How Do We Lose Body Fat? Part Two

In part one I went over why an education and knowledge of the ins and outs of how weight loss occurs could help with you losing weight and keeping it off. In case you missed it, you can find it here

In this part, we’ll look at how to design as close to a bulletproof diet as possible. This literally ticks all the boxes:

• Adheres to scientific principles of weight loss
• Let’s you eat your favourite foods and drinks
• Sets controlled portion sizes
• Allows you to be sociable, and even enjoy a few drinks!

Working it out yourself does involve a fair bit of maths so either whip out your pen & paper and a calculator or get your free Get Shredded Starter Pack which works it all out for you HERE!

How Many Calories Do I Need Per Day?

We can get a rough estimation of the calories we need to maintain our bodyweight by multiplying our bodyweight in pounds (if you don’t work in old money, multiply bodyweight in kg by 2.2) by 14 – 16. If you are sedentary then go for 14, if you are quite active then go for 16 and if you’re somewhere in the middle go for 15.

Using myself as an example, I’m 83kg/183lb and am very active so my maintenance calorie intake would be:

183 x 16 = 2928

However, for our purposes, we want to be losing weight, so we need to be in a calorie deficit. Let’s take a gentle calorie deficit of 10%. The greater and more aggressive the calorie deficit, the more likely we are to experience issues so 10% is a good starting point.

Again using me as an example, 10% of 2928 is ~293 calories (2928 x 0.1). To get our new calorie intake we just minus our maintenance calories by our 10% deficit.

2928 – 293 = 2635 calories to start to lose weight

Now, calories aren’t the be all and end all when it comes to losing weight and body fat. As we briefly went through in part one, setting our macronutrients right is essential.

If we’re just concerned with calorie intake without paying attention to macronutrients we will lose weight but we might lose a fair amount of lean mass in the process, perhaps making our bodies not look as good as we’d like and reduce our metabolic rate.

If we set our macronutrients right we can maintain our muscle mass, keep our energy levels up, maintain our ability to train hard and therefore make the process of losing fat as easy as possible.

Our calories intake depends on what macronutrients we eat, as each has a different calorific value with these being; protein with 4 calories per gram, carbohydrate with 4 calories per gram, fat with 9 calories per gram and alcohol with 7 calories per gram.

Now the process for setting our macronutrient intake is a little more complicated. If you tend to glaze over when it comes to a lot of numbers then I suggest you download my Get Shredded Toolkit as it does it all for you, including working out your recommended calorie intake.

If you would like to do the hard work yourself read below!

If you have downloaded the Toolkit then you can skip to the “Alcohol” section if you like.

Alcohol

So many articles in popular media say that alcohol is an absolute no-no for fat loss. However for a lot of us, drinking is almost a “fact of life,” given that a lot of jobs require entertaining of clients or purely based on that a lot of us enjoy drinking and the social aspects of it.

So are these people doomed to never being able to lose body fat unless they give up the sauce?

Absolutely not! That being said though, while there is definitely room in your diet for alcohol, its consumption can make it very easy to screw up your diet. This is down to two things:

1. It contains calories. Just like all the other macronutrients, alcohol contains calories, 7 calories per gram to be precise. If over consumption of it causes us to go into an energy surplus then we can kiss all our fat loss goodbye.
2. In higher amounts, it often kills our inhibitions and control. This causes us to destroy the peanuts at the bar or an impromptu trip to the kebab shop. Here we have a double calorie whammy from the alcohol itself as well as the extra food! This can easily wipe out an entire week’s worth of eating in a calorie deficit and is why a lot of people who say they’re “good” throughout the week don’t lose body fat.

If you’re drinking regularly, but in small amounts, e.g. 1-2 beers or glasses of wine 1-5 times a week (try and have 2+ days a week where you’re alcohol free) then just track it with the rest of your food/drinks on MyFitnessPal (more on this later). This way, regardless of the alcohol consumption, you’ll hopefully be in a calorie deficit and won’t gain body fat.

Now, if you’re a self confessed binge drinker and drinking more than 1-2 drinks (we don’t recommend this approach, nor are we condoning binge drinking, but the following is a decent strategy to negate alcohol related fat gain) then tracking will most likely be a futile attempt as you won’t remember, nor have the motivation to whack out your phone and log in to MyFitnessPal on a night out!

