Want to Lose Fat? Do This

Why?

If you want to lose fat, first you should ask yourself why you want to lose fat.

That may seem a bit silly - why wouldn’t someone want to lose fat?

But the reason that it’s so important to get clear on your why is because losing fat is simple, but not easy.

There will be hard days.

And the more clear you are on why you are embarking on this endeavor, the easier it will be to get up on the hard days and get shit done.

Educate Yourself

The next thing I would do if you want to lose fat is to educate yourself on what it takes to lose fat.

Begin to understand the basics of nutrition and how it applies to losing fat.

The most fundamental principle when it comes to losing fat is creating a caloric deficit. This means that you are burning more calories than you are consuming and your body begins to use your stored fat as energy.

Create A Plan

If your plan to lose fat is to “wing it” then you are going to fail.

This doesn’t have to be a Navy SEALs operation, but the clearer you are on what you need to do to strategically lose the fat, the more likely you are to achieve that goal.

What should you include in this plan?

Well, pretty much everything.

Training Plan

Figure out realistically how many days per week you can train. Anywhere between 3-5 days is what I would recommend for most people.

• Full-Body Split
• Upper/Lower
• Push, Pull, Legs, Upper, Lower

Choose one of those splits for your lift.

When it comes to strength training, even though your goal is to lose fat, your intention should be to build muscle in the gym.

In fact, your training won’t look much different from when training to lose fat versus training to build muscle. Those outcomes will come primarily from your diet.

So your training intensity must be high, pushing close to failure, sometimes even to failure depending on where you are at on your journey.

Cardio Plan

Doing cardio is not necessary to lose fat.

But cardio can be beneficial for many other reasons, such as

• Hear health
• Crating a parasympathetic state
• Digestion
• Lowering HR, BP
• Increasing HRV
• As well as increasing caloric output which means you can lose fat on more calories.

I heard a fitness professional being asked earlier today what’s the best cardio for fat loss and I really enjoyed his answer.

He said something along the lines of:

“Choose the cardio that you enjoy the most for the sake of enjoyment; the cardio effect should be an added benefit to doing the thing that you enjoy.”

I really like this because it focuses on enjoyment, which will lead to adherence.

Nutrition Plan

This is where you are going to see the most results when it comes to fat loss.

Like we said earlier, the only way to lose fat is to create a calorie deficit.

And it is SO much easier to NOT eat 300 calories, than it is to go out and burn 300 calories. At least, from a time perspective.

You have to have the will power to not eat those 300 calories, but in the long run that will be easier than trying to out train your bad diet.

So you’ve got your calorie deficit, now what about macros?

Before we get into that it’s important to note that if you hit your calories and your protein goal, then it doesn’t really matter where your carbs and fats lie, for most general population people.

That being said, in my opinion I think there is some advantage to keeping fat as low as possible in order to maximize food volume, since fat is more than twice as calorically dense as carbs.

Protein

0.8-1.0g/lb of protein per pound of bodyweight is a rough estimate.

If you’re used to eating a decent amount of protein then I would opt for the higher end in order to maintain as much muscle as possible.

Fat

You need a certain amount of fat in order to survive and thrive. For most people, unless you’re really tiny I wouldn’t go below 60 grams of fat.

Carbs

The rest of your calories should go to carbs.

Meal Plan

Now that you know how much to eat, it’s time to decide what to eat.

This is where a meal plan can be very helpful.

Now, when I say meal plan - I literally just mean what meals do you plan to eat.

Over the years I feel like meal plans have created this idea that there are certain foods that you have to eat in order to lose fat and if you eat off plan, then you’re fucked.

A meal plan to me is just a relatively small number of meals that you eat on rotation in order to maintain consistency with your diet.

In fact, I would encourage you to even eat the same exact breakfast and lunch with varying dinners for a week at a time, or until you get bored of it.

Boredom isn’t such a bad thing when it comes to fat loss.

Track Progress

In order to make sure that you make progress, you need to track progress - both inputs and outcomes.

Inputs

• Food; calories and macros
• Training; weight training and cardio

When it comes to tracking your food, it’s never going to be perfectly accurate - and that’s okay.

But, we still want to make sure that we are as accurate as we possibly can be.

So that means buying a food scale and tracking our food by weight, not by eyeballing it or using meauremtns like cups and tablespoons.

Weighing your food in grams is going to be your best bet.

Outcomes

• Bodyweight (Daily)
• Progress pictures (Weekly)
• Circumference measurements (Weekly)

Friction

This a term I picked up from Matt McLeod and I love it.

With friction we want to add friction to the things that are going to make losing fat harder, and we want to remove friction from things that are going to make losing fat easier.

For example:

• Put the cookies in the very top cabinet, behind the pasta, the bread, the canned good, so you can’t see it when you open the cupboard and it takes a decent amount of effort to actually get to the cookies and eat them.
• On the other hand, buying pre cut fruit and veggies and keeping them in sight in your refrigerator so that eating those things is as easy and welcoming as possible.

You could apply this to so many different areas and I really like the idea. Thanks Matt.

Things to Limit

Fat loss is simple, but not always easy.

Limiting things like:

• Eating out
• Drinking alcohol
• Social events
• etc.

Are going to make your fat loss journey so much easier.

Think about it when you go out to eat - the chef doesn’t give a fuck about your fat loss goals. He wants to make you the best damn food so that you come back and tell all your friends and so that he makes a lot of money.

Parting thoughts

You’ve got this.