You type this term into Google and return over 6 million results. You don’t have time to devour all of that information, and I bet 90% of it says the same thing in a different way. However, I am going to cipher through the BS and tell you what you need to know to lose fat, not just weight.
Diet
There is only one way to lose weight, calories in have to be less than calories burned. You are just wasting your time if you spend hours in the gym and keep your eating habits absurd. The best way to determine what your diet should be like is to find your basil metabolic rate . That tells you how many calories that you need to eat to stay at the same weight.
Once you figure out what that is, decide how much weight you want to lose a week. For me, I wanted to lose very little weight a week to improve my chances of holding on to most of my muscle. So I decided to do 500 calories below my basil metabolic rate. Since there are 3500 calories in a pound, that would average out to me losing a pound a week based only on my diet. Now that you know how many calories to eat, you must decide when to eat them.
The most effective method to guarantee an active metabolism and muscle retention is to eat frequently. It is recommended to eat every 2-3 hours to ensure this. This averages out to be from 5-8 meals a day. I generally eat about 7 times in a given day. So I divided my new caloric intake (which was 2900 after subtracting 500 from my BMR) and came up with roughly 410 calories per meal. This is just an average, and you probably shouldn’t consume that much every meal, but instead prioritize your important meals (breakfast and post workout) to contain slightly more. For example, my breakfast usually came out to be about 600 calories, so my second and third meal is about 300 calories to accommodate the average. Now that you know how often to eat and when to eat, you need to know what macronutrients should be in your meals.
It is a good rule of thumb to increase your protein during cutting cycles for a few reasons. One is that you want to do your best to keep what muscle that you have, so you don’t want to have your body running in low supply of protein. Another is that it takes your body twice the amount of energy to metabolize protein as it does carbohydrates. I recommend that 40%, of your calories should come from protein (it usually comes out to be ~ 1.5g / lb of bodyweight).
Another important macronutrient to be in control over is your carbohydrates. The important thing to note here is that you should only consume your simple carbohydrates after you workout. All of your other carbohydrate sources should come from low GI foods such as fruits and vegetables (learn more about carbs in our article about Low Carb Diets). This will keep your energy levels stable throughout the day and keep you from craving food all day long. Some people drop a lot of carbohydrates for a cutting session, but I usually keep them as about 35% of my diet. One thing that you don’t want to happen when cutting is to have extremely low glycogen levels in your muscles. This is bad news because then your body burns muscle as an energy source. Carbohydrates quickly replenish these stores and save your muscle from catching the catabolism bug.
The last macronutrient left is fat. Believe it or not, fat helps to aid in losing weight. However, not all fats are created equally. The fats that we need in our diet are ones that contain Omega 3, 6, 9, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fats. These are the healthy fats for you and are found in foods like salmon, nuts, olive oil, flax seed, peanut butter and tuna. They are important for many different health benefits which include a healthy heart and brain functioning. I recommend that 25% of your diet come from these fat sources.
Really take a lot of time in developing a feasible diet based on these guidelines. Plan a day’s worth of meals that would meet these guidelines. Don’t worry about calorie counting to the exact number, but try to stay consistent and within limits. I find it better to plan your day’s meals ahead of time so that you aren’t making it up as you go along.
So now that we know how to eat, let’s plan our workouts to assist these goals.
