The
10 Commandments of Getting Cut
Losing Fat, Not Just Weight
by Chris McClinch
Everywhere I go, people seem to be trying to lose weight. They're hitting the
exercise bike, cutting fat out of their diets, and doing hundreds of sit-ups.
Unfortunately, an awful lot of what they're doing isn't terribly productive,
and some of it may actually be holding them back from reaching their goals.
Losing fat isn't tough, but there's a lot of bad information out there. What
follows isn't technologically advanced, and I don't have an infomercial or a
1-800 number for you to call and send me just $149.95, but it's solid
information that will help you lose weight.
1. Thou shalt create a caloric deficit. Just like you
need to take in more calories than you burn if you want to gain weight, you
need to burn more calories than you take in if you want to lose it. You can
adjust your caloric balance from both ends, of course: by eating fewer calories
and by burning more. If you're not burning more calories than you're taking in,
you're not losing weight. Period.
So far, so good, right? Wrong. Ever see what happens when people go on crash
diets? They lose plenty of weight, but at least half of it is muscle. At best,
they weigh less and have the exact same shape. At worst, their body fat
percentage actually goes up. Because you're reading this, I'm positive you
don't want to be one of those people. You want to lose as much fat as possible
while holding onto the muscle.
2. Thou shalt not try to lose the weight too quickly.
The first thing you can do to make sure you hold on to your muscle mass is to
make sure you're not losing more than two pounds a week. Unless you're obese, a
loss of more than two pounds a week virtually guarantees that you're losing
muscle as well as fat. Remember, you want to create a caloric deficit, but you
don't want to create a deficit so large that your body mistakes it for
starvation. If you're within 20 pounds of your ideal weight, shoot for a
deficit of about 500 calories a day, which should mean a loss of a pound a
week. If you're more than 20 pounds overweight, shoot for a deficit closer to
1000 calories a day, which will have you losing more like two pounds a week. As
a rule of thumb, the more you have to lose, the quicker you can afford to lose
it.
3. Thou shalt eat six meals a day. All too often,
people try to lose weight by skipping breakfast, having a salad for lunch, and
having a normal dinner. These people rarely look better after their diets,
though. Don't become one of them. Every time you eat, your metabolism spikes
for the next two hours or so while you digest the food. Given the exact same
intake, split into two meals or six meals, you'll burn significantly more
calories in digestion if you eat them as six smaller meals.
4. Thou shalt eat according to a plan.
Even when eating the right foods, eating at random is no good. You're less
certain of creating a caloric deficit, you're less likely to get the right
number of meals, and you'll frequently overdo it on the carbs,
underdo it on the protein, or find that there's no
real consistency from day to day. I can't recommend highly enough that you
follow an eating plan.
Eating the Right Foods
5. Thou shalt eat the right foods.
To burn fat, you've got to know what makes you fat. The first thing that makes
you fat is eating more calories than your body can use. Rather than eliminating
the excess calories, your body stores them as body fat. We've taken care of
that problem with the caloric deficit, but it's also important to understand
that certain types of food are more likely to make you fat.
Some of the foods that make you fat are obvious: candy, soda, beer, chips,
pizza, and fast food have no place in a healthy diet, period. When you're not
dieting, they're okay as occasional cheat foods, but even then, pay careful
attention to the words "occasional" and "cheat." As in,
you're not going to be eating these foods on any kind of a regular basis, and
you're fully aware of the fact that they represent a step back from your
physique goals. An occasional step back is healthy, but 90% of what you eat
should be quality bodybuilding foods.
The next group of foods is less obvious, especially since so many foods in this
group are traditionally considered "diet" foods. This group includes
pasta, bread, pretzels, crackers, white rice, rice cakes, breakfast cereals,
and fruit juices. What do these have in common? They're all highly processed
carbohydrates--high on the glycemic index, low in fiber,
low in nutrients, and not terribly filling. They massively spike insulin
release in the body, don't provide much other than calories, and leave you
feeling hungry again shortly after you eat them. You don't need to go
aggressively low-carb to lose fat, but you do want to
severely limit your intake of processed carbs. You're
much better off with fruits, vegetables, brown rice, yams, and old-fashioned
oatmeal (the stuff that comes in the canister, not the packets) as your primary
sources of carbohydrates.