What is an option instead is to create a “caloric sink”, a term coined by my friends over at Propane Fitness (more from them on dieting strategies whilst socialising here). You can do this by eating mainly lean protein sources plus veggies and maybe small amounts of carbohydrate and fats to allow you to create a proper meal leading up to your night out. This then will allow for the drinking and any food slip ups and hopefully still bring us in at a calorie deficit, or at worst, a very small calorie surplus.

Again I must stress that this is not something I recommend doing on a regular basis, due to the potential detriments to your health and also because you’ll feel like crap anyway which might impact the following day’s eating in a negative manner. It will also negatively affect your training and recovery in the days following your session, so beware and cut back on alcohol if necessary!

Micronutrients

Micronutrients, otherwise known as vitamins and minerals, are important for various body processes. Common examples are magnesium, vitamin D, iron, calcium and zinc.Provided you eat a varied diet, don’t exclude any food groups (such as dairy), eat plenty of fruit and vegetables and aren’t getting all of your carbohydrates from Haribo, all of your protein from over-boiled chicken breast and all of your fat from vegetable oil then you are most likely getting adequate amounts of micronutrients.If you want an insurance policy, you could pop a daily multivitamin/mineral supplement, but this is not a replacement for whole food sources of vitamins & minerals.

Without going in to too much detail here, a decent rule of thumb is to try and get at least a portion of fruit/vegetables for every 500 calories that you eat per day, and if it falls off a multiple of 500 then round it up.

For example, if you have to eat 1600 calories per day then get 4 portions, 2000 calories would be 4 portions, 2500 calories would be 5, etc.

Please note that this is at a MINIMUM and the more veg you can eat the better! Especially when you get to the later phases of your fat loss approach, eating plenty of vegetables is great. The water and fibre content is typically high, keeping you fuller for longer as well as exposing you to a larger array of micronutrients.

How Many Times Should I Eat Per Day?

For most people (non-athletes and those without any health conditions that would perhaps require to eat a little more regularly, such as type II diabetes) you can eat as often or as little as you like. The most important thing is to hit your required macronutrients for the day, and get plenty of micronutrients from a variety of fruits and veggies.

Contrary to popular belief and outdated advice, eating regularly does not increase your metabolic rate.

In our experience we find most people do best in terms of controlling their hunger, and keeping their diet flexible (have “room” to eat your favourite and treat type foods, within the constraints of your macronutrients for the day) with three similarly sized meals with the macronutrients relatively evenly spread across each meal plus one snack.

Tracking Your Food Intake

Now you know your recommended macronutrient intake, how many times to eat per day and what each meal should consist of, where do we go from here?

We have to track and monitor what we eat each day, and try and get all of our foods and drinks to fit our macronutrients.

Use MyFitnessPal either online or on your smartphone log EVERYTHING you eat and drink. Seriously, anything that has calories in should be logged!

I strongly recommend weighing or measuring anything that’s calorie dense such as oils, nuts, grains, potatoes etc. but things that aren’t so calorie dense such as fruits, vegetables etc. in terms of portion size can be “guesstimated.”

One thing to bare in mind though is that MyFitnessPal tries to recommend a calorie and macronutrient intake for you. DO NOT use their recommendations, they will be suboptimal at best.

Unfortunately MyFitnessPal doesn’t let you set custom numbers, only via a percentage. Instead you just adhere to your macronutrients that you’ve worked out from earlier, or using the Diet Tracker and use these as your values OR you could take your macronutrients and convert them to the closest percentage that MyFitnessPal will let you.

Don’t expect to hit your macronutrients to a T, hitting them +/- 5-10g is perfectly acceptable. As you start to track you learn the composition of different foods, which helps you hit your macronutrient goals more accurately and makes you much more wary of what you’re truly eating. This is particularly handy, as regardless of whether you choose to track macronutrients forever you will get an appreciation of what’s in your food, perhaps causing you to eat less anyway.

The remaining 20% should be made up of naughtier, treat type foods. Having these in the diet hugely helps with adherence, allows you to have a little more variety and perhaps most importantly allows you to take part in social occasions involving food and drink.

