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Weight loss is not what you really want
When I talk to a new client about their fitness goals, the number one goal is almost always weight loss. In the age of sedentary lifestyle and availability of cheap and unhealthy food, most people lose control over their body composition. However, body composition and body weight are two different things. In reality, your weight doesn’t really matter. The only thing that matters is the proportion between your lean mass and fat. So your real goal is a fat loss rather than weight loss. Losing fat while gaining muscle is the best gift you can give your body, and it will not necessarily result in any weight loss. In fact, some people gain weight while losing fat, and believe me - they are happy. The reason being is that you are actually more concerned about your health, size of your clothes and the look in the mirror, and rightfully so. Relating this directly to bodyweight is a common mistake. I did it myself years ago. Before becoming an athlete and a personal trainer, I was just an average IT guy, “overweight” by common definition and by BMI charts (body mass index, the world’s worst approach to assess your body composition situation). I was unhealthy and definitely didn’t enjoy my look in the mirror, to say the least. One day I decided to get better and find a way to transform myself. Guess what, in the first year of transformation my pants size changed from 36 to 30, looking in the mirror in the morning felt great and my blood work was perfect rising eyebrows of my primary care doctor. Did I lose weight though? Nope. My bathroom scale was showing about the same number as before, but I didn’t care about it anymore. My body composition monitor was showing normal body fat, which was way more important. Since then I went through additional cycles of fat loss that resulted in even lower body fat with overall lower weight as well. So depends on your initial situation and the approach to fat loss, you can lose, maintain or even gain weight and any of these are normal as long as the other parameters that really matter are what you want them to be.
Fat loss philosophy
Fat loss is all about creating a caloric deficit. No matter what your diet is - low fat, low carb, vegan, even intermittent fasting - you will lose weight only if you create a caloric deficit. There is no magic solution to it. I’d love to tell you that I found a way to do it effortlessly, but unfortunately, there is none. Anyone saying different is a liar. It also works in the opposite direction - if you are in a caloric deficit you will lose weight no matter what you do. If your deficit is high, you will lose weight faster, but along with losing fat, you will also lose muscle that in the long run will slow down your fat loss (I will explain it more in-depth in one of the paragraphs below). It’s also rarely sustainable since it will make you feel hungry and at some point, you will simply break and regain back all of your fat, potentially with some extra.
As for various dietary approaches - Keto for losing is not better than Paleo, WFPB or any other diet of your choice. All the fad around choosing the “right diet” for losing weight is just nonsense and marketing games. The truth is fairly simple - you can use any diet of your choice to lose weight (health benefits of various diets is a different story though). If you are in deficit you will. In surplus, you will put pounds on. Eat just enough and you will maintain your current weight. End of story. Once you have internalized these foundational facts the most important question to ask is: how do I know how many calories are “deficit” for me?
How to establish a proper caloric deficit
First of all, what “deficit” is? It’s fairly simple actually - it’s a negative energy difference between your intake (what you eat) and expenditure (what you burn). For successful fat loss, it’s crucial to understand that for most of us what we eat is the biggest contributor to that and should not be overlooked.
Here is why what you eat is typically a bigger contributor of all: think about putting just two tablespoons of olive oil on your salad and your caloric intake immediately increased by 240 kcal. You probably know how hard you need to exercise to burn it and how much time you have to spend doing that while eating it takes one second and zero effort and can happen multiple times a day. Given you do repeat it a few times a day, each time with another innocent, but calorie-dense food and you will need to burn anywhere from 600 to over a thousand calories extra. In theory, it is possible, but unfortunately absolutely impractical for most people. It would be so much easier to control your intake instead.
The expenditure, or “what you burn” part deserves an explanation too. It consists of two components. The first is your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) or, simply put, what your body burns at rest within 24 hours, The second is the extra calories your body needs to perform normal daily activities including any kind of exercise. BMR is strictly based on your lean body mass, in other words on the weight of your muscles only (I will have a separate article on that). The more muscles you have, the more calories you burn at rest (this is one of the reasons why strength training is as important for weight loss as cardio). Typically BMR is a bigger number than what you can practically burn exercising. What you burn during exercise can be only roughly estimated based on activity type, intensity, duration, and body weight. You can also try using stuff like smartwatches or other heart rate monitors but while they might be somewhat reliable for cardiovascular activities, the error for strength training is typically too big. Anyway, it’s not absolutely necessary since there are practical ways to figure this stuff out that I highly recommend. One approach that always works:
know what you eat. Install a calorie tracker that is easy to use and has an inclusive nutritional database of most commercially available products, a full history of the products you typically use, recipe and meal recorder and other options to reuse info. Meticulously record everything you eat, at least for the first couple of weeks.
track your weight or better, body composition (how to monitor body composition) to see the trend.
establish a baseline based on the information above and come up with what a potential deficit looks like. Use your estimated BMR (how to estimate BMR) and your estimated energy expenditure based on your activity for that purpose. The combination of the two gives you an estimate of maintenance calories (daily amount of calories to maintain your current weight).