Healthy sources of protein are hugely important for getting cut. Remember,
you're not just trying to lose fat; you're trying to preserve as much muscle as
possible, and one gram of protein per pound of body weight should be your goal
here. Good sources of protein include lean cuts of beef, 90% or leaner ground
beef, ground chicken, ground turkey, chicken breast, turkey breast, pork
tenderloin, fish, eggs and egg whites, cottage cheese, and egg-, whey-, and
casein-based protein powders. I can't recommend soy to anyone other than
vegetarians or vegans because of the high concentrations of phytoestrogens
present in soy protein. Other protein sources to avoid? Bacon, pork chops,
sausages, hot dogs, prime rib, fatty cuts of beef, and the other high-saturated
fat usual suspects.
Finally, you need good fats in your diet. The big message moving forward should
be that you need to eat the right fats if you want to burn fat. Let's start
with what the wrong fats are: saturated fats and trans fatty acids. Saturated fats
you're familiar with--they're the fats in butter, red meat, and hard cheeses.
Any fat that's solid at room temperature is a saturated fat and to be eaten
only in moderation. Try and keep them at less than half of your daily fat
intake. Trans fatty acids are chemically manipulated vegetable fats such as you
find in margarine or Crisco. Essentially, they're polyunsaturated fatty acids
with hydrogen atoms added to them to turn them into pseudo-saturated fats. If
the words "partially hydrogenated" appear anywhere on the label, it's
best avoided entirely.
Good Fats The good fats are the monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats,
particularly those high in Omega-3 fatty acids. These fats can help boost
testosterone levels and lower blood cholesterol. They also blunt insulin
release and aid in the absorption of vitamins A, D, E, and K. The majority of
your fats should come from sources such as flax oil, olive oil, fish oil,
natural peanut butter (if it has ingredients other than peanuts and salt, it's
not natural), macadamia nuts, almonds, cashews, peanuts, olives, and ground
flax seeds.
Food Logs & Formulating a Cardio Plan
6. Thou shalt keep a food journal.
No matter how good your plan is, the only way to make sure you're following it
exactly is to keep a record of everything that goes in your mouth. Is that a
pain in the butt? Yes, at first. Is it essential? Absolutely. Why? Two reasons.
One, you're trying to create a consistent caloric deficit, which is tough to do
if you don't know exactly how many calories you're consuming in a given day.
Two, most of the eating plans that control insulin and help you lose weight are
very specific about the ratios of carbohydrates, protein, and fat that you're
consuming. Writing down what you eat is the best way to make sure that your
ratios are correct.
The best way to set up your food journal is whatever way makes it the most
painless for you. You need to keep track of how many calories, grams of
protein, grams of carbohydrates, and grams of fat you're taking in at what time
of the day. That's the bare minimum. It's even better if you also track hunger
levels, energy levels, and mood. This will help you fine-tune your diet to
include more of the foods that fill you up and make you feel good.
I like keeping my journal in a physical notebook--I use a Mead composition
book--but others use Excel spreadsheets. There is no best way: whatever makes
it most convenient for you is the proper way to go.
7. Thou shalt do smart cardio. Eating properly is
only half the battle in losing body fat. The other half is physical activity.
Most people understand that some type of cardiovascular activity is a good idea
for fat loss, but unfortunately most do their cardio in a way that actually
sabotages their chances of making progress.
What do you think of when I mention cardio? An hour-long jog? A long, steady
session on the exercise bike? Sweatin' to the oldies?
If it's any of those things, you're doing cardio, but you're not doing smart
cardio. There are lots of things you can do to burn calories, but if you're
reading this article, you know that you want the calories you burn to come from
fat, not lean mass. Traditional long, slow distance cardio burns muscle and fat
pretty indiscriminately. In fact, if you do enough, you may find that your body
burns muscle preferentially to ease the demands of doing so much aerobic work.
