You’ve seen that new action movie with your favorite actor and noticed that the guy is in fantastic shape. His muscle definition is all over the big screen and you’re astonished how in the world someone can look like he’s actually carved out of granite. Not only do you ask yourself how this is possible do actually look like that, you also wonder if it’s possible for you to look like a master work of a renaissance sculptor. This certainly was the case for me back in the day. I smacked my head against the wall several times when searching the internet for for celebrity workouts and diets, because different sources offered different solutions. I’ve tried about every diet under the sun in during my late teens and early twenties and none of them worked. The few who did deliver some temporary results, weren’t sustainable in the long term. After educating myself properly on the topic of nutrition, I can proudly announce to you that I have found the answer to the question: “What is the best fat loss diet in the world?”. The answer might shock you and/or might surprise you in either a good or a bad way. But before I sharethe answer to the million dollar question with you, let’s first take a little look at what actually causes fat loss and how we can use this to our advantage.
The law of energy balance
Every living creature in this universe operates on energy and we are no different. Your body is a biological machine that needs energy to function properly. We eat our way to being energized by eating food. The foods we eat contain units of energy, which we have given the name calories. Each and every person needs a certain level of calories to maintain his or her current bodyweight and to perform their daily activities. This energy need is different for everyone, since everyone has a different body (height, weight, lean mass vs non-lean mass, etc.) and a different activity level. Obviously a sedentary person who works a desk job and doesn’t do any physical activity at all will require less calories to maintain his or her current weight compared to a professional athlete with a totally different body composition and a lifestyle where he is more physically active than he is resting.
The body is a biological machine optimized for survival. It’s an energy saving masterpiece. When we eat too many calories on a regular basis, our body is able to store that excess energy as fat tissue so that it can be used when we need it in times of food scarcity. In most countries of the Western world, there is an overabundance of food. The excess energy stored will never be used involuntarily for survival purposes because we keep putting more and more calories into our mouth and our body’s primal survival mechanism keeps storing more body fat as calories keep coming in. Over time, this leads to obesity. The opposite is true as well. During times of food scarcity, times where the body is deprived of calories, you will lose weight. Once your body fat reserves are at an extreme low, your body will start tapping into using muscle tissue as fuel. If no calories come in after that point, starvation will be the next and final stop.
Basically, it’s all about calories in vs calories out when it comes to gaining, maintaining and losing weight. If you eat at maintenance calories, you will maintain your current weight. If you eat above maintenance calories, you will gain weight and if you eat below your maintenance, you will lose weight. It truly is as simple as that. Weight management is just a mathematical game revolving calories in vs calories out.
The world’s best fat loss diet
Now that you know how weight management works, you want to know the answer to the initial question I asked: “What is the best fat loss diet in the world?”. The simple answer to the question is: The best diet in the world is the one that allows you to stay in a calorie deficit without too much effort and that is sustainable as a lifestyle. There are no magical foods that are going to make you lose weight faster than others. There is no holy grail diet that will melt of those layers covering your muscles. The only thing that matters, again, is calories in vs calories out.
If you want to lose body fat, the only thing you have to do is to eat in a way that puts you in a calorie deficit. Eating less calories will allow your body to use its fat stores as fuel and as a result you will become leaner. There are no good or bad foods when it comes to losing fat. Each food source has calories in them. The main reason why people tend to put a bad or good label on different food sources is because some foods are very calorie dense and contain plenty of fats and sugar. This combination gives a heavenly flavor which acts like a drug in the brain and inevitably causes a lot of people to overeat in large quantities on those foods. As a result, a lot of additional calories that are fed to the body and weight gain is its final product. Food labeled as good on the other hand contains substantially less calories and are packed with vitamins, minerals and fiber. These essential nutrients don’t only do your body a big favor, they also cause you to feel full after a meal way faster, while putting in less total calories in your system.
It doesn’t require one to be a genius to realize that it’s a better option to center your food intake around natural, unprocessed food sources that contain a lot of essential vitamins and minerals as they will contribute majorly to optimal health, a balanced hormonal profile and you feeling well energized in general. But purely talking about weight loss, it doesn’t really matter what you eat as long as you in a calorie deficit. In other words: eating less calories than you burn. When that calorie deficit is sustained for a certain period of time your body will have no other choice than to burn its fat reserves as a fuel source and as a result you will be leaner. Someone who is able to find a dietary pattern that leads to consistently eating less calories will sport a lean body for as long as he’s able to maintain his eating habits.
This last point is the exact reason why most ‘diets’ don’t work. Diets cause restrictions and people don’t do mentally well when they are restricted in any way, shape or form. When crash dieting or following extreme dietary restrictions, tension builds up both mentally and in the form of physical cravings. Once your willpower to resist your restrictions breaks down, most people will overcompensate by gorging themselves, binge eating huge amounts of the things they weren’t supposed to eat. I know because I used to do this myself and have had clients say the exact same thing. No matter how strict your ‘diet’ is, it doesn’t matter if you can’t maintain it in the long term. Because of this reason, I absolutely hate the term diet and would advise you to adopt a new lifestyle. A whole new way of approaching food and energy intake that is healthy for both the body and the mind.
If it fits your macros
In terms of weight maintenance, there are no specific foods that will make you fat or that will make you shredded. Every food source has a certain caloric value. The ideal situation is that you become aware of how many calories certain foods have and fit that into your daily calorie requirements. This is actually THE strategy most people use who are always in amazing shape. Even movie stars who get into phenomenal shape for certain roles do this unknowingly. Their personal trainers calculate the actor’s daily calorie requirements and strategically manipulate the actor’s daily meals according to how many calories he requires to get down to single digit body fat percentages for the specific movie role. Actors and other celebrities are often unaware of this even happening because they leave everything up to their trainers and don’t have to occupy themselves with their food preparation. They simply eat what the trainer and chef serve them. However, as normal people who don’t have the luxury of being served by trainers and chefs we have to take matters into our own hands and be aware of how many calories we need to eat each and every day and eat accordingly.
This concept is known as ‘If It Fits Your Macros’ (= IIFYM) and is quite popular in the online fitness community. As long as your daily calorie and macronutrients requirements are respected, you can eat whatever you want. To manipulate your weight, what you eat doesn’t matter. It’s the amount of calories from whatever foods you choose eat that really counts. Therefore, you can have your cake and eat it too. Some people will take this to extreme ends and will try to fill up their daily calorie requirements with as much junk food as they can. Funny enough, it will work in terms of losing weight and improving body composition if their calculations are correct. I don’t advise this approach though. Since junk food is extremely calorie dense, the quantity of food you’ll be able to eat solely from processed junk foods will be quite small. Besides that, there are certain nutrients you need to be in good health that you will be deficient in if you only live on twinkies and Oreo cookies. To have the best of both worlds, I strongly suggest that you apply the 80/20 principle to your diet. Aim to get 80% of your daily calories from natural, unprocessed, quality food sources full of essential vitamins and minerals (meat, fish, eggs, fruits, starchy tubers, grass fed butter, olive oil, etc.) and leave some wiggle room to fit in a treat during or at the end of your day to keep your sweet tooth is satisfied. I am a huge sucker for ice cream and chocolate, so I don’t skip my regular dose of sweetness complementary to an otherwise very micronutrients rich diet. By using this approach you’re able to create a lifestyle that doesn’t restrict you from your cravings and you’ll experience a sense of freedom when it comes to your food choices. It allows you to actually live your life and have a social life where you can also have some drinks and go eating out with friends. The longer you play with calorie measurements, the better you’ll become at eyeballing your food when eating out. Consistency is key when it comes to fat loss and creating a new lifestyle. Therefore, you should make it enjoyable for yourself.
The calorie deficit
Another important question that arises is: “How much of a calorie deficit should I create to lose fat?”. Just as extreme food restrictions will reduce the chances of you sticking to your calorie requirements, extreme low calorie crash diets will be a hell to maintain in the long term. For long term fat loss and maintaining a low body fat percentage, extremes are never the answer. We should use a sensible approach and gradually ease in the groove of lowering our energy intake. Therefore I strongly suggest creating only a moderate calorie deficit of about 10-20% of your current calorie requirement to stay at your current weight and body fat percentage. If you’re currently maintaining your weight at 3000 calories per day and want to shred off fat, you need to be able to be in a calorie deficit on a consistent basis. By lowering your caloric intake sensibly, you’ll be able to maintain this the rest of your life and be lean forever.
In our example, our man who eats 3000 calories will reduce his calorie intake by 10-20 percent depending on how aggressive he wants to diet down. This means that the calorie deficit he will create will be between 300-600. Let’s say he will take the middle ground and is going to put himself into a deficit of 400 calories each and every day. This will put him on a daily calorie target of 2600 calories. 2600 calories is still an enjoyable amount of food that can be eaten and will be sustainable in the long term. If he combines his calorie deficit with the principle of IIFYM, the journey to a lean body results will be an enjoyable one.
At a certain point in time, everyone who loses weight will reach a fat loss plateau. This is normal because the body adapts itself to the new energy intake. If this wouldn’t be the case and would keep losing weight you’d eventually starve to death… which isn’t ideal. Therefore, once you reach a fat loss plateau and aren’t at your end destination yet, you may have to create a new calorie deficit to keep shedding body fat until you reach your end goal.
Making sure weight loss comes from body fat and not muscle mass
Eating less calories on a daily basis will without a doubt make sure that you lose weight. There’s a caveat that many people don’t talk about though. A lesser known fact is that the body doesn’t just lose body fat when it loses weight. People who put themselves in a calorie deficit and lose weight will also experience muscle loss. This might come as a shock to you, but overweight people that don’t perform any resistance training actually carry more muscle mass than slim people that don’t perform resistance training. Both gaining weight and losing weight is never just gaining only fat or just losing fat. With a surplus in calories, even without performing resistance training, a small amount of the weight gained will actually come from muscle mass. In terms of weight loss, a certain amount of weight being lost will actually come from lost muscle mass. Before you now become neurotic about becoming next Christian Bale in the Machinist, I already want to reassure you that there’s no need to pull your hair out. Making sure you maintain your muscle mass when dieting down isn’t hard at all and only requires two small tweaks in your lifestyle. When you respect these principles, you’ll be sure the weight lost comes from fat tissue and not from wasted muscle mass.
In order to maintain our muscle mass on a calorie deficit, there are only two things we have to do. Those are to eat enough protein on a daily basis and to perform a workout routine where you perform a form of resistance training a couple of times per week. Studies have shown that people who eat sufficient amounts of protein and challenge their body with resistance training hold on to their muscle mass when losing weight. The opposite holds true as well though. People who simply eat in an energy deficit and don’t lift weights lose a significant amount of weight not only from adipose tissue, but also from metabolically expensive muscle tissue. The amount of protein one should eat for optimal muscle gains on a muscle gaining phase and muscle preservation on a fat loss phase is 0.8g per pound of bodyweight. Eating more than this may help some people to stay satiated longer, as protein is known to keep you more full for longer periods of time, but in terms of additional benefits in body composition more isn’t necessarily better. In fact, I used to eat an insane amount of protein back in the day when I used to believe that more protein was better. Ironically, my body composition, performance and overall physical shape is at its best now that I eat a moderate protein diet. When you’re eating a fixed amount of daily calories, it’s important to leave some room for quality carbohydrates and fats to optimize your hormonal profile. Testosterone production is actually optimal when sufficient carbs and fats are present in one’s diet, rather than overconsuming protein and reducing the intake of fats and carbs.
When it comes to resistance training there’s no need to break your head about this topic either. Different people will need to train at different frequencies depending on their goal. But when you’re not aiming to become the next professional bodybuilding and simply want to maintain your muscle mass when dieting down (or even gain muscle mass, which is possible for people who are new to resistance training) and look like for example Brad Pitt in the cult hit Fight Club or Christian Bale portraying Patrick Bateman in American psycho, you’ll only need to lift weights 2-4 times per week, with the sweet spot being 3 days per week. It actually takes way less training volume (= sets close to failure per week per muscle group) preserve muscle mass than it takes to build muscle mass. Lowering your volume on a cut is actually going to be serving you well if you’re at an advanced stage in your lifting career, since your recovery capabilities will be lower due to the reduced energy intake. So there’s no need to live in the gym when trying to hold on to your muscle mass while losing body fat.
Your perfect fat loss blueprint
You are armed with the crucial information on how fat loss works. Now you want to put this information into practice and achieve your goal of becoming a lean, mean muscle machine. To give you a clear summary of what you should remember and what you should do to shed body fat effectively while preserving muscle tissue, I’ll list the most important factors here:
● Weight management in all about energy in versus energy out (= calories in vs calories out)
● There are no good or bad foods when it comes to fat loss, it’s all about calories in vs calories out
● To lose weight, one should create a calorie deficit
● A moderate calorie deficit of 10-20% is a sustainable and enjoyable approach to lose fat
● Eat a diet of 80% nutritious, micronutrient rich foods and save 20% of your calories to fit in a treat
● Eat 0.8g of protein per pound of body weight as it will prevent losing muscle tissue while being in a calorie deficit
● Resistance train 2-4 times per week depending on your goals to maintain or even build muscle mass
● When reaching a fat loss plateau, create a new calorie deficit from your current starting point to keep losing more fat until you reach your goal body fat percentage
Kevin Mahjoubi