Questions regarding body fat loss

Hej everyone,

It is undoubtedly a good idea to lower my Bodyfat (BF%) to 10% or below as I am certain it would increase my performance and health considerably. The question is how should I go about it? I have seen Slizzardman continuously saying that no more than a -400 cal deficient a day will yield best results when trying to maintain muscle mass but I have no idea why that is ? just looking for clarification and reasoning behind that.

My goal is to lose BF as fast as healthily possibly without losing strength. Not sure how I should do this though. Would it be wise to have FBE's 3-4 times a week as well as 3x30min steady state cardio sessions on the off days while eating enough to sit at no more than 400 cal deficient or could I eat enough for daily activity and FBE's only and what ever I lose from the cardio I dont replenish probably increasing overall deficient? I will have to choose swimming as I am still recovering from an ankle injury will this hopefully that wont be detrimental to my training.

I am eating pretty healthily I think. I usually eat around a kilo of veggies a day mixed in with a lot of milk until I get some whey and a bit of meat and fish and most of my food is focused around my work out.

At a guess I would say I am 18% BF at around 80 kilos (176 pounds)

for more info about my situation routine and eating habits go here.

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=9173

The short answer is the proper timing and pacing of your food intake relative to your energy expenditure and exercise times so (1) the proper nutrients & energy are available when you need it, and (2) you take full advantage of the "anabolic window" post workout.

Maintaining a 400 calories deficit at all times seems to be optimal for the body to use BF for basal metabolism.

There is a whole thread about pre/post workout nutrition that will answer all your questions.

while the thread you mentioned is a great source of information it still doesnt answer my questions. such as, why is no more than a 400 cal deficient best when trying not to lose strength/muscle mass and it doesn't answer my questions about cardio and if it is a good idea to not refuel after a 30 min cardio session for fat loss which will likely increase the cal deficient every second day.

Sorry, I thought it did...

ausswe said:

while the thread you mentioned is a great source of information it still doesnt answer my questions. such as, why is no more than a 400 cal deficient best when trying not to lose strength/muscle mass and it doesn't answer my questions about cardio and if it is a good idea to not refuel after a 30 min cardio session for fat loss which will likely increase the cal deficient every second day.

Your body is all about efficiency. When energy intake drops, it makes perfect sense to lower metabolism in response. The simplest way to do that, if you think about it, is to get rid of the most metabolically active tissue. I am assuming it will surprise no one to find out that this is muscle

So, while having available protein is necessary to build NEW muscle, the primary consideration when trying to keep what you have is to get enough energy.

The BEST thing to do is to not have an energy deficit at all. As your deficit gets bigger, you end up giving the body a better and better reason to lose muscle.

It is always a terrible idea to not refuel after exercise. You just damaged muscle AND are in a deficit. Can you come up with a better stimulus to lose muscle?

The trick is to not have a large momentary deficit at any point in the day but rather to have a 15-20 calorie deficit per hour (or so), and to focus on replacing what you burned primarily with carbs and some protein.

This is all based on research based on energy balance and body composition in athletes, including gymnasts. In fact two of the four groups were gymnasts. The artistic gymnasts had better energy balance and lower body fat levels than the rhythmic gymnasts, who had both larger deficits and higher body fat. This is a recurring theme with current nutrition, and some personal experience with this practice will help you understand even further.

Joshua, in a video of Poliquin recently, I heard him say that protein "pulsing" is better than continuous drip fed intake for body composition due to hormone surges when a larger amount of protein is taken less frequently (roughly every 2 hours is what he says). In your experience, then, is there a limit to how continuous your energy balance should be for optimal results.

By the way, sorry that my question is not very specific, if anyone wants a look, then the video is on Poliquin's youtube channel (but it is also pretty vague)

Thanks in advance

Ok so basically over a day i would end up with something like a 100-300ish deficient doing it the way you described with around 10-20ish deficient every hour But you also said its best not to have any at all if that is the case how do you lose fat if you are eating enough energy to keep your body going all day? is it when you sleep or something I am missing? I really have no idea about the processes of the human body and I am currently looking into studying more on nutrition and exercise and their effects on the body as soon as I figure out what course that would involve that stuff!