That's exactly the opposite of what you want.
So how do you do cardio without sacrificing precious muscle? The answer is
interval work. Definitely get yourself cleared by a doctor before jumping into
intervals, though, because the whole idea is to rapidly and repeatedly raise
your heart rate, alternating the high heart rate work with brief recovery
periods. The optimal way to do interval work is probably to do walkback sprints. Sprint all-out for 15 seconds, then turn
around and walk back to where you started. It should take about 45 seconds to
walk back. Once you're back where you started, sprint for 15 seconds again. Do
seven sprints your first week, and add one sprint per week until you're up to
20 sprints per session.
If you're not up for sprints, you can approximate them on an exercycle or an elliptical machine. Simply go all-out for
15 seconds, then pedal or walk at a recovery pace for 45. The same build-up
pattern applies.
Finally, if neither of these ideas appeals to you, you can try boxer-style
cardio. Pull on a pair of bag gloves and pound the heavy bag for a minute, rest
for a minute, jump rope for a minute, rest a minute, hit the heavy bag for a
minute, etc. for the duration of your cardio session.
Cardio should be done 2-3 days per week, preferably on days when you don't
lift. If you have to do cardio on lifting days, try to do cardio in the morning
and lift in the evening. If you have to do them in the same session, lift
first. Under no circumstances should you ever do cardio before lifting, as you
will be dramatically weaker.
Weight Training for Fat Loss
8. Thou shalt train hard and heavy with the weights.
Time to explode another old training myth. For years, people have been saying
that you need to use heavy weights and low reps to bulk up, and lighter weights
and higher reps to get cut. This is just plain wrong. Getting cut has much more
to do with how you eat than how you train. Ditto for bulking up. With that
said, you want to train in such a way that your body will retain as much muscle
mass as possible; just like you can't flex fat, you can't look ripped without
muscle.
So what do I mean by hard and heavy? During this time, you want to be doing
primarily compound exercises that involve a lot of muscle: squats, deadlifts, bench presses, bent-over rows, pull-ups, power
cleans, snatches, military presses, dips. And you want to be training for
strength. This is not the time for doing three sets of 12. Bump up the weight
and go for five sets of five or even 10 sets of 3. Hold your rest in between
sets to about a minute, and make the weight heavy enough that you're struggling
to finish that final set.
9. Thou shalt not fall victim to the myth of spot
reduction.
This is the big one that seems to get people who want to lose weight or see
their abdominal muscles for the first time. Doing a billion crunches won't do a
thing to burn the fat obscuring your abdominal muscles. The abductor/adductor machine
(the "leg spreader") won't do a thing to reduce the size of your
thighs. Step-ups will firm up the muscles of the butt and upper hamstrings, but
they won't burn the fat there. Fat is burned by creating a caloric deficit and
training the entire body with resistance exercise and smart cardio. That's the
only effective way to deal with your "problem areas," whatever areas
they may be.
10. Thou shalt keep a training journal.
A training journal is never as important as when you're trying to lose body
fat. Your training journal is going to provide some of your most valuable
feedback on how well your diet is working for you. You're not likely to get a
lot stronger while dieting down unless you're relatively new to lifting
weights, but if your training journal shows that your lifts are going down,
it's a pretty good indication that you're restricting calories too severely and
possibly burning muscle as well as fat.
Again, you can keep your training journal in a variety of formats. The most
important information to record is the time of day, the exercises you do, the poundages you use for those exercises, the number of sets
and reps you complete, and how it feels. This information will provide you with
valuable feedback not just about your diet but about how your body responds to
exercise. It's also the beginning of a continuous log that will show you how
much progress you've made since you started working out and let you see at a
glance what your most effective workout programs have been.
These commandments aren't glamorous, and they call for a good deal of hard
work, but if you follow them religiously, you just might find that they'll lead
you to the promised land of a lean, sexy physique.