing fat free mass and not weight.

Why is this article here?

I have seen countless people losing weight incorrectly. They pile on everything at once and wonder why it doesn’t work. They throw in insane gym sessions lasting hours, long sessions of cardio, fat burners, cut carbs amongst other things in an attempt to shed the fat. At the time this seems the correct way to do it, until you burn out. As you are putting your body under this much stress at once it is inevitable that you will burn out and start binging again which is basically a yo yo diet. By doing something like this you will actually gain more weight than when you started because you’ve effectively slowed your metabolism down when you dieted and then during an unhealthy binge session you start piling on the weight as your body just stores all of the extra fat that’s going in. It’s a survival mechanism. You’ve basically starved your body so much that when you reefed it takes in everything it can as it thinks you may go through another stage like that.

On top of what was previously said you will be psychologically drained. If you’ve taken your sugars out and really downed your carbs there will not be much glycogen in your muscles so you will feel heavy and tired along with not being able to exercise at a good intensity. You will also lose strength so you’re muscles will start to decline in size which is very unhealthy. You may even start overtraining leading to actually hurting yourself also which will mean you would have to take time out. This is due to your body being in a very catabolic state putting you in a vulnerable position.

Why listen to what I have to say?

Now as you’re reading this article, you obviously want to lose some fat free mass, and I don’t know what your specific goals are but losing some of this fat will be within in it. You’ve probably read through hundreds of articles on how to do this, you’ve definitely seen fad diets around claiming you can get thin in 31 one days and blah blah blah. So with in this in mind why trust my opinion? Well I’m not going to bore you with my qualifications and all of that but I’m going to base everything you’re reading here on my personal experiences. So I’m not regurgitating information I’ve found from unreliable sources on the Internet but my actual first hand experience of my experience of weight loss. Now what works for me may not work for you, that’s a given but hopefully this insight on how to fat effectively and correctly will set you on the right road.

Last year I competed in a competition. It was imperative that got to a low percentage of body fat while at the same time keeping my strength and muscle size. This is possible, why do you think you see all of thee massive bodybuilders about with incredibly low percentages of body fat? It is mainly down to correct dieting and training. Leading in from my competition then… I had a certain time frame to compete this task so again it was at the up most importance that I didn’t do much wrong to hinder my results.

Now you know I was doing this for a competition. You may read this and take it on board for your competition or you may just want to fit into that next trouser size, or look better in a t-shirt for example. You need to understand that whatever the case we are manipulating our bodies and it will change. It will change as you’re going to be increasing your energy output while decreasing your energy input, in normal words you will be doing more exercise with eating less food.  So as we are changing our bodies through a diet it soon becomes the start of you changing your lifestyle. The diet is just a catalyst to get you started and then when you’re eating healthily its no longer a diet; it’s just a habit, a healthy habit.

Lets get started. The main steps.

 Step one: Macros

What we need to do is firstly calculate your macronutrient intake. By finding what we put into our bodies we can precisely cut things out so to reach out goals.

We need to know how much carbs, protein and fat we are putting into our bodies. This way we can weigh out food precisely as the calculation gives us exactly what our bodies need. Once the macros have been calculated you have to split these up into each meal you are going to have. It is good have meals little and often as you can always top yourself up. Remember this as it comes into play a lot more during the end weeks of your diet.  In issue 1 there was an article explaining macronutrients so give that a look to get started! It is very complicated to explain but essential to reaching your goals.

Step two: Timings

Secondly, what you need to get your head around is timings. Timings in this game are fundamental. Start you cardio to early you may hinder results. Cut your carbs to quickly and you may experience over training and negative psychological effects which will again slow down your progress. So what I mean by timings is when to have your meal within the day such as 2 or 3 hours separated alongside effectively planning when to cut things out and put things in.

Step three: Plan ahead

So now we have a grasp on timings what you need to do is plan ahead. You can’t plan the whole diet of course as you don’t know what your body will do as the weeks go on.  Make a little table for yourself to follow, something to follow is easier than making it up in your head as you go along. As we have already calculated our macros, as this was the first step you can write down the exact amount of grams for each meal meaning you just have to refer back to it if you ever get a bit lost.  Make sure you put your times in here too so for example: meal one at 8am meal two at 10am etc etc. You’ll soon remember the times you can have a meal but the initial change from eating what you want to actually setting out a timetable is a struggle.

These are my top tips. I know it’s only three but calculating your macros, timings and planning ahead is it really. It’s that simple. These are very broad statements, it’s obvious that you will need to exercise and eat good foods to help you lose weight and that is widely known which is why I haven’t talked about it. I’m addressing the issue of how people go about it to lose the most amount of weight in the safest way.

Example: Case study

Now we know all of this information lets put it into a little case study. Firstly we have calculated all of our macros and have decided to have 7 meals a day. We have set a plan out and decided on what times to eat. The first week into this cut and weight has been lost. As the weight is dropping nothing needs to change. Lets fast forward another week but the weight has stayed the same this time so now we add in a little low intensity cardio at the end of your work out as you will be in a fasted state which is optimal for burning fat.  When your weight stops going down again we will increase this cardio, not the intensity but the time. For example 20mins will increase to 30mins. Another stop in weight will result in some fasted cardio in the morning. Now can you see what is happening? You are eating the same amount of food but you are just increasing the exercise so weight will continue dropping off. Once cardio has reached around 45minutes to an hour for the morning and after training we will need to start looking at the food situation.

This is where the carbs will start to be cut BUT WE GRADUALLY TAKE THEM OUT.  In each meal I remember I had around 40g of carbs for each meal until 6pm (which was my carb cut off). So simply I took out 20g of out of one meal, which wasn’t my morning, pre or post training meal. After another decline in weight loss all of the carbs will come out of this meal. Further on from this I would start gradually taking carbs out of other meals until only my morning, pre and post work out carbs were left.  Another weight plateau would then lead to gradually pulling back these carbs too. This is where life gets a little hard.  Only because the decrease in food will result in you feeling hungry due to the exercise still staying at this high intensity. Now to give myself a little edge when I was losing weight I used fat burners on top of this just to spike my metabolism to get everything running a little quicker but this was only added in at the very end. 

Lets conclude

Can you see that from all of these steps we have lost fat in the most comfortable way? By doing this I got to low numbers of body fat while still retaining my strength and muscle size. I completed all of these steps in 12 weeks so don’t be mistaken; it’s not something you throw in all in a few weeks. By gradually doing this and pulling things back in your diet and gradually increasing your energy output you are allowing your body to adjust to what is happening to it.  This means you will not experience mind numbing hunger or insane tiredness as you are bringing everything back slowly. And by pulling things back step by step you are constantly changing what happens to your body so this means it cannot adapt fully to what you’re doing to it so you will keep losing weight.  I hope this helps you guys, try my tips out and see how it helps.

Client of mine who participated in my 8wk fat loss programme