Also if I do the small hourly deficient is that ok to do every day? or should I bounce between deficient and slight surplus every other day?

Is it possible to target muscle mass loss? I heard if you go for a say 10km run or something but then dont give your body enough replenishment then it will target the damaged muscle mass first, which in this case would be my legs! I want to shrink them they are just to big. I probably know the answer behind this but thought I would ask anyway.

One last thing! Would it be more beneficial to lose bf at a faster rate at the expensive of some muscle tissue and then rebuilding? because It feels like losing 7 kilos of fat would aid greatly with my advancements! I went from 85 to around 74 and could do a muscle up I lost some muscle mass but it seemed mostly fat when i was doing lots of triathlon training! I lost all that weight in about 2 months mostly eating veggies watermelon and the occasional bit of meat and milk with oats for breakie. now I am 80 kilos and muscle up is no where to be seen! If anything I feel much stronger now than I did then.

Sorry for all the questions but knowledge is power and right now I am low on power!

ausswe said:

(...) around 10-20ish deficient every hour (...)

Good luck with the Kcal accounting!!! This sort of precision is unattainable! :roll:

I dont expect to be so precise but once I get nutritiming I imagine it will be far easier to keep track of! Most of my cals seem to relove around the work out though so I think they rest of the day will be higher deficiency. I always like to have an idea even if it isnt realistic in keeping to it I can at least strive to be as close to it as possible better than nothing really.

nf46 said:

Joshua, in a video of Poliquin recently, I heard him say that protein "pulsing" is better than continuous drip fed intake for body composition due to hormone surges when a larger amount of protein is taken less frequently (roughly every 2 hours is what he says). In your experience, then, is there a limit to how continuous your energy balance should be for optimal results.

By the way, sorry that my question is not very specific, if anyone wants a look, then the video is on Poliquin's youtube channel (but it is also pretty vague)

Thanks in advance

The 2 hours is about right, that's the fastest you could absorb 20g of whey completely.

The primary flaw in a lot of these arguments, which doesn't necessarily make them wrong by the way, is that when you have a large dose of protein (particularly when it's animal protein or whole food protein in general) you have a long, slow release that is no different than taking smaller amounts on a more regular basis.

There may be hormonal advantages to letting the amino acid levels drift back down, particularly when you're only exercising for one single bout per day. When you're very active, like biking to work for 45 minutes and back each day along with a workout and walks and so on like my girlfriend is, you can safely say that the uptake mechanisms change just as they do for carbohydrates.

The only real test would be mass gain results over an 8-12 week period between the two groups. Either way you will get good results.

FredInChina said:

ausswe said:

(...) around 10-20ish deficient every hour (...)

Good luck with the Kcal accounting!!! This sort of precision is unattainable! :roll:

Nonsense. In practical terms it means eating every 3 hours and having 340 kcal instead of 400 with each meal, if 400 kcal was about what you needed every 3 hours. That's ridiculously easy to do.

ausswe said:

Ok so basically over a day i would end up with something like a 100-300ish deficient doing it the way you described with around 10-20ish deficient every hour But you also said its best not to have any at all if that is the case how do you lose fat if you are eating enough energy to keep your body going all day? is it when you sleep or something I am missing? I really have no idea about the processes of the human body and I am currently looking into studying more on nutrition and exercise and their effects on the body as soon as I figure out what course that would involve that stuff!

Also if I do the small hourly deficient is that ok to do every day? or should I bounce between deficient and slight surplus every other day?

Is it possible to target muscle mass loss? I heard if you go for a say 10km run or something but then dont give your body enough replenishment then it will target the damaged muscle mass first, which in this case would be my legs! I want to shrink them they are just to big. I probably know the answer behind this but thought I would ask anyway.

One last thing! Would it be more beneficial to lose bf at a faster rate at the expensive of some muscle tissue and then rebuilding? because It feels like losing 7 kilos of fat would aid greatly with my advancements! I went from 85 to around 74 and could do a muscle up I lost some muscle mass but it seemed mostly fat when i was doing lots of triathlon training! I lost all that weight in about 2 months mostly eating veggies watermelon and the occasional bit of meat and milk with oats for breakie. now I am 80 kilos and muscle up is no where to be seen! If anything I feel much stronger now than I did then.