Measuring Progress

Whilst we shouldn’t use bodyweight as our sole indicator of fat loss, it is still arguably the most important variable to measure if our body mass is decreasing. The problem is that our weight fluctuates due to other reasons than just losses in body fat which may give us a false impression of what’s really going on.

A great way to get around this is to weigh yourself every day and then take an average at the end of the week. You then aren’t looking at progress on a day to day level, but instead taking into account the fluctuations that will inevitably happen during the week and is therefore a much truer indicator of progress.

On the Progress Tracker there is a Bodyweight Tracker tab that works out the average for you, as well as representing it on a graph for motivational purposes!

There will be fluctuations on the bodyweight line, but if things go to plan, there will be a drop over time in average bodyweight. That’s progress right there!

Measuring your waist measurement once a week, and if you have access to it, some measurement of body fat percentage every 4-6 weeks, such as skinfolds taken from a skilled personal trainer. Bioelectrical impedance is NOT a suitable measurement (those funny scales that you stand on in bare feet or hold onto the attached handles) as they are too susceptible to short term fluctuations, making it unclear as to what is going on.

Be patient with your fat loss.

Effective, long term, maintainable fat loss is a marathon not a sprint! We should be seeing a 0.5-1kg drop in weight per week on average. Any more than this is perhaps a little too fast in most circumstances, and can have negative health effects.

If a weight drop does not occur, then for the following week a good ideas is to drop our carbohydrates by 10g, and fats by 5g and having done this each day for a week we should see a weight drop. Repeat this process whenever weight loss stalls.

If weight loss occurs perhaps a little too fast then add 10g carbohydrate and 5g fats each day for the following week and the weight loss should occur at a more reasonable and sensible rate.

I cannot stress enough that you should enjoy and trust the process, as well as being patient. If you go way over on your macronutrients/calories on one day do not make up for it on the following days by severely cutting back or fasting, just move on and stick to the plan as usual!

For most people the consistent process of eating in a calorie deficit and tweaking your macronutrients to ensure long term fat loss WILL work.

Summary

• Statistically speaking, most of us are unsuccessful in losing weight, and even more unsuccessful in keeping it off. This is perhaps due to not knowing how weight/fat loss occurs and how once we stop a “diet” how to go back to a normal, sustainable way of eating and maintain our new leaner body.
• The solution to the above is to never go on a restrictive diet in the first place, and learn how to integrate your favourite foods into your daily diet.
• You can do this and design your own personalised fat loss diet using the following steps or by downloading my Get Shredded Toolkit

1. Establish your daily calorie intake for fat loss. Take bodyweight (bw) in lbs x 14-16. Drop 10% off of this to get your number.
2. Protein intake: regular weight trainer? bw in lbs x 2.2 = g of protein/day
   Not regular weight trainer bw in lbs x 1.8
3. Fat intake: take your daily calorie intake and multiply it by 0.2-0.3, go towards 0.2 if you don’t like too much fatty food or towards 0.3 if you do. Take this number and divide it by 9. There you have your fat intake in grams for the day.
4. Carbohydrate intake: take your protein intake in grams and multiply by 4. Take your fat intake in grams and multiply by 9. Add the two together, then minus this number from your calorie intake. Divide this number by 4 to have your carbohydrate intake, in grams for the day.
5. Fruit and vegetable intake: consume at least 1 portion of fruit or veg for every 500 calories that you consume. This ensures a decent level of micronutrient intake.

• I recommend 3 meals per day plus one snack, but this isn’t set in stone. Do whatever suits you.
• Track your daily food intake via MyFitnessPal and try and be +/- 5-10g for each of your macronutrients.
• Eat whatever foods you like, but try and stick to 80% single ingredient, whole foods, and 20% treat type foods. This is best for adherence.
• Alcohol intake should be limited to 1-2 drinks 1-5x per week but tracked with everything else. If you intend to drink more than this, ensure it isn’t regular and intake fewer calories for rest of the day via eating lean meats and veggies.
• Weigh yourself every day and take an average at the end of the week. We aren’t looking for a daily drop, but instead a week to week drop on the average.
• If your average bodyweight isn’t dropping then drop the fats by 5g and carbohydrates by 10g for the following week. Repeat this process as often as needed.
• Stick to the plan if you slip up and don’t be tempted to drop your calories massively or fast to make up for it.

Good luck!

JB