For a lot of women, going through a building phase can be a little intimidating. 

We are always chasing fat loss and being smaller, but at some point if you want to get a strong/toned looking physique you’ll need to spend some time building so you have the muscle mass to give you the shape you want.  

The foundation of making progress when trying to change your physique is having the right nutrition strategy.  You might know the basics of "calories in vs. calories out" but it goes a lot deeper than that when you get into more advanced territory with building the most amount of muscle possible.   

For the goal of building muscle, you need to have a good grasp of your macronutrient requirements

mac·ro·nu·tri·ent

A type of food (e.g. fat, protein, carbohydrate) required in large amounts in the diet. 

In order to set your macros, you need to know the hierarchy of importance with your targets for each goal as they are different for fat loss vs. building. 

For fat loss, the hierarchy goes: 

1. Adherence.  This is the foundation because if you are trying to stick to something that doesn’t fit your lifestyle or preferences, it probably won’t be sustainable for long and you’ll either not achieve the results you want, or achieve the fat loss but end up going back to where you started shortly after. 
2.  Total calories.  In order to lose fat you must be in a calorie deficit, burning more calories than you’re consuming.
3. Protein/macronutrients.  These are the proteins, carbs, and fats that make up your calorie allotment. Shifting these around in different proportions can vary the results you get within your fat loss diet. 
4.  Micronutrients.  These are the vitamins and minerals that are included in the food you’re eating.  These are important indirectly for fat loss, and more and more the longer-term because the healthier you are the better you’ll respond to a fat loss diet and the longer you’ll be able to maintain a healthy and fit physique. 
5.  Meal frequency and timing.  This can help out quite a bit with adherence and training performance, but doesn’t directly play a large part in fat loss. 
6.  Supplements.  These have almost no effect in fat loss until you get into the illegal stuff.  There are some potentially health-promoting effects of some supplements, which as discussed above if you’re healthier you’ll have a better outcome, but any thermogenic or “fat loss boosting” effects are negligible.

The muscle building hierarchy is a bit different:

1. Nitrogen balance. To build muscle you have to have a positive nitrogen balance, and nitrogen is found in protein.
2. Protein frequency.   To build muscle we want to get a spike of amino acids from protein between 3-6 times per day, spaced 4-6 hours apart. 
3.  Macros.  The amount of carbs and fats you have play a part in muscle building. 
4.  Carb and fat timing.  This is when you eat carbs and fats, and timing around training. 
5.  Food quality. This is how much of your diet is made up of whole, micronutrient-dense foods…and just like with fat loss, this is higher on the hierarchy but as always, a healthier body will respond and recover better, so it’s best to dial this in as well. 
6.  Supplements.  These are the least important aspect of building just like with fat loss.

SETTING MACROS TO BUILD MUSCLE

In order to set your macros for muscle building, you will follow a similar order but with more consideration for timing, and almost always skewed more toward carbohydrates.  Fat loss is more forgiving on some of the details, as long as you are in a calorie deficit and getting enough protein.  Within muscle building, you will need to dial in protein spacing and timing a bit more, and make sure you’re eating enough carbs for energy, glycogen replenishment, and repair.  Fats play a supporting role and are set close to the minimum to maintain healthy hormones, organs, and tissues. 

The sequence in which you’ll figure out your muscle building macros is:

1a. Calories 

1b. Protein 

 2. Protein spacing and timing 

 3. Fats 

 4. Carbs

CALORIES

In order to set your macros for building muscle you have to first find the calorie target you’ll use. 

To do that you need to know your maintenance intake.  Maintenance intake is a range, and will depend on several factors like:

→ How adaptive is your metabolism? 

→ How active are you throughout the day? 

→ What is your current size and body composition? 

→ What is your dieting history? 

To find your maintenance, the two simplest ways of doing that are to:     

1. Use an online calculator.  This is a very broad rough estimate, and a lot of times will overshoot maintenance if you are someone with low non-exercise activity or if you have dieted a lot in the past, but it is a jumping off point to adjust from. 

2. Track for two weeks.

This way is much more individualized to you, but takes two weeks.  Basically you track everything you eat and drink for two weeks and find the average intake per day.  You would also be tracking your weight during this time.  If your average weight is very similar week to week, you are eating within your maintenance range. 

Once you’ve found your maintenance intake, you will start out by adding 100-200 calories per day for a week or so at a time, taking average weekly weights.   

Your desired rate of gain will work on a scale from 0%-0.5% bodyweight gain per week. 

You will be toward the lower end of that range if: 

→ You are a newer lifter who isn’t very lean and wants to recomp (lose fat while building muscle) 

→ You are wanting to stay very lean and are ok with making the trade-off for less muscle gain 

→ You are an experienced lifter who is near genetic potential and taking a very long building phase in order to minimize the cutting time later on 

You will be on the higher end of that range if: 

→ You are an experienced lifter who wants to gain in a shorter amount of time and you’re ok with more fat gain

→ You are a newer and younger lifter who wants to maximize newbie gains 

Let’s use a 150 pound example client who started with a maintenance of 2200.  With a couple of increases of 100-200 calories they may end up starting their muscle building phase around 2500 calories.

PROTEIN

In general, protein targets should fall somewhere within 0.8-1.2g/lb of bodyweight.  You could theoretically increase the protein target in a building phase because you’ll be getting more trace proteins in things like beans, grains, and other non-optimal protein sources, but you also have the added benefit of plenty of carbs for a protein-sparing effect, so the range tends to still stay around 0.8-1.2 grams per pound.   

From there you need to decide on your protein spacing and timing. 

Muscle protein synthesis (MPS) is the process of repairing and building your muscle tissue and is triggered by a dose of amino acids in your protein, and notably leucine. 

This ties into an important concept called "the muscle full effect".

The muscle full effect is the observation that there is a period of time where amino acids spike MPS fully, then there is a necessary period of time where they fall back to baseline before you can maximally stimulate MPS again with another meal.   

Because of this you want to spread your protein intake into enough meals to get that MPS spike several times per day, but not spread your protein into such small meals that they don’t contain enough amino acids/leucine to maximize MPS in each.  

Typically, 3-6 meals with 3-4 hours between meals will tick both of those boxes.   

Exactly what meal spacing you go with in the 3-6 range depends on your total protein amount per day.  

A large man eating 250 grams of protein per day is able to have more meals and still hit the leucine threshold...plus he may need to have more meals in order to feel good eating that amount of protein.  

250 grams of protein split between 6 meals (40-45 grams per meal) is a lot easier than eating the same amount in two large meals (125 grams of protein per meal).  

On the flip side if you are a smaller female weighing around 110 pounds and you split your protein into 6 meals that only gives you about 18 grams per meal, which isn’t enough to maximally stimulate MPS. 

We have found that for most clients with a wide range of protein intakes, between 4-5 meals per day seems to be a sweet spot that works well for protein spacing and lifestyle.

Let’s take our example 150 pound woman eating 150 grams of protein per day.  Eating 4 meals per day, she’ll need 35-40 grams of protein per meal. 

Another strategy you can use to get every last bit of benefit from your protein intake is to have a slow digesting protein source before bed.  THIS study found that having a 40g dose of casein protein immediately before sleeping improved recovery from exercise and stimulated muscle protein synthesis.   