Sorry for all the questions but knowledge is power and right now I am low on power!

For the muscle mass loss, you could certainly do a hard leg workout and then not feed yourself properly. The most important thing to do would be to miss the 3 hour anabolic window.

As for dropping fat, keep these numbers in mind: 50-ish % of excess carbs go to bodyfat (slightly less but this is an easy number), 10% of excess protein goes to bodyfat, and 100% of excess fat goes to body fat.

If you are getting the carbs you need and not exceeding your energy needs with fats you will lose a reasonable of the day's calories as body fat going by the numbers. Something like 20%. For me that's about 500-600 kcal from fat per day, and that means something like 4 lbs of fat loss per month is reasonable while gaining muscle.

This works because 70% of your resting metabolism always comes from fat. If only 50% of the carbs are replacing this fat you can do some simple math and see what the difference is.

Example:

2000 kcal per day = 1400 kcal coming from fat.

Assume 20% of your diet is fat and 60% of your diet is carbs.

you are getting 400kcal of fat in your diet, so 1000kcal of body fat is being burned.

You are eating 1200 kcal of carbs. let's pretend half of that turns to fat. That's 600 kcal of fat.

1000 kcal fat burned - 600 kcal of fat made from carbs = 400kcal of body fat gone that day.

Bam. You just lost body fat with no calorie deficit. That's right. Welcome to the crazy world of how things actually work! It will make you dizzy at first because it is not what you are told, but dude... nothing compares with real world results.

It should go without saying that the quality of the carbs is paramount here. You will get very different results from sugar and fruits +veggies + brown rice, even if the calories are identical.

So I understand the importance of low GI carbs in the diet and its effect on insulin. However your approach to using carbs to loose weight is quite different from the typical paleo "get your calories from fat" mindset. I know this is fairly in depth but can you or someone else describe the pros and cons to both for both longterm health and fat loss? Or at least point me to a few sources so that I can research for myself.

I havent worried much about my diet. I typically eat whole foods but I am getting interested in some fat loss to loose some of the fat that I gained from stress (presumably since it is concentrated around certain areas) during the school year.

Joshua Naterman said:

FredInChina said:

ausswe said:

(...) around 10-20ish deficient every hour (...)

Good luck with the Kcal accounting!!! This sort of precision is unattainable! :roll:

Nonsense. In practical terms it means eating every 3 hours and having 340 kcal instead of 400 with each meal, if 400 kcal was about what you needed every 3 hours. That's ridiculously easy to do.

Come on now!!! Outside of a lab, the cumulative errors in estimating your basal metabolism, the variance in your food energy content, the errors in measure, the temperature difference of the food you ingest (that your body has to heat), your energy expenditure variations according to your mood, external temperature, etc..., the digestibility variation of that food, account for more than 10-20 Kcal per hour...

Just the energy content of a scoop of your buckwheat broth will vary if you take it at the top or at the bottom of the pot!

Say you have a scale precise to +/-1 gram and mix pure protein, pure fat and pure sugar, you already have a +/-17 Kcal build in error, just with the measure of the 3 components!

Are you measuring your food intake to the gram each and every time?

I do not think so!

Good luck with accounting for that sort of precision! :roll:

It works in real life. All random error like that evens out. Stop whining and start giving it a shot.

Joshua Naterman said:

ausswe said:

Ok so basically over a day i would end up with something like a 100-300ish deficient doing it the way you described with around 10-20ish deficient every hour But you also said its best not to have any at all if that is the case how do you lose fat if you are eating enough energy to keep your body going all day? is it when you sleep or something I am missing? I really have no idea about the processes of the human body and I am currently looking into studying more on nutrition and exercise and their effects on the body as soon as I figure out what course that would involve that stuff!

Also if I do the small hourly deficient is that ok to do every day? or should I bounce between deficient and slight surplus every other day?

Is it possible to target muscle mass loss? I heard if you go for a say 10km run or something but then dont give your body enough replenishment then it will target the damaged muscle mass first, which in this case would be my legs! I want to shrink them they are just to big. I probably know the answer behind this but thought I would ask anyway.