don’t expect it to precise, because it’s a rough estimate. Only in rare cases, using professional-grade body composition monitors that estimate your BMR pretty accurately (which is expensive and not very accessible for most people), plus having a good idea of your caloric expenditure you will get it relatively close right away. Otherwise, use your guesstimate to make the first attempt to create your caloric deficit. I recommend starting with no more than 200-300 kcal a day if muscle loss is a concern (and it should be unless you are severely overweight), you can try up to 500 kcal if you feel really adventurous. Just subtract it from your presumed calories for maintenance and you are good to go.
plan your meals based on your estimated number of calories. Establish proper daily macros (carbs, protein, and fat) that will provide both caloric and nutritional needs. There are different opinions about choosing proper macros, I personally recommend the following approach (read here) which is efficient and also doesn’t fight your physiology, unlike some others. Using a tracking app as a planner also helps. I normally put all I am planning to eat starting with breakfast and see how my macros behave so I can change and rebalance everything as needed, so no surprises when I eat. It’s especially useful when you plan on changes in your normal meals or eating out at night. Knowing what you are going to eat throughout the day really helps to keep things under control.
monitor your body weight and/or body composition changes over the course of one week. Since your body weight may fluctuate significantly based on hydration levels, sodium intake, the emptiness of your stomach and other factors that are impossible to precisely control so I weigh in every day to watch the trend to be sure.
based on the results adjust your caloric intake and macros accordingly. For sustainable loss and muscle preservation, you should not see more than 1 pound (or about 0.5 kg) weight loss a week. If you use any kind of body composition monitoring methods you should see your fat mass going down while muscle mass is either stable or ideally slightly increased (this can happen only if you do some strength training). If you didn’t lose weight go ahead and reduce your intake by another 200-300 kcal a day and monitor for another week. Repeat until you have achieved the desired weight loss speed. If this approach stops working before you achieved your target weight, make the same adjustments again until you reach your goal. From that point, you are in maintenance so your caloric intake should go up slightly (about 200 kcal) which is just enough to maintain your target weight.
How to create a deficit and survive it
There is more than one way of creating a caloric deficit. The simplest is obviously by decreasing your food intake. This way you can pretty easily make a dramatic cut compared to your normal intake. The obvious issue with that, if you are used to eating much more you may feel hungry. I mean, really hungry. This isn’t sustainable for most people. So this method works best either when you don’t need a dramatic caloric decrease or if you are extremely disciplined. Another way is increasing the amount of cardio/conditioning. This works best for those who aren’t too far from the target caloric intake or can do either long steady-state training sessions or a significant amount of HIIT. As for the long-term sustainable approach doing strength training at least twice a week is highly recommended. You will build muscle that will support higher expenditure and also will make you healthier, stronger and more functional overall. For an optimal drop in daily calories, it’s best combining a decrease in intake with an increase in cardio and weight training. This will be easier from the hunger management standpoint and as such, more sustainable. Still, for most people creating deficit is not fun at all unless you know how to be very efficient about it. I have experimented a lot with different approaches to making this process significantly easier and found many useful tricks that made the process absolutely painless for me that I would like to share with you:
prioritize foods with low caloric density and high volume. Foods that are high in fiber and low in fat. In that sense, healthy fats sourced from avocado, nuts, and seeds are not any better than refined ones. They are definitely better for your overall health but still deliver 9kcal per gram which is more than twice as much as either protein or carbs which makes a huge difference. Avoid oil and most of sauces and dips (check the label first!) as much as possible since they are extremely high in calories and low in nutritional value.
drink plenty of water. Overhydrate at least for several hours a day. Carry around your large water bottle with known capacity and drink. Finish and refill. Repeat. By the way, when I say water, I mean it. Water, not beverages. I know, many people don’t like drinking just water, especially lots of it. What worked for me is adding a splash of lemon juice into my bottle. It makes the taste so much better and the drinking process so much easier while adds zero calories to your diet. Win-win.
don’t try getting all of your protein from real food if you are planning on a relatively high intake. On low calories, it will be very hard to do so. Really, I am on WFPB (whole foods plant-based) diet myself and prefer getting my protein from whole foods. While it works fine for diets lower on protein or while not trying to lose weight. It’s good enough to get 50% or more of your daily protein from real food, but the rest can easily come from protein powders and shakes. Believe me, there is nothing wrong with using organic, non-GMO, derived from whole foods plant-based protein powder. You still get all you need from a nutritional perspective eating most of your calories from a well-balanced (from both micro and macronutrient perspective) diet that comprises most of your daily calories. Go ahead and make your shake or add protein powder to your morning cereal. It’s totally fine.
try my modified version of intermittent fasting. Real intermittent fasting is about splitting your day into two parts - one is fasting per se and it lasts most of the day, typically 16-18 hours, while you are allowed to only drink (remember water?). In the remaining 6-8 hours, you consume all of your calories. My modification is easy and simple. When I wake up I have a few dried dates. It gives you enough sugar to start your brain and keep you moving for a while. A few hours later I have my protein shake which is liquid food and doesn’t really count as breaking your fasting. This helps me survive for the first 16 hours (including sleep). This way I save lots of calories for just 2 remaining meals, most of it for dinner so I feel like I eat a lot every time. It really helps taming hunger. Most people get hungry in the evening and overeat, with this approach it will never happen.
I hope these tricks will make your fat loss experience more pleasant.
Good luck with your journey!
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