In order to take advantage of the spike of amino acids while you sleep, you’d want to have a slow digesting protein.  The study participants used casein protein powder supplements, but there are other sources of casein that can work like Greek yogurt and cottage cheese.

CARBS AND FAT

Once your protein is nailed down you can start to figure your carb and fat targets.  Fats will generally stay pretty close to the minimum threshold for health in a build phase, which is 0.3-0.4 grams per pound of bodyweight with women staying closer to the top end and men toward the bottom end. 

When you’re building muscle you want to have the most amount of carbs available, which is why fats need to stay as low as possible while still maintaining health.  Carbs will be fuel for glycolytic training, keep glycogen storage full, aid in staying in an anabolic state because it triggers the release of insulin (more on that HERE), and they are protein sparing. 

The 150 pound woman will stay around 50g of fat per day to fall within this .3-0.4 range. 

From there, the rest of the non-protein calories will go toward carbohydrates. 

150g of protein is 600 calories, and 50g of fat is 450 calories, 1050 calories total.  

The calorie total is 2500, so 2500-1050=1450.  

1450/4 (calories per gram of carb) gives us 362.5 (rounded to 365) grams of carbs.  

So the total macro breakdown per day is:    

→ 2500 calories   

→ → 150g protein 

365 g carbs 

→ 50g fats 

Once you have your carb targets and your total breakdown for the day you can adjust your macro timing to fit your training.  

Your protein targets will stay pretty consistent over the course of the day (i.e. if you know you want to eat 5 meals per day you can just divide your total grams of protein by 5 and try to stick pretty closely to that to take advantage of spiking MPS and the muscle full effect mentioned above). 

But with carbs and fats, there is a big advantage to specific timing.  

We like to see about ⅔ of the day’s carbs split between pre and post workout meals in order to fuel training and recovery.  These should be fairly easily and quickly digested carbohydrates.  

Fats take longer to digest, so those are better saved for meals not eaten immediately pre or post workout.  (There’s a full breakdown and explanation of what to eat around training, and why HERE.)

FOOD SELECTION

The foundation of choosing meals remains the same in all phases.  

They should be: 

1. Fit to your targets 
2. Enjoyable 
3. Repeatable 

But a meal that is enjoyable (meaning it makes you feel good, digests well, and tastes good enough) on building macros is different from a meal that is enjoyable on fat loss macros. 

If you’ve been in a dieting mindset for a long time you’re probably used to looking for high volume, low calorie foods.  

That’s great for cutting, but if you try to fill out all of your carbs with vegetables and fruit you’re going to be bloated and feel like you’re gaining much more fat than you want.  More importantly you may impair the digestion and assimilation of the nutrients you’re eating if your fiber intake gets out of hand. 

This is a great place to add in easily digested carbs.  Some carbs that digest very well for most people are: 

→ Rice and all rice products like puffed rice, rice cakes, and cream of rice 

→ Cereal

→ Potatoes 

→ Spotted bananas 

→ Bread 

This is also the time to add in more calorie dense foods you may not normally eat.  

Of course it’s easy to get carried away with this and you still want most of your food to be whole, natural, unprocessed foods, because they will provide micronutrients and promote overall health.  

But once you include a certain amount of those foods you don’t get extra credit for more.  In most cases if you get over a certain % of RDA of a particular vitamin, you don’t get extra-healthy, it just passes through urine.  

Once you have a few servings of a variety of fruits and vegetables included in your day it’s fine to include whatever easily digested more-palatable foods you prefer.

And that's exactly how you can figure out the right macro breakdown for building your physique.  

Taking all of these factors into consideration and nailing them consistently will take your building phases and your physique to the next level. 

If you're ready to achieve your full physique potential, with expert guidance through these phases of nutrition and training, click here to apply to work 1-1 with our team.

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Can eating more food by taking a diet break or refeed during a fat loss phase really help you make losing body fat easier?

When done properly, yes. Most people just don't understand how to apply these strategies properly for fat loss. 

Today’s blog teaches you the science behind diet breaks and refeeds, and how we use them with online clients to achieve easier fat loss.

WHAT IS A REFEED?

A refeed is 1-3 days of taking your calories from a deficit (below maintenance) back up to maintenance. This is typically done by increasing calories almost exclusively via carbs.

WHAT IS A DIET BREAK?

A diet break is essentially the bigger brother to refeeds - 4 days to (usually) 2-3 weeks where calories are returned to maintenance levels. A large portion of this calorie increase can come from carbs, but it’s also more common for more protein and/or fat to be added back in during this time.

WHY TAKE DIET BREAKS & REFEEDS?

The primary reason you'll hear people promote diet breaks is to prevent metabolic adaptation. 

See, your body has four different ways it burns calories: 

1. Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) - Your BMR is the number of calories your body burns just to stay alive. Generally, the heavier you are, the higher your BMR. 

2. Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) - Calories burned during digestion. It takes energy to turn the food you consume into energy. This is TEF. 

3. Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (N.E.A.T.) - All the calories you burn in your everyday movement outside the gym. 

4. Thermic Effect of Exercise (TEE) - Calories burned lifting weights, doing cardio, etc. 

These four mechanisms make up your metabolism. 

As you eat fewer calories and get leaner, your metabolism adapts to prevent you from withering away into nothing: 

→ Your body is smaller, so BMR decreases 

→ You're eating less food, so TEF decreases (given macro composition stays the same) 

→ TEE decreases, because it takes fewer calories to move your smaller body 

→ NEAT generally decreases, because you feel lethargic due to lack of calories 

Plus, levels of a hormone called Leptin also decrease. This leads to an increase in hunger, and less energy expenditure. 

As you eat more and gain more fat, the opposite happens - metabolism increases, hunger decreases. 

This up-regulation and down-regulation of your metabolism when dieting is called metabolic adaptation. 

The thinking behind diet breaks and refeeds is... 

If eating more up-regulates your metabolism and hormones, then taking diets breaks and refeeds means you'll arrive at the end of the diet with a faster metabolism and better hormones. 

Which sounds pretty great, right?

The question is... 

Does it really work like that?

THE SCIENCE BEHIND REFEEDS & DIET BREAKS

The reality is, there hasn't been a ton of research on diet breaks or refeeds in the sense we’re talking about here. 

But a few we have that do stand out: 

 → The recent ICECAPS trial on one week diet breaks by Jackson Peos and colleagues seemed to show they're an effective tool to decrease hunger and desire to eat:

A decrease in hunger of course means that it will be easier to stick to your diet again once you get back to the Fat Loss Phase. 

It may seem like taking a step back to take a diet break... but really, they'll usually allow you to be done dieting sooner, because you're able to stick to the plan more consistently after taking a pit stop, rather than trying to grind it out. 

The people you know who have been dieting for years, and still haven't achieved the results they want are also the ones that refuse to take a diet break.  

Along with the aforementioned ICECAP trail, we have a few other studies that are pretty promising. 

→ This study from 2003 set out to prove that longer diet breaks would be detrimental to weight loss.  