One last thing! Would it be more beneficial to lose bf at a faster rate at the expensive of some muscle tissue and then rebuilding? because It feels like losing 7 kilos of fat would aid greatly with my advancements! I went from 85 to around 74 and could do a muscle up I lost some muscle mass but it seemed mostly fat when i was doing lots of triathlon training! I lost all that weight in about 2 months mostly eating veggies watermelon and the occasional bit of meat and milk with oats for breakie. now I am 80 kilos and muscle up is no where to be seen! If anything I feel much stronger now than I did then.

Sorry for all the questions but knowledge is power and right now I am low on power!

For the muscle mass loss, you could certainly do a hard leg workout and then not feed yourself properly. The most important thing to do would be to miss the 3 hour anabolic window.

As for dropping fat, keep these numbers in mind: 50-ish % of excess carbs go to bodyfat (slightly less but this is an easy number), 10% of excess protein goes to bodyfat, and 100% of excess fat goes to body fat.

If you are getting the carbs you need and not exceeding your energy needs with fats you will lose a reasonable of the day's calories as body fat going by the numbers. Something like 20%. For me that's about 500-600 kcal from fat per day, and that means something like 4 lbs of fat loss per month is reasonable while gaining muscle.

This works because 70% of your resting metabolism always comes from fat. If only 50% of the carbs are replacing this fat you can do some simple math and see what the difference is.

Example:

2000 kcal per day = 1400 kcal coming from fat.

Assume 20% of your diet is fat and 60% of your diet is carbs.

you are getting 400kcal of fat in your diet, so 1000kcal of body fat is being burned.

You are eating 1200 kcal of carbs. let's pretend half of that turns to fat. That's 600 kcal of fat.

1000 kcal fat burned - 600 kcal of fat made from carbs = 400kcal of body fat gone that day.

Bam. You just lost body fat with no calorie deficit. That's right. Welcome to the crazy world of how things actually work! It will make you dizzy at first because it is not what you are told, but dude... nothing compares with real world results.

It should go without saying that the quality of the carbs is paramount here. You will get very different results from sugar and fruits +veggies + brown rice, even if the calories are identical.

Josh, I agree that a small deficit over a long period of time is the best way to go for the athletic population. But reducing

this way can only work but only if the person remained at rest all day where 70% calories are derived from fat.

Any activity, including eating, will shift the %, and generally towards the composition of the food which was eaten.

Eat a higher fat %, burn a higher fat %. Eat a higher carb %, burn a higher carb %. Increased activity will increase carb/glycogen utilization of course.

P.S. Thanks for your remarks regarding tendons in the hanging upside-down thread.

That's mostly bunk.

Activity steadily increases both fat burning AND carbohydrate burning up to something like 70% VO2 max, but that is on TOP of the base metabolism. The basal level of energy consumption is always there and remains unchanged. It's what happens on top of it with activity that is really important, and about that you are correct but your statement about the substrate shifting is not.

This has been demonstrated by a heavy body of research.

Now, with resting metabolism there is more truth to that, but there are other obvious issues. For one, the more dietary fat you eat the less body fat your body is going to burn. Ketogenesis is a complicated cycle that has several layers of misleading ideas built on it, but the end result is that your body still gets very nearly the same amount of carbs and a much higher nitrogen load in the kidneys. That is not an ideal scenario. More discussion on this should probably have a thread of its own.

It is definitely true that there is a shift based on what we give our bodies, but it's not quite what you would think... and if you look at research done on very high fat diets you will see that they promote insulin resistance. I was surprised by this, but it is hard to argue with so much replicated research. This has forced me to revise what I have said earlier about periods of high fat, low carb eating as a step towards correcting insulin resistance. It is possible that I was not doing myself as much good as I thought I was.

Perhaps. Yes, carbs will predominate substrate after 70% Vo2^ but it reaches 50/50 way before that, at a lighter level of exertion. So that 70% fat burn *all the time* is suspect, to me. See, what you're saying is that most of the time it's possible to lose fat eating at maintenance, providing slo-carb intake is around 60% intake. I'm just not sure that there's any proof of that.

At a deficit, for sure, fat will be reduced. But at maintenance? What your saying implies that there's a bodily preference

to disposal of fat stores and most people find that it's the opposite, that it's much more difficult to lose fat than to

put it on. I think that makes sense from a survival point of view too. Insulin sensitivity will play a part in how much fat is stored and lost too.

I'm not saying that you're talking nonsense. don't think I am either. I'm not an expert. I am not a big fan of high fat diets

either. Certainly from a performance point of view they have nothing to offer. And let's not forget the 4th macronutrient - alcohol. It has thermogenic and other weight loss properties as well, at low levels anyway!

Joshua Naterman said:

It is definitely true that there is a shift based on what we give our bodies, but it's not quite what you would think... and if you look at research done on very high fat diets you will see that they promote insulin resistance. I was surprised by this, but it is hard to argue with so much replicated research. This has forced me to revise what I have said earlier about periods of high fat, low carb eating as a step towards correcting insulin resistance. It is possible that I was not doing myself as much good as I thought I was.

Did they say what kind of fat they used? I find this hard to believe that healthy fats would do that.

Well zero carb diets have been known to cause insulin resistance, in order to spare glucose for the brain. A bit different from the pathological insulin resistance that comes with inflammation.

Razz said:

Well zero carb diets have been known to cause insulin resistance, in order to spare glucose for the brain. A bit different from the pathological insulin resistance that comes with inflammation.

This makes total sense! Thanks Razz and Josh. Makes me feel less bad about the carbs I eat. I used to think zero carbs rocked (for me) but now I'm seeing it really isn't optimal. I will just feel them mostly around workout time.

isn't the whole Idea behind the Paleo solution not to consume too many carbs except from veggies (which isn't much) and focus more on fat and protein intake? It sounds like what you are saying is that The paleo solution isn't such a good idea? man there is just too much back and forth with nutrition I never know what to listen to! I am just going to do this....

eat every 2ish hours during the day

eat most Calories around my work out

eat around 1kg of a variety of veggies spread over the day maybe more..

eat somewhere around 200-400grams of meat or fish every day

eat a few pieces of fruit maybe around breakfast and around the workout

eat the occasional small handfull of nuts (I love nuts especially amlonds)

drink whey protein mostly around the workout with a small bit of meat with one of the meals after the work out

eat a couple eggs for breakie with that fruit and maybe some veggies or something else I feel like for brekkie (or left overs)

sleep at least 7-9 hours a night

workout gymnastics for 1-2 hours every other day with the in between days being a lite 30 mins of swimming or running with some ab work and rock climbing on weekends.

that seems like a healthy lifestyle to me but tbh I just dont know whats what any more so we will see what happens maybe I will lose weight, gain strength, feel better or not. I guess the best way is to see for myself if what I said above works or not!

Oh also slizz can you fill me in on the deal with the anabolic window you talk about? or maybe send me to somewhere I can read about the research behind it?

ausswe said:

isn't the whole Idea behind the Paleo solution not to consume too many carbs except from veggies (which isn't much) and focus more on fat and protein intake? It sounds like what you are saying is that The paleo solution isn't such a good idea? man there is just too much back and forth with nutrition I never know what to listen to! I am just going to do this....

You completely, utterly and absolutely missed the point of Paleo. Which is to eat whole, unprocessed foods. Which is an awesome idea.

I didnt miss the point of paleo at all and it seems like common sense to avoid such un natural processed foods. If you look at what you are left with after not eating all the crappy processed food you pretty much are left with veggies, fruit, meat, nuts things like that with a focus on meat and veggies which is low carb higher fat/protein unless you are eating a lot of potatoes and fruit that I believe is not recommended by him. I am in the process of reading "the paleo solution" and he seems to stress the point of eating less carbs and more fat and protein saying that higher carb diets are more harmful than good this seems to be a big part of it. I wont say more until I have finished the book and feel free to fill me in on any misinterpretation I may have about this book so far but like I said I am only half way through so I could be missing some things.

Either way it may be because of the way I wrote it but you seem to have missed my main point which was what slizzardman says is in contrast to the macronutrient distribution of paleo. I dont think anyone would agree that eating all of these processed foods is a good idea for great health.

Pfew, the great news about diets is that Humans have evolved to be able to process a wide range of foods and survive our own ignorance or stupidity! 8)

............ at least for a little while! :roll: