Hi Coach.
I read your article ‘‘Fat loss, fast or slow?’’. Thinking I want to try a sprint, but I wanna be sure i don’t go overboard since I can be quite extreme when I get obsessed.
My maintenance is about 3000 calories (gaining slowly on 3500 at the moment. using your BDWP part one)
I plan on eating 1800-2000 calories (1,2 kg white fish, 200g salmon and as much veggies I can get without going over 2000 cal.). In addition I am going to add on extra walking. An hour extra for the first two weeks (doing exams so I don’t have time for more), then 2-3 hours daily for two weeks when i finish my exams and have time of until christmas.
In my mind I should be losing at least 2 pounds per week doing this, probably more.
Would you say this is ‘‘safe’’. As in I will not lose a huge amount of muscle? Is there anything else i should consider?
I weigh 94 kg (206 lbs.) today, about 15-16% body fat. Goal is to get down to 86 kg and 12% body fat (ish) (Long term I wanna get down to sub 10%, but I guess I’ll need more than 6 weeks to reach that).
Thank you in advance.
A 6 weeks blitz might be a tad long. It’s doable, but will normally lead to some metabolic adaptations which will lead to a rebound after the blitz is done. I normally favor 3 weeks for a fat loss blitz. If you want to do 6 weeks, I’d suggest 3 weeks blitz / 2 weeks maintenance / 3 weeks blitz.
I did a 6 weeks blitz for my last photoshoot. It WAS NOT the smart thing to do, but I had to be in photoshoot shape in 6 weeks, I did not have more time for professional and personal reasons.
The first 3 weeks felt great but the last 3 were horrible. And the worse part is that once the diet was done, it took me 2 weeks to feel normal (not depressive or unmotivated) again. I also regained most of the weight, despite knowing how to theoretically avoid a rebound.
Metabolic adaptations (mostly chronically elevated cortisol leading to a decrease in T4 to T3 conversion and thus a slower metabolism, as well as a leptin decrease which makes you have more cravings and can slow metabolic rate too) happen in response to both the severity and the length of the caloric deficit. 6 weeks at a large deficit is one of the worse possible combination because it has a severe deficit and a long enough period in that deficit.
Take it for what it’s worth, and from someone who has done some crazy, extreme fat loss stuff, fat loss blitzes are pretty much never worth it and almost never work in the moderate term and the only time I recommend them is if you absolutely don’t have a choice.
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Thank you for the quick reply. I will take your advice and try three weeks and see how it goes.
You are probably right that slow is better, and I’m not actually in a hurry. My problem is that I need to be extreme otherwise I get sloppy and lose motivation.
I totally understand that. I’m very much like that myself. I like to have one specific goal and devote everything possible to achieving that goal for a brief period of time. All the more reasons to use a series of shorter blitzes linked together by short periods of maintenance or even a slight surplus. I kinda like the old ABCDE diet by Thorbjorn Akerfeld (our own TC wrote the interview for Muscle Media something like 25 years ago!). You can easily find the 4 (or 5) part article on Google.
Essentially it’s alternating 2 weeks of a major caloric surplus with 2 weeks of a major caloric deficit. If you are more oriented toward fat loss, you could use a smaller surplus on the “high calories” period.
TC also has his own, less extreme, version in T-nation’s archive.
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Above and beyond as usual, than you for the reply, I will definitely check it out.