However, they found out there wasn’t a statistically significant difference in weight loss between groups that continuously dieted and those that took diet breaks, for the same period of time. (So the diet break group spent less total time dieting, but lost the same amount of weight as those who dieted non-stop.) 

→  The Matador Study. This study had two groups on a diet.

Group 1: Followed the diet for 16 weeks straight, in a 33% calorie deficit.  

Group 2: Dieted in a 33% calorie deficit, followed by two weeks at maintenance calories. They alternated between the two until they had completed 16 total weeks of dieting. (So it took them twice as long.)  

At the end of the study, the diet break group lost more fat, more weight, and seemed to see less adaptation in their metabolisms.

SCIENCE TRANSLATOR 🤓 

 As you can see from the graph above (taken from the study), resting energy expenditure (REE) remained higher in the intermittent dieting/diet break group (INT) than the continuous diet group (CON). 

→ The Diet Breaks/Diet Refeeds Study. This study took two groups through a 7 week diet.  

 Group 1: Ate in a 25% calorie deficit, for 7 weeks straight.  

Group 2: Ate in a 35% calorie deficit 5 days per week, but every weekend increased calories to maintenance levels via carbohydrates (so the weekly deficit for both groups was equated). They followed this pattern for 7 weeks.

Long story short, the study showed the continuous group and the reefed group lost the same amount of fat mass. 

So the research currently shows us that refeeds and diet breaks probably aren’t “metabolic magic”... but they can be an effective tool to have in our fat loss toolbelt. 

HOW TO USE REFEEDS FOR FAT LOSS

Refeeds are a tool to help us train harder and mitigate some of that mental fatigue that comes along with dieting. 

As mentioned, a refeed is usually 1-3 days where calories are increased to maintenance levels almost exclusively carbs. 

With an increase in carbs on a refeed day, we’ll see: 

1. Refilled glycogen stores ​​(think: carbs that are stored in your muscle that help fuel your training).  
2. An improvement in training performance over the next 24 hours, due to the increase in available muscle glycogen. 
3. An improved mood & sense of well-being.
4. A potential drop in water retention. The stress dieting places on the body can cause levels of the stress hormone cortisol to rise. Along with increased cortisol levels can come increased water retention. A sudden influx of calories can allow your body to “relax”, cortisol levels drop, and water is flushed out. 

REFEEDS IN APPLICATION

When it comes to diet breaks and refeeds, the estimated length of your diet is very important. 

For someone who had a smaller amount of weight to lose (5-25 lbs) and could realistically lose said weight in 8-12 weeks, there’s likely not a reason to worry about implementing longer diet breaks. It’s likely more beneficial in this case to just get the diet over with, so that you can get back to eating at maintenance for good.  

However, with shorter diet timelines like this (<16 weeks), refeeds can be very useful.  

The most common times we implement refeeds with online clients: 

1: When we start to see motivation or energy decrease. As you get leaner, it is normal to have a bit less energy.  

Calories are energy, so your body is literally “taking in less energy” when you’re dieting. 

That said, when energy or motivation are tanking (which can lead to adherence issues), a 1-3 day refeed is a great way to allow a client to maintain the results they’ve achieved so far, and take a few days to recharge before getting back to the diet.  

2. After hitting weight loss targets. Many goal-oriented clients do well knowing… 

“I just have to hit this weight loss target before I can take a 3 day refeed.” 

This is an effective way to split a diet up into manageable chunks (i.e. take a 3 day refeed every 3 weeks, at intervals of 5 lbs lost), rather than a brutally long journey (i.e. diet continuously until you’ve lost 30 lbs). 

3. During a more challenging week of training. Even when dieting, you should still be training like you’re trying to build muscle.  

This means that there should still be very challenging days/weeks of training within your program. 

For clients that are focused on body recomposition (losing fat and building muscle at the same time) instead of just fat loss (where this would be less applicable), we’ll often implement a 2-3 day refeed during an especially hard week of training every 4-5 weeks.

Weeks like this are when your body’s calorie needs in order to actually recover and grow new muscle tissue will be highest, so pairing a refeed with these weeks will aid the client’s ability to continue to see a body recomposition effect. 

HOW TO USE DIET BREAKS FOR FAT LOSS

As mentioned, a diet break is 4 days to (usually) 2-3 weeks where calories are returned to maintenance levels. 

Protein should stay at .8-1.5g/lb (don't decrease your current intake).  

Just like with refeeds, increasing carbs will refill glycogen stores. So it's likely most optimal to increase calories to maintenance almost exclusively via carbs, while keeping protein and fat where they were on the diet. 

We don’t want you losing weight (a.k.a. dieting) during this time. Even if you feel better, you’ll want to continue to increase calories if you are still losing weight, or you won’t be getting all of the benefits of a diet break. 

DIET BREAKS IN APPLICATION

As of now (similar to refeeds), it doesn’t seem that diet breaks are “metabolic magic”.  

The MATADOR study seemed to show a slightly better retention in metabolic rate for those who took diet breaks (their metabolisms were burning ~100 calories more per day vs. those that didn’t take diet breaks), but we have yet to find a HUGE difference in metabolism for those that do vs. don’t take diet breaks. 

That said, diet breaks are very applicable for clients that are new to training in a smart, science-based manner, and are very capable of (for a few months) building muscle and losing body fat simultaneously (a.k.a body recomposition).  

After 3-4 months of the recomposition process, typically results will start to slow, as we can only have “the best of both worlds” (losing fat and building muscle) at the same time before we need to choose to focus on pushing your body harder in one specific direction. 

So after the 3-4 month mark, it’s often helpful to push clients like this into a 1-2 month diet break.  

The increase in food dramatically improves your ability to train hard, recover better, and add lean muscle tissue to your frame. 

Plus, after 3-4 months of fat loss, most people are getting burned out on dieting. 

But after 1-2 months focusing on eating more food and building muscle, most people will feel mentally rejuvenated and ready to finish their diet strong (and now have more lean muscle to boot).

So essentially, this client would be shifting from 3-4 months focusing on body recomposition → 1-2 months focused on building → 2-3 months focused on fat loss. 

At the end of this process, said client would likely be as lean as they had set out to be, but would also have built a considerable amount of lean muscle tissue. So as a whole, their physiques would look much different. 

The other area diet breaks are most applicable is with someone primarily focused on fat loss, but with a large amount to lose.

Again, dieting just becomes very physically and mentally taxing after 2-4 months. That said, a client with the goal of losing 100 lbs probably won’t want to spend longer than necessary dieting (as they’ll already have a very long diet timeline), which is where 1-2 week diet breaks become more applicable. 

Here, we’re typically splitting up 8-12 week fat loss phases with 1-2 week diet breaks. 

Trying to diet much longer than this usually leads to adherence issues (which is why you know so many people that are always dieting, but never get any leaner).  

This allows a client with a large amount of weight to lose to still spend most of their time dieting and reach their goal relatively quickly, but also makes the diet as a whole seem more manageable, and allows the client to reap the physical and mental benefits of diet breaks. 

So splitting things up like this and taking diet breaks actually allows you as a client to reach your desired fat loss result quicker than if you had tried to diet straight through.  

