Fat Loss is Confusing, How to Do a Cut?

Training
1

Hi CT,

First of all Congrats for the son and guiding us for all these years.

I need your help in understanding how to do a Cut(Fat loss). There is so much information out there and it is very confusing. It is also something which I have never done in my 15 years of lifting hence I am even more confused. I am 37 currently and a height of 187 cms and weigh 224 pounds. I want to come down to 205 pounds and then do a bulk. I am happy with my size but doing a cut and bulk is something which I have never done so I want to try this. In the past all I did to lose weight was give up the Gym for 4-6 weeks and I would lose both muscle and fat and then gain back that again.

I read that you recommend to lift heavy during a cut phase so that the body gets the hint to retain muscle. I tried that for a couple of weeks but that leaves me very tired and exhausted the next day. I admit I have a stressful life style also. I generally lift 4-5 times a week with workouts very similar to “Best damn workouts for Natural lifters”.

Please guide me.

thanks,
Abhi

2

This is VERY doubtful. You did not lose muscle in 4-6 weeks. Not if you kept training hard and eating enough protein and were not under 10% body fat.+

You don’t easily lose muscle when you keep training. It’s the last strategy the body will use to accomodate to a lowered caloric intake. It will use several other ones prior to that. Muscle is useful, especially if you keep using it by lifting. The body doesn’t really want to part with it, especially not if there are other options available.

When you are in a caloric deficit the body will start by increasing hunger. This is a strategy to try to get you to eat more calories. At this point it’s fairly easy to stay disciplined and not jump off of the dieting bandwagon.

If that doesn’t work (you are still in a deficit) the body will subconsciouly try to decrease how much fuel you are burning daily… you will become a bit lazier… you won’t move as much, fidget less,etc. Oftentimes it’s not even noticeable. And if you keep training hard, chances are that it won’t be enough to stop being in a deficit.

Then the body will try to decrease metabolic rate by reducing T4 to T3 conversion. By decrease metabolic rate you can lower how much calories you are burning significantly. It’s like turning down the heating in your house by a few degrees: you will be using a lot less electricity. This is where you might start to feel cold and fat loss slows down.

If that’s not enough you will start to have much bigger cravings. Your body is trying to force you to eat caloric dense food by having your hormones and neurotransmitters act on your brain and body. It will not be a lot harder to resist the urge to eat crap.

But if you manageto stay the course NOW the body might consider dropping muscle to reduce energy expenditure.

Most people who train hard to not reach that stage until they have lost A LOT of fat.

So NO, unless you did something stupid like consuming 600 calories a day and almost no protein, you didn’t lose musce.

What likely happened is that you got flat. When you reduce calories (and likely carbs) you decrease muscle glycogen stores (carbs stored in the muscles). A 220lbs man can likely store 400g of carbs in his muscles. And each gram is stored with 3g of water for a total of 1.6kg or 3.5bs. When you cut calories and carbs a good portion of that is lost. You could have easily lost 2 -2.5lbs of glycogen/water. But since it was stored in the muscle, it looks and feels like you lost muscle.

The change in intramuscular pressure/leverage also decrease strength a bit, which can reinforce the belief that you lost muscle.

On top of that if you carry a significant amount of fat (more than 15%,which you likely are even though most weight training men believe that they are 12% or so when they really are 18% or so) losing 10 or so pounds will not make you look better. You won’t be lean enough to see a real difference, but you will feel smaller in your clothers, also making you believe that since you don’t look leaner, but are smaller, you lost muscle.

The fact is that most people don’t diet down long enough to reach a level of leaness that makes them look better.

4 Likes
3

I will go out on a limb here and say that you probably won’t look as lean as you think you will at 205lbs.

Most people GROSSLY underestimate how much fat they need to lose to look good.

Of course I have no idea what you look like, so I could be talking out of my arse. And I don’t know how lean you want to get. But it has been my experience that the VAST majority of people need to lose 10-15lbs more than they think they do to look remotely close to what they want to look like.

When I start preparing for a photoshoot I always have a full 6 pack and a lot of vascularity… but I normally have to lose 25-30lbs to look great, from that state.

Here’s an example. In the bottom pics (before) Sebastien was 222lbs and he was not in “bad” shape to start with. In the top/after pics he was 182lbs! At his competition a few weeks later he was 177lbs. That is a drop of 40lbs from a condition that wasn’t bad. When we first met he believed that he would beed to be 198-200lbs to look great!

Sebastien_Cossette

I think that having a weight goal is a mistake. The first week alone you should drop about 5lbs of water weight.You should have an goal of a certain degree of leaness and you assess that weekly with pictures and stop the dieting down only when you have attained the degree of leaness you were shooting for.

There WILL be times where you feel small, weak and flat. That’s part of the process. But if you keep training hard and ingesting plenty of protein, you won’t lose muscle.

4

Well, when I say “lift heavy” I mean not to lift lighter than usual. I believe that you should not change the way you lift weights when try to lose fat. A lot of people who normally do sets of 6-10 reps start doing sets of 15-20 reps or more to cut. This is a mistake.

You should use the diet and cardio (if you decide to do it) to stimulate fat loss and use the lifting program to maintain muscle mass, not to burn more calories.

The Best Damn Workout is a solid lifting strategy when trying to lean down.

Basically…

  1. Ingest a caloric deficit
  2. Keep protein high (1.25g per pound)
  3. keep training hard and pretty much the same way you did before
  4. Add cardio if weight is not going down
  5. Assess every 2 weeks or so to see if your caloric intake is too high (weight is not going down) or too low (no energy, big mood swings, lethargy)
2 Likes
5

Thank You CT !! This information is vital !!

6

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.