So like I said losing weight is not something extremely difficult that you have to read a whole book on or only stick to certain foods and avoid foods that “make you fat”, or something extremely easy in terms of just being in a caloric deficit, especially if you want to get to very low body-fat percentages for the summer and get shredded so you can show off your abs. The lower your body-fat percentage goal is, the harder it’ll be for you to achieve it. Constantly being in the same 300 or 500 caloric deficit will not get you to 0 percent body-fat if you implement it long enough, that’s for sure. Your body is way smarter than you thought and also very adaptive, just like if you were to do the same workout routine with the same amount of weight, exercises, sets and reps, your body would get used to that after a while and you would hit a plateau.
Now let’s first cover which foods to eat. The typical questions: “Bro which foods should I avoid in order to lose fat?”, or “Which foods burn fat?”,”Will I get fat if I eat this?”. You can also see a lot of clickbait ads talking about the five foods to avoid when trying to lose weight, or 3 fruits that burn fat instantly and stuff like that. In reality the foods you eat have nothing to do with your weight loss or weight gain in those terms. But having that said I always suggest eating “clean” and healthy not necessarily because of making your fat loss journey easier, because there are a lot of healthy foods that are very high in calories, but because of your overall health, mindset, etc. And we’re here to develop ourselves in every aspect as much as possible not just acquire those aesthetics brah.
Having all of that said here’s how you’ll start off your shredding journey. Calculate the exact amount of calories you burn each day (your maintenance level) and you can do that by finding a calorie calculator on Google and I’ll also make sure I post a link to one in the description box. When you’re done with that subtract somewhere around 300-500 calories from your maintenance level and that will be your daily caloric intake. You are not going to experience some super fast fat loss results with being in a low caloric deficit like this one but when it comes to shredding and preserving as much muscle mass as possible, slow and steady wins the race. Otherwise your energy levels are going to be very low, resulting in having bad workouts and fast strength loss and ultimately resulting to you losing a lot of muscle mass as well. Your weightlifting workouts should also stay the same when you’re shredding, when you’re in the gym just forget that you’re even on a cut and focus on pushing or pulling as much weight as you can within the hypertrophy friendly rep range in order to preserve your muscle mass.
As far as the macronutrient ratio goes I have an older video where I talked about how much proteins, fats and carbs to eat during a cut so make sure you check it out if you’re interested I’ll provide the link in the description box.
Now that you’re in a caloric deficit make sure you track your weekly progress, this is very important because at a certain point you’ll hit a plateau where you won’t be burning fat anymore simply because your body got used to it and your metabolism slowed down. So week one you burned 2 pounds of fat for example (this of course depends on the caloric deficit you’re in), week two the same, week three and so on. Eventually you’ll hit a plateau where you won’t be losing weight anymore and the time when this will happen depends on a lot of factors (it varies from one person to another, depends on your body fat percentage goal (the lower it is the higher your chance of hitting a plateau earlier) and so on…). So when you see that you only lost half a pound in a 7 days period or none at all you’ll know that it’s time to do something different and what is that you ask?
Here are my 2 personal favorite methods you can try out: Number one is intermittent fasting and I don’t want to stay on this topic for too long but what intermittent fasting comes down to is consuming all of your daily amount of calories within a short specific amount of time with having 2-4 meals and after that not eat within a couple of hours. For example the most common one is eating within a period of 8 hours and then after that fast for 16 hours, or eat within a period of 6 hours and then fast for 18. I would recommend having a strong breakfast when you wake up so try and arrange it based on that. Now an argument might come: “Well if you only ate within a period of 6 or 8 hours you wouldn’t be able to eat 6 small meals a day”. The 6 or 8 small meals a day thing has been outdated and confirmed to be a myth and it got popular based on another one stating that your body can only absorb somewhere around 20-25g of protein per meal. This has been also scientifically debunked but I don’t want to bore you with that it’s simply not my style but you can also think about it from a logical standpoint. Your ancestors living in a cave did not have the luxury to eat 6 small meals a day or even 3 for that matter, in fact they might even go days without eating and only having giant meals when they catch a pray. So do you really think that in those kind of circumstances the building blocks of our body which we need in order to survive would only be absorbed in quantities of 20g per meal? Doesn’t make sense right? So you don’t have to worry about that, I also used to eat 6 small meals a day and then when I transferred to eating less meals a day but with the same amount of calories and I didn’t see any differences whatsoever.
We’re done with talking about intermittent fasting, method number 2 is carb cycling, and what it comes down to is that you’re going to sort of trick your body by consuming the same amount of calories on a weekly basis but with manipulating your carbohydrate intake, and how are you going to do that? Simple, you’re going to have high carb days, medium and low carb days one after another. So the medium carb day will be the same as every other day since you started your cut, on high carb days you’re going to increase the amount of carbohydrates and on low carb days you’re going to decrease the same amount of carbs you increased on a high carb day.
With these 2 methods, especially guaranteed for carb cycling, you will surely break your weight loss plateau and continue shredding fat.
Now let’s talk about your cardio routine. The way I approach cardio is not goal oriented so that I only do it when I’m cutting in order to burn extra amount of calories. I do cardio year around for health purposes, mainly cardiovascular health. So you want to think about your heart just like every other muscle, you want to train it year around and not leave it behind. So in those terms I would advise you to do cardio for your overall health but when it comes to using it as a tool for a cutting season the best approach in my opinion is to do steady pace light cardio sessions or even only taking walks around the park instead of doing some crazy, high demanding cardio sessions. The reason behind it is that you want to preserve as much energy as possible and not waste it on some exhausting cardio routines, the main energy focus should be on your weightlifting workouts.
Another interesting fat burning tool I would like to mention is taking cold showers on which I also made a video about so make sure you check that out as well if you’re interested.
In the end guys I just want to mention that although working out and building a great body is a great thing for you to do, don’t get obsessed with getting to extremely low body-fat percentages just so you could look good in your own eyes because the energy loses are not worth it not to mention the health consequences of being at extreme low body-fat percentages as well.
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