If you're ready to take the guesswork out of achieving your best physique ever, click here now to apply for Online Coaching with our team. You'll get the structure, accountability, and expert guidance you need through every step of the process.

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As a woman, the heavy marketing to having the perfect physique, plus all the wrong messaging about how to get there can leave you pretty frustrated by lack of results.   

It’s not the effort that’s the issue... you’re working your tail off. It’s just not showing up in the mirror like you want it to.   

There are a few mistakes a lot of women make that could be holding you back from looking and feeling the way you want.

MISTAKE 1: CONFLICTING GOALS

As women, we tend to want to do it all, all at once.  That can be great in some aspects, but with physique transformation, it doesn’t work out in our favor.  When you try to build muscle, lose fat, get stronger, and improve cardio all at once, you’re sending conflicting signals at the cellular level.   

This ends up with you not actually making adaptations toward any one aspect despite working really hard.  Lack of effort isn’t your issue, it’s distinguishing what to do now, and what isn’t serving you. 

The solution for this is to hone in on one thing at a time.  This is why we have your training and diet periodized over the course of months and years.  There are distinct phases for building muscle, cutting body fat, and maintaining.   

→ BUILDING MUSCLE

Once you’re beyond the beginner phase you’re going to need a dedicated building phase to see much muscle growth, so we’ll set up a 3-12 month building phase where your sole focus is to build muscle tissue.  From there you can cut to lose any fat you put on in the process and reveal the muscle you’ve built during that time. 

Women tend to try to skip over this phase and stay in a deficit but that’s a big mistake that is holding your physique back.   

More muscle is going to give your body shape.   

Without it, even if you lose quite a bit of body fat you’re going to end up with the same shape you currently have, just smaller.  This is what you’ll hear people call a “skinny-fat” physique.   

When you see someone who has defined shoulders and arms, toned legs, and shapely glutes, it’s because that person has a relatively low body fat percentage and muscle mass underneath it. 

Going through this phase is also setting you up for a productive cut later on.  

Giving your body plenty of calories will not only supercharge your energy for training, but you’ll tell your body it’s safe to start to upregulate things like thyroid hormone and sex hormones, decrease hunger hormones like ghrelin, and increase the fat-burning satiety hormone leptin.  

These things, along with increasing weight from muscle mass, and increased NEAT mean you’ll be starting your next cut with a higher metabolism. 

To set up your building phase:

Find the top end of your maintenance range (the highest amount of calories you can eat while maintaining your weight), then add 100-200 calories and monitor your weight.  

You’re looking to add about 1-2 pounds per month in a build.  Much more than that and you won’t be adding any more muscle, just more fat.   

Training is the other half of the muscle gaining equation.  To maximize the amount of weight you’re gaining is coming from muscle tissue, make sure your training is on point.  You should be aiming to train with an appropriate amount of volume, and make sure your technique is correct. (For a full breakdown on how to set up your hypertrophy training, check out The Hypertrophy Training Guide.) 

→ CUTTING BODY FAT

 This is the phase everyone tries to stay in all year round.  There are a lot of problems with this approach:

1. You’re going to adapt, and get frustrated.  Your body has a lot of systems set up to make sure you’re not starving to death easily.  A few of the compensations that happen include more hunger, lowered BMR, lowered NEAT, fatigue, downregulated thyroid, and decreased libido.  Eventually, seemingly no matter what you do, your weight won’t budge.  If you keep trying to continue cutting instead of taking a different approach, you’ll spin your wheels putting in lots of effort and not eating much, but not getting anywhere.   
2. You won’t be building any muscle.  As mentioned above, muscle is what gives you shape, and muscle also plays a large part in your metabolic rate at any given rate--the more muscle mass at a given weight the more calories you’ll burn at rest and during training. 
3. Perpetually dieting makes having a social life hard, and will prevent you from eating a large amount and variety of nutrient dense foods.  This can create a vicious cycle of causing nutrient deficiencies that slow your metabolism through things like thyroid output, and cause health to decline, putting your body in an even worse spot for training, fat loss, and muscle gain.   

As a general rule, you want to get in, get the fat loss phase done, and get back to maintaining or building.  

If you have just a small amount of fat to lose, you could diet for up to 12 weeks or so and return to maintenance.  

If you have a larger amount to lose, and losing that weight would make you healthier, you can diet for quite a while before you have a need to get back to maintenance, but it may be psychologically helpful to take a week or two of a diet break every 12-24 weeks.  

MISTAKE 2: NOT RESTING LONG ENOUGH

→ REST BETWEEN SETS 

Most women who come to us as coaching clients have been doing circuit training, or instagram swipe workouts with lots of calisthenics, jumping, bodyweight training, and very short rest periods.  Those are easy to sell as effective because they burn and feel hard.  You’ll end your session tired and sweaty, and it feels like it worked. 

When you rest longer between sets, your body regenerates ATP, which is the fuel source you’ll use in the first few reps, or when performing something like a sprint.  (This is also part of why creatine can help performance, because creatine is stored as ATP.)   

You need about 3 minutes to fully regenerate ATP, but with most hypertrophy training you’re going beyond the typical “strength” reps and also using the glycolytic system (carb-fueled training--hint, hint...it’s helpful to have carbs to work work within this rep range).   

For this style of training you’ll need at least a minute or two of rest to put your full effort into your sets - closer to the 2-3 minute end if you’re performing a big compound exercise, and can be closer to the 1-2 minute side if you’re doing isolation work.  

If you’ve ever been in a training session and gotten distracted during the rest period making it longer than usual, you can tell when you go back to the next set how much it helps to have that extra recovery time.  

This matters a lot, because the closer you can push your muscle toward failure, the more muscle growth you’ll stimulate in that set.  We like to have clients push to around 1-3 reps in reserve.

If you aren’t taking adequate rest between sets, the thing that will give out isn’t your target muscle, but the cardiovascular system.  That means the target muscle for that exercise never actually gets within an effective RIR.

→ REST DAYS 

There’s also the issue of not taking enough rest over the course of the week.  If you’re someone who trains 6-7 days per week or takes “active rest days” that are way more active than rest, you may not be recovering enough to make progress.  

You need rest days in order to keep your total stress load low enough for health and performance, and to actually recover from the training you’re doing so that you can adapt and become bigger/stronger.   

This goes even more for anyone in a deficit. In general, if you are in a deficit (which adds to total stress load) you can make progress with 3-5 training sessions per week.  If you are in a surplus and have sleep and stress dialed in, that’s when you may be able to push things to 5-6 days per week.  Either way, rest days are important and an overlooked aspect for progressing your physique.   

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do things that are active on your rest days, but you should keep it to activities that don’t eat into your recovery ability.   

Things like leisurely bike rides, walks, housework, playing with kids, gentle yoga, and other activities that would be considered NEAT that you enjoy are still great to incorporate and may even enhance recovery.  Just be cautious not to turn every day into a day to push the limits.

MISTAKE 3: TOO MUCH CARDIO

Cardio can be a helpful addition to your training when you’re in a fat loss phase to burn a few extra calories a day, but it shouldn’t be the foundation of your training, and you should be careful not to do so much that it takes away from your resistance training performance.   

Weight training is used to build your shape, not to burn calories.  The pursuit of burning extra calories through training leads to ineffective modalities like mentioned in the section above, and can easily be undone with just a few bites of your favorite high-calorie food.   

When weight training is added and you’re building your muscle tissue, it sends a signal for the calories you eat to be used as fuel, and to be stored in the muscle to grow and repair and become stronger. Cardio is a catabolic activity, and your body can much more quickly adapt to it and burn less calories to compensate. 

When adding cardio, your body has a lot of mechanisms in place to “make up” for those calories burned.  

In this study they showed the amount of exercise (cardio) didn’t correlate to the amount of weight lost you would predict based on the numbers. 

That’s in large part to all of the things our bodies do to make sure you don’t starve to death. When you add cardio: 

• Hunger hormones increase 
• Fat burning/fullness hormones decrease 
• BMR decreases, organs shrink 
• NEAT is decreased 

That last one is typically the thing that makes up the biggest difference.  When you do a bout of hard cardio, the rest of the day you’ll naturally decrease movement through non exercise activities.   

You will tend to walk around less, rest instead of cleaning or playing with the kids, lean or sit more instead of stand.  All of those add up over the course of the day and can totally wipe out the calorie deficit created through exercise. 

There’s also the psychological side of it where you eat more, or justify eating things you wouldn’t normally, because you went for a run or did a cardio session.  When comparing the calorie value of the two, cardio vs. food, you can start to see how easy it is to quickly eat more than you’ve burned.   

A cardio session may burn 600 calories an hour if you’re really pushing it. That is equivalent to half a meal out at a restaurant, or one dessert.   

Yes, cardio burns more calories during the time spent doing it, but that doesn’t mean you’re burning more calories overall.   

The focus of exercise shouldn’t be to burn the most calories to lose weight, but to build your muscle tissue so that when you do lose the fat from a calorie deficit, you have shape created by the muscle mass underneath to show.  After all, such a small percentage of your total daily energy expenditure comes from exercise:

When you replace the time spent doing cardio with weight training, you start to create a job for your food to do.   

Now the carbs you eat are stored as glycogen in your muscle tissue to repair from training and to fuel future training sessions.  This also acts as a storage unit for carbs, and the more muscle mass you have, the more carbohydrates you’re able to eat without them circulating as blood glucose or being stored as body fat.   

The protein you eat is broken down into it’s amino acids which are the “building blocks” for your muscle mass.  You start to utilize the nutrients in your food and keep your metabolism running at a higher rate rather than giving it the signal to adapt and slow down.

MISTAKE 4: AVOIDING BUILDING PHASES

Building phases are often uncomfortable for women.   

You start to eat a larger volume of food, which can give you a feeling of fullness that makes you feel “fluffy” or heavy.  Even for women who know they should take a building phase to get the hypertrophy they want to reach their goals, they abandon ship when they start to feel the discomfort of the building phase.   

This is a hard one to get through, but there are some mindset shifts you can attempt to make to make the building phase easier:

1. Take your building phase over the fall/winter/spring. Having the bulkier clothes to cover up in helps ease the discomfort of feeling heavier than you like.  There usually aren’t occasions to wear a swimsuit over the colder months, so it helps that not many people will see much of your physique while it’s “under construction.” 
2. Think of the building phase as the slingshot that will propel you toward an awesome cut, and try to remember that cutting has it’s own discomforts. This is a necessary part of the process to get you where you want to go.  Most great outcomes have some sort of hardship to get there. 
3. Keep food quality high. If you’re eating foods that digest well and maintain just a slight surplus, you’ll gain minimal fat and feel more healthy and less bloated.   

Ideally, if you’re doing this in a slow and steady manner you will put on much more muscle than fat, which means you’ll end the build looking leaner and with lower body fat percentage.    

This is a time to utilize foods that are less filling per calorie, the exact opposite of a cutting phase.  You still want to include plenty of fruit and vegetables, but once you get enough for health, you don’t get extra credit for more, so this is a good time for:  

• Some easy to digest greens and rice instead of a large salad 
• Cereal in place of oats 
• More liquid calories 

Once you take 6-9 months (minimum) in a building phase, that’s when you can go back into a cut to strip down any fat you may have gained during the process and reveal the muscle you’ve built, and the toned look you were after. 

Need more expert guidance reaching your physique goals? Click here now to apply for coaching with our team. 

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The first half of your diet goes well... but a few months in, results creep to a halt, and once again you fail to achieve the lean physique you wanted from your diet.

Have you watched this story play out over and over the last few years every time you try to diet?

If so, today's blog is for you. You'll learn... 

→  The science behind why fat loss stalls

→  The 8 step system we use to help online clients fix stalled fat loss

→  How to adjust your macros to break through plateaus, and finally get as lean as you've always wanted

Let's dive in.

WHY DOES FAT LOSS STALL ON A DIET?

It's well known that to lose fat, calories in must be less than calories out... A.K.A. you need to eat fewer calories than you burn in a day. 

Now, the total calories you burn in a day is what we call your metabolism, and it's a lot simpler than you might think. 

Basically, your metabolism has four different pieces:

1. Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) - The calories your body burns just to stay alive. Even if you lie in bed all day, BMR won’t change. It’s calories burned through things like breathing, your heart pumping, etc. Generally, the heavier you are, the higher your BMR. 

2. Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) - Your body actually burns calories while digesting the food you eat: 

- TEF of protein = 20–30% 

- TEF of carbs = 5–10% 

- TEF of fat = 0–3%. 

3. Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (N.E.A.T.) - All the calories you burn in your everyday movement outside the gym. N.E.A.T. is the most controllable variable of your metabolism, and seems to be the biggest difference in the metabolisms of lean and obese individuals.  

4. Thermic Effect Of Exercise (TEE) - Lifting weights, cardio, etc. This is the smallest portion of your metabolism -  exercise doesn't burn many calories. You could burn 500 calories with an hour on the stairmill, and then drink a 500 calorie margarita in five minutes. 

These four pieces of your metabolism account for all the calories you burn in a day. 

So, if your food intake has stayed exactly the same (calories in) but you’re not losing anymore, we know that your calories burned must have decreased.

Or as you’ve probably heard it put... Your metabolism has slowed. 

*gasp*

But really, don’t worry.

A “slower metabolism” is a normal part of weight loss, due to something called metabolic adaptation. You didn’t break anything, nor are you doomed to a life of under-eating.

As the four pieces of your metabolism adapts to weight loss and less food (metabolic adaptation), some changes occur:

1. Your BMR drops as you lose weight - A smaller body burns fewer calories. This also applies to TEE, a smaller person will burn fewer calories during exercise. 

2. TEF drops, since you’re eating less food - Some of this can be offset by increasing protein intake, but a decrease in calories still generally creates a drop in total TEF. 

3. Calories burned via NEAT also drop - When dieting, you’re depriving the body of energy (calories). You’re more lethargic, resulting in less daily movement. Step goals and increasing exercise help, but a decrease in calories burned here is inevitable.

When you eat more, it has the opposite effect on your metabolism - you have more energy, you’re eating more food, and have (potentially) a larger body, so you start to burn more calories. 

But in this circumstance, your body is getting smaller as a result of your diet, and burns fewer calories as it shrinks. 

Thus, your metabolism slows. Some of this is an inevitable part of fat loss, and actually means you’re achieving the goal of the diet... a smaller body. 

To learn more about Metabolic Adaption, Optimizing Fat Loss, And Reverse Dieting, check out my podcast on the topic with Eric Trexler of Stronger By Science.

KEY THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN FAT LOSS STALLS

In my experience as a nutrition coach, metabolic adaptation is rarely the reason fat loss actually stalls… I’d say ~5-10% of the time. 

If your fat loss is stalled right now, you’re probably in the other 90-95%... meaning you don’t need to decrease calories or increase cardio yet in order for fat loss to resume. 

Since the goal within nutrition coaching is always to keep you eating as much as possible to fuel your performance, recovery, and lifestyle... we need to get clear on what else (outside of metabolic adaptation) can be causing a fat loss stall.

WHY FAT LOSS ACTUALLY STALLS

As cool as all of this metabolic adaptation stuff sounds… most of the time your fat loss actually stalls due to an error in measuring calorie intake or calorie output.

People are often too quick to cut calories when the problem isn’t actually metabolic adaptation, but mismanaging calories in/calories out.

This is exactly why with our online clients, the last thing we do is cut calories when fat loss stalls. 

One of the most beneficial things to helping out clients achieve amazing results has been establishing our 8 step system for fixing stalled fat loss... which of course I'm going to explain to you right now.

THE 8 STEP SYSTEM FOR FIXING STALLED FAT LOSS

This is the exact order of operations we take a client through within nutrition coaching.

This allows us to pinpoint exactly what factor has stalled your fat loss, and adjust your nutrition & training strategy accordingly. 

Ready? When faced with a potential fat loss stall, start by asking yourself... 

1: HAVE MEASUREMENTS DECREASED?

Our fat loss focused online clients take body measurements weekly, and drop them into a metric tracker.

How your measurements are changing is typically the single biggest factor we adjust nutrition from (in a fat loss setting). 

Your weight loss can stall (or even increase due) to factors like building lean muscle, stress, digestion, sleep, and hormones… just to name a few. 

Measurements give a much more accurate picture of your fat loss progress across the course of a week, and are less prone to the fluctuations of the scale. 

DECISION MAKING KEY:

→ Have you’ve lost .25”+ off of multiple measurement sites? It’s safe to say that you’re losing fat. No nutrition adjustments needed. 

→ If "no" to the above, move on to #2.

2: HAS WEIGHT DECREASED?

For most, the ideal speed of weight loss when trying to get leaner is .5-1% of body weight per week. 

But like mentioned, scale weight can fluctuate pretty wildly, due to things like water retention from higher sodium intake, stress, and digestive issues. 

Most should see a monthly trend of 2-4% of total body weight lost, but this rarely plays out as losing exactly .5-1% per week. 

This is why taking body measurements is so important. Online clients will often see weight loss stall, but a big decrease in measurements. 

This will be followed by a large weight drop a week or two further along.

So don't get caught up in weekly weight changes. Look at the trend over multiple weeks/the month.

This also very much depends on how lean you are already, and how much muscle you’re building as you lose fat.

A great example of this is our very own Coach Andrea's transformation when I helped her with her nutrition - she only lost 6 lbs over 6.5 months of coaching, but had a crazy body recomposition and measurement changes.

DECISION MAKING KEY:

→ Have you’ve lost .5%+ of bodyweight (on average) over the last two weeks? If so, no nutrition adjustments needed. 

→ If not, move on to #3.

3: DID FAT LOSS STALL ABRUPTLY AND/OR DID HUNGER DECREASE LARGELY?

The reality is, metabolic adaptation is a slow process. So a fat loss stall via metabolic adaptation happens very slowly, with rate of loss gradually decreasing. 

If you saw solid fat loss changes on these macros a few weeks ago, and then an abrupt stall, you probably don’t need to decrease calories yet, and the issue lies somewhere in #4-#6. 

Similarly, if you’ve been relatively hungry throughout the fat loss phase (2.5-3.5/5 is normal in a fat loss phase) and suddenly see a large decrease in hunger (without drastically increasing the % of protein or whole foods within your calories), it’s likely that calories in have increased, or calories burned via movement have decreased.

DECISION MAKING KEY:

→ Simply take some time to self-audit: has hunger largely decreased and/or did fat loss stall abruptly? From here, move on to #4. 

4: ARE YOU CONSISTENTLY HITTING YOUR MACROS?

This one’s pretty simple; if you’re not consistently hitting your macro goals, then you’re just eating more calories needed to lose fat.

No macro adjustment can make up for a lack of consistency.

DECISION MAKING KEY:

→ If you’re not consistently hitting your macros, no macro decreases needed. We’ll likely revisit your diet strategy, and make sure it’s the best fit for you and your consistency. 

→ If you are hitting macro targets consistently, move on to #5.

5: ARE YOU MEASURING FOOD ACCURATELY?

Measuring food accurately is very important for macros. Tracking accurately requires measuring most of your foods. 

I know it’s a pain in the ass... but not as much as kinda tracking for years and never getting results, right?

Truly, this is one I could go on about for a long time… but I’ll try to keep it brief. 

Tools to help track accurately: 

- A food scale

- A set of measuring cups

- A set teaspoons and tablespoons 

The Most Common "Tracking Mistakes":

- Cooking oils: Even if you don’t apply it directly to your food, but rather line the pan with it, it still gets absorbed. This can add up to hundreds of untracked calories.

- Dressings, toppings, alcohol, and condiments: The two biggest culprits here are salad dressings and condiments like BBQ sauce. Both are sneaky high in calories, and all too easy to forget to track.

- Estimating instead of measuring: We're typically pretty terrible at estimating our food intake accurately.

- Not tracking entire meals or days.

- Getting too flexible, with foods that are hard to track accurately: Nothing at all wrong with going out to eat, but eating food you didn’t prepare yourself always leaves much more room for error - you’ll never know exactly what’s in the dish you’re eating. So even if your macros look perfect in your tracker, eating out too frequently can still lead to underestimating calories. 

Guidelines:

- Don’t track using metrics like: small/medium/large. (I.e. One medium banana. One large avocado. ½ bowl of rice. 1 steak.) This leaves a lot of room for error.

- Weight measurements (in grams) are by far the most accurate. Weigh as much as possible with a food scale. Measure the rest with cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons.

- Weigh your meats raw (but thawed) and track them as such.

DECISION MAKING KEY:

→  If you realize you’re not measuring your food accurately, don’t beat yourself up. This is a common mistake. We’ll take the next few weeks to work through your food diary together, and figure out anywhere inaccuracies could be slipping in. Fat loss will resume shortly. 

→  If you are measuring food accurately, move on to #6.

 If you are measuring food accurately, move on to #6.

6: ARE YOU CONSISTENTLY HITTING DAILY MOVEMENT GOALS?

Like we talked about earlier, N.E.A.T. (non-exercise activity thermogenesis) is the most manipulatable variable of your metabolism. 

Metabolism varies a lot in how it responds to over-eating or under-eating - especially N.E.A.T. From my experience as a nutrition coaching, most client's metabolisms will fall into one of two categories: 

#1: Adaptive Metabolisms - For these people, when you eat more, your body automatically increases NEAT to compensate. (Think: subconscious fidgeting, blinking, pacing, etc.) 

Your body adapts to higher calorie intake by increasing calories burned through movement - so weight stays the same, even with calorie increases. 

The opposite happens on a diet. When you eat less, your body decreases NEAT by a large degree to compensate.

Your body adapts to lower calorie intake by decreasing calories burned through movement - so weight stays the same, even with calorie lower than before. 

#2: Rigid Metabolisms - These people see very little or no increase in NEAT as a response to overeating. Thus fat gain is a bit easier.

But on the bright side, these people usually don't have to decrease calories as much to lose fat (because calories burned through N.E.A.T. doesn't decrease as much as it would for an adaptive metabolism). 

To prove this idea, a 1999 study fed 16 people 1,000 calories over their maintenance intake per day. 

- Weight gain between individuals varied from .8lbs to 9.3lbs - a huge difference in 8 weeks. 

- The change in NEAT between individuals also varied wildly, from -98 cals up to +692 cals per day. 

Basically, the 16 people in the study had crazy different responses to eating the same calorie surplus. There's a huge variance in how people's energy expenditure (via N.E.A.T.) will respond to overfeeding or underfeeding. 

So the point of all this talk is; as you diet, movement will likely reduce. 

While we can’t account for all of the fidgeting and blinking you might cease to do, we do give all fat loss focused clients a daily movement goal. 

This helps ensure that your weight loss hasn’t stalled from a decrease in movement.

Depending on how active you are at work, 7-10k steps per day is a realistic target for most.

DECISION MAKING KEY:

→ If you realize movement has decreased (or been inconsistent), determine a realistic step goal you can hit daily, and stick to it. Fat loss progress should resume soon.

→ If you are hitting your movement goals, move on to #7.

7: WAS YOUR LAST MACRO ADJUSTMENT LESS THAN TWO WEEKS AGO?

The reality is, it just takes time for a decrease in calories to compound to noticeable changes. So if it’s been less than two weeks since your last macro adjustment, you likely need to just give it more time. 

DECISION MAKING KEY:

→ If it’s been less than two weeks since your last macro adjustment, stay put. Progress should pick up soon. 

→ If it’s been 2+ weeks, move on to #8.

8: HAVE YOU TAKEN A DIET BREAK IN THE LAST 8-12 WEEKS?

From a psychological perspective, dieting just gets hard after 2-3 months of pushing. Both physical and mental fatigue (a.k.a diet fatigue) start to creep in, and - often without even realizing it - attention to the finer details of dieting that have a big impact on results (I.e. tracking everything, using your food scale, movement) starts slipping.

This is why most of our online clients are prescribed a diet break every 8-12 weeks. 

Despite not seemingly having a large amount of physiological benefits, the psychological benefits of diet breaks are large for most. We almost always see dramatically improved adherence (and thus, fat loss) post-diet break.

To learn more about all things diet breaks, check out our blog on the topic here. 

DECISION MAKING KEY:

→  If you haven’t taken a diet break in the last 12 weeks, implement one now for 1-2 weeks. 

→ If you have taken a diet break in the last 12 weeks, fat loss is likely stalled. It's time to make a macro adjustment.

[For a guide to making macro and/or movement adjustments, click here now.]

We take online clients through an entire 8 step process before decreasing macros... because a macro adjustment isn't needed more often than not. 

So be smart (a.k.a. use our system) when determining whether you really need to decrease macros or not. 

If you're ready to stop guessing and start achieving the physique you've always wanted, click here now to apply for online coaching with our team.  

We apply proven, science-backed nutrition & training methods through individualized coaching to help you get the body you want, and teach you on how to keep it for a lifetime.

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You’re not happy with where your physique is at currently, and know that the body you want requires some combination of losing fat and building muscle. 

That said, you’re just not sure… 

“Should I enter a building phase (focused on adding muscle tissue) first OR should I focus on shedding the fat first, and worry about adding more muscle later?” 

The path you choose is important - this could be the difference between having the physique you want 12 months from now… or realizing that you spent months moving in the wrong direction. 

So let’s get into how to know which direction to choose. 

HOW TO KNOW WHETHER YOU SHOULD BULK OR CUT FIRST

Really, you have three options here, you can either: 

1. Enter a fat loss phase (a cut) 

2. Enter a building phase (a bulk) 

3. Enter a body recomposition phase (losing fat & building muscle simultaneously)

WHAT IS A BULK/BUILDING PHASE?

A building phase (what we prefer to call the “bulking phase” within our online coaching service) is a period of time focused on teaching you how to fuel your body for the absolute best training performance in the gym, and recovery from said training. 

During this time, you also must be sure that you’re training in a manner that will actually stimulate muscle growth. 

From what we’ve seen with new online clients, the building phase is most often where people need to spend more time, as most have avoided this in the past in favor of constant dieting.

WHY DO YOU NEED A BUILDING PHASE/WHY DO YOU NEED TO BULK?

Achieving a lean physique with plenty of muscle definition requires first having plenty of lean muscle tissue on your frame.

Most people who don’t have the body they want, despite the fact that they’ve been consistently working hard in the gym & keeping tabs on their nutrition for the last few years simply don’t have enough lean muscle. 

Sound like you? 

Here’s what you’ve failed to consider…. 

Unless you’re new to science-based training and nutrition practices like our online clients follow, building muscle is much harder when you’re underfeeding your body. 

So while you probably noticed a dramatic transformation the first 6-12 months you got into training and nutrition… you’ve noticed your physique hasn’t changed much (if at all) over the last 1-2 years. 

This is usually caused by constantly trying to diet and build lean muscle at the same time… but with where you are in your fitness journey, this is no longer feasible, for a few reasons: 

1: Eating in a calorie deficit (eating fewer calories than you burn) seems to reduce your baseline levels of muscle protein synthesis, as well as the degree to which your body increases muscle protein synthesis as a response to consuming protein. (1)(2)(3)

SCIENCE TRANSLATOR 🤓

Being able to build muscle across any given time frame comes down to something called net protein balance.  

Your muscles are essentially built from protein (or more specifically, the amino acids that you consume within protein). 

Muscle protein synthesis (MPS): The process of your body repairing/adding to your current muscle protein.  

After you consume protein, levels of MPS “spike” for the next 2-3 hours before returning to baseline. The size of the spike depends (to an extent) on the amount and quality of protein consumed.

Resistance training also spikes MPS.  

But it’s not just as simple as eat protein, train, spike MPS, build muscle. Because there’s another sinister force at work here...

Muscle protein breakdown (MPB): The process of your body breaking down muscle protein.  

Your muscle proteins are stuck in a constant battle between MPS and MPB. Sometimes the rate of MPS is greater than MPB, sometimes vice-versa.  

To build muscle: You need positive net protein balance (More MPS have occurred than MPB) across any given timeframe.  

To lose muscle: You need negative net protein balance (more MPB than MPS must have occurred) across any given timeframe.

