The Correct Way to Lose 25 Kilos?

Bigger Stronger Leaner Christian Thibaudeau Coaching
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I weigh 110 kgs today.
I lift heavy and have a solid muscle base due to years of training. But these past couple of years I’ve been too careless and let myself get into a very bad shape…
I want to lose 20 kilos . Or maybe even 25.
How should I go about it in the sense that I don’t become a slim fat person! Please I want to retain as much lean weight as possible.
Diet is King , I just need to know what approach should be taken… And what wouldbe a reasonable time in which I can attempt to drop the fat. For training and diet I’ve been doing a lot of reading on tnation
I’m motivated too. But somewhat impatient

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I’m trying with keto (attempting to get to keto at least). So far, in my attempt, I have been able to drop over 11 lbs this month (March). I guess that is around 5 kilos? My goal is to drop down 60 lbs, which I think is about 25 kilos. Just a thought.

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Keto makes a person irritable, or so I’ve heard.
And being a lawyer I need to be calm

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In legal terms, that’s what is called ‘hearsay’. What kind of lawyer are you?

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I’m a criminal lawyer in India…
Plus I also do some miscellaneous cases

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Fair enough. Not far removed from what I do in the UK.

Can’t be easy being keto in India either, although ghee is the trendy keto food these days so…

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I would suggest looking into a Protein Sparring Modified Fast. If you are impatient and willing it will work.

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PSMF. Read up on the “Velocity Diet” here on T-Nation and “the rapid fat loss diet”. This is the fastest way you can lose fat and retain most of your muscle.

CAVEAT EMPTOR

  1. You have to lift while on a PSMF to hold muscle.

  2. You have to start eating sensibly and raise calories slowly after a PSMF or you’ll just get fat again.

  3. After the first 25-30lbs lost on a PSMF your metabolism will stall and won’t recover for about a month. Then you can begin losing weight again.

  4. Eating super low calorie really, really sucks.

  5. Don’t know if you have decent protein powders in India, but I would recommend the whole food version and not the shake version.

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Where does point 3 come from?

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And re point 2, are you suggesting you must reverse diet?

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I remember once watching a podcast with lyle mcdonald, in which he talked about how evidence shows that reverse dieting isn’t really a thing… I don’t recall everything he said but that basically had to do with the metabolic adaptations of dieting being in large part to attribute to NET and not a slowdown of your BMR itself, plus he seemed to be of the idea that one’s metabolic setpoint can’t really be changed by increasing calories progressively.

What’s more, I think lyle mcdonald is actually a proponent of drastically increasing calories (and carbs) for a short period of time following a dieting period. In his books, he goes into detail about how if your body finds itself in a very glycogen-depleted state, and has switched to using fat for fuel for some time, one can increase carbs to a great extent while keeping fat intake minimal, and that would result in little to no fat gain while one would get all the benefits of refeeding with carbs. He also says this would only work for a very short span of time, about 36 hours if I recall correctly

If someone better informed on this than me wants to chime in, I’d love to hear thoughts

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My personal experience. So n=1.

That’s not what Lyle McDonald calls it, but he does recommend you don’t go from PSMF level right back to maintenance.

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Care to provide a reference here? I might be honestly wrong, but I don’t recall him saying any of this, at least not in his rapid fat loss book, in which I believe, especially for category 1 dieters, he suggests 2 full days of refeed at the end of the diet, followed by 1-2 weeks at maintenance.

I also remember that when asked by Jeff Nippard (is that the guy’s name?) whether it’s smart to increase calories progressively once the diet is over, he said he didn’t think it was necessary and if one did, they would have to do it in “2 weeks maximum, because while doing so you’re basically still in a deficit.”

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Well that’s not “right back to maintenance” lol. I must be recalling his UD 2.0 or something and not the RFL handbook itself. Mine is so old it’s actually a spiral bound book and I think we loaned it to somebody. So I can’t check without pirating it.

Doesn’t he have a section in there about “finding your new maintenance”? I thought he did. He explains that after you’ve lost 25lbs that your new maintenance level is a great deal lower than it used to be. So I mischaracterized it. You shouldn’t go right back to your “old” maintenance. But as you’ve both pointed out, that’s not the same thing as a reverse diet.

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I think the reason fr gradually increasing carbs after a severe diet is more psychological than physiological. After a period of severe deprivation it is VERY easy to fall in binging/gorging mode when you reintroduce carbs. The enhanced pleasure response (among other things) make it really easy to go overboard if you don’t impose limits on yourself. That’s why I believe that after a phase of very intense dieting you need to set a limit. It doesn’t have to be a very gradual increase in carbs/calories, you can move up to a maintenance level or slightly higher, but until that initial 2-3 weeks where you are more at risk of gorging or overindulging you should follow a plan. Especially if you know that you easily tend to abuse (which is likely the case with people who want to lose a large amount of weight).

We should not only think about physiological reasons. Something can offer no physiological benefit, but still be a good approach from a psychological standpoint.

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So theoretically, if one is tracking calories and is disciplined enough to follow the plan, they don’t have to worry about gradually increasing carbs?

When I ended my PSMF diet last week, I did not go one gram above the carb target (which, as per Lyle McDonald’s recommendation, was pretty high—800 g in fact) and had no problems whatsoever scaling back to maintenance (about half that).

I believe I have quite a bit of discipline and never had problems sticking to a diet, however strict or complicated that was. I’ve also been tracking calories for 2 years day in and day out.

So for a person like me, do you think I can re introduce carbs quickly after a diet?

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Instead of going into intricacies , will the “eat healthy, train regularly” approach work for someone like me?
Say full body workouts x3 per week plus 3 hiit sessions and eating clean , healthy and nutritionally dense foods with no carbs after 7pm!
Will it take me to 15% bf?
I had a fairly muscular lean body back in the day, but lot of bad habits left me obese…

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Also , are supplements like ECA or clenbuterol useful for me?

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1st, no questions about drugs (clen). 2nd, ECA is not something that I believe someone should take until they reach a very low level of bodyfat (sub 10%) and need to get down to super low levels (to compete in a physique sport for example) and that fat loss has stalled. But it would be a last resort, and I HATE using stimulants

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Yes it will… IF your energy intake (“calories”) represents a deficit. Recent studies have shown that if protein level is high enough, if calories are equal is doesn’t matter the carbs and fat rations for fat loss.

So if you …

  • Eat enough protein (250g per day or so in your case)
  • Are in a caloric deficit
    -Don’t eat crap

You should be able to drop down to 15%

If you can’t, then what you are eating is not a deficit.

The problem with “eating well” is that if you consume too much food and become in a caloric surplus you will not lose fat, regardless of how healthy you are eating

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