So understanding this, it’ll clearly be much harder for your body to add lean muscle if you’re constantly under eating/dieting, and why eating more food in a building phase will put you as an online client in a much more advantageous position to add some physique-transforming lean muscle. 

2: You ability to train hard will suffer if you’re under-eating

Calories are energy. So when you're eating in a calorie deficit for fat loss, you're literally in an "energy deficit", and thus have less energy to freely spend on things like pushing hard in your training.  

Lifting challenging weights is the primary signal to your body that adding muscle is important. 

So if training performance is suffering because you’re under-eating/dieting (which is very common), building muscle while losing fat is much less likely. 

3: Calories are your body’s primary recovery resources 

Building muscle is more than just training hard… to actually grow new lean muscle tissue from what you’re doing in the gym, your body needs to be able to fully recover from all of the fatigue you generated in a training session.

As you can see in the above, muscle growth doesn’t actually occur until after your body has recovered from all of the fatigue that a training session created. 

One of the primary resources your body uses to help your recovery is food - especially the carbs and proteins that you’re eating. 

The trap that many people fall into is constantly training hard… but not providing their body enough of the recovery resources/food and sleep needed to actually adapt and build new muscle. 

Thus, you’re stuck in a place where your body can just barely recover back to it’s previous baseline before you train a muscle again… a.k.a. You’re always training hard, but never actually building muscle - your body is always stuck in the same place. 

When you enter a building phase, you’re finally giving your body all of the recovery resources it needs to actually fully recover and adapt to what you’re doing in the gym… so you’re able to build lean muscle at a much quicker rate than before.  

4. Your body is more likely to use protein as a fuel source when you’re under-eating 

When plenty of energy (calories) is available, your body prefers to use carbs and fats (as its fuel sources, as the process of converting protein to a usable energy source for your body) is very inefficient.

That said, when dieting and short on available energy, your body just doesn't have enough energy coming in (in the form of carbs and fats) to fuel itself, so it can potentially start breaking down more muscle protein as a fuel source. 

It’s pretty obvious why this is suboptimal for building muscle.  

So in a building phase, our online clients are focusing on properly fueling their bodies to be able to train hard, fully recover, and maximize lean muscle tissue growth. 

A building phase will typically last anywhere for 4-9 months within online coaching. At the end of it, you’ll have a considerable amount more lean muscle than before, which will dramatically improve the way your body looks and feels. 

PROS & CONS OF BULKING/BUILDING FIRST

Now that you have a great understanding of the benefits of a dedicated building phases, let’s weigh out the pros & cons to help you decide if you should bulk first. 

PROS OF BULKING/BUILDING PHASES 

→  You’ll add muscle tissue and see significant strength gains 

→ Better training performance, and more energy throughout your day 

 → You get to eat more food 

We already covered the pros very thoroughly above, so let’s move into the potential cons.... 

CONS OF BULKING/BUILDING PHASES 

→ You’ll likely gain some body fat 

→  Seeing visual changes takes longer, as building muscle is a slower process than fat loss 

During a building phase, we push most of our online clients to gain ~.5-1% of their body weight per month.  

Now, seeing the scale go up in a building phase can be a scary thing (and is usually why people don’t have successful building phases without the guidance of a coach).  

But as discussed, we don’t want you to be in a calorie deficit/losing fat here, as it’s much less optimal for muscle growth. 

So if you’re not slowly seeing the scale increase, you’re probably just not building muscle. 

With the weight gained during a building phase, you’ll inevitably gain a bit of body fat and feel “fluffier”... and that’s ok! 

Building muscle is a very slow process - gaining 1-2 lbs of muscle per month is great progress.  

But understand that fat loss happens much quicker, so you can easily lose 1-2 lbs of fat per week in a fat loss phase.  

Any fluff gained here will be lost quickly in the subsequent fat loss phase.

HOW TO KNOW IF YOU SHOULD BUILD/BULK FIRST

When deciding if you should focus on bulk/build or cut first, it’s important to objectively weigh where your physique is currently at. 

YOU SHOULD BULK/BUILD FIRST IF… 

→ You don’t have much body fat on your frame… but still don’t have the body shape you want. You simply don’t look the way you want to because you don’t have enough muscle. Not because you need to get leaner. 

→ You classify yourself as skinny-fat. 

→ You recently lost a significant amount of body weight (10% or more of total body weight). This doesn’t have to mean building in the manner described above if you still want to get quite a bit leaner… but realize that you just significantly pushed your body from it’s previous body fat settling point.  

This means that your hormones, energy levels, and metabolism will all be working against you if you enter a cut at this point. 

For online clients in this scenario, we highly recommend a period of time focused on eating more food, adding lean muscle tissue, and improving hormones and biofeedback before pushing for fat loss. 

ONLINE CLIENTS WHO FOCUSED ON BULKING/BUILDING 

 To wrap up the conversation around building, let’s talk through a few real world examples from our online client roster, and how we decided that they needed to focus on building. 

CLIENT EXAMPLE 1: PAUL

This is my former online client Paul.  

9 months before the “after” picture, Paul started coaching on a mission to look like a (better looking) Thor for a photoshoot.

From the start, we established that this was going to be a LONG GAME.

⠀ 

The end result he wanted required him getting shredded… but he first needed to add some muscle to actually look like an Avenger, and was already starting the process very lean.

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The first 6 months of this process were spent in a building phase, where we pushed him to eat more food to optimize his training and recovery.

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During this time, he added 20 lbs, and definitely got a bit fluffier. But he ALSO added a considerable amount of lean muscle to his frame.

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The final 3 months, we pushed him into a fat loss phase to strip off the fat (while maintaining all of his new muscle).

⠀

Paul uncovered a dramatically different physique than he had 9 months ago, because he was willing to play the long game of entering a build first. 

CLIENT EXAMPLE 2: KATHY

On the left, Kathy had just wrapped up a photoshoot prep and gotten very lean. 

⠀ 

After this, we spent months focused purely on eating more and maximizing performance in the gym, with a special emphasis on glute gains.

⠀ 

After months dedicated to building, we dropped her into a fat loss phase to prep for another photoshoot, bringing us to the picture on the right. 

In both pictures, her body weight is very similar, but as you can see, her body composition is much different, with more muscle and less fat on the right.

WHAT IS A CUT/FAT LOSS PHASE?

During this phase the primary result we’re pushing your body for is fat loss.  

New trainees with a decent amount of body fat or those that are detrained (used to train but have fallen off of the wagon) will still be able to add a notable amount of muscle during this time (a.k.a body recomposition). 

But as you understand from our discussion on the building phase, you won’t be putting your body in nearly as optimal a position to build muscle. 

This means that those of you who have been taking a smart approach to your training and nutrition for a decent amount of time will likely just maintain your current muscle mass in the fat loss phase instead of actually being able to build. 

WHY DO YOU NEED TO CUT/WHY DO YOU NEED TO ENTER A FAT LOSS PHASE?

Many online clients will start coaching with our team complaining that, despite training in a smart manner for a long period of time and being relatively strong, they still don’t “look like they lift”.  

For these clients, the reality is they often do have a well above-average amount of muscle mass… it’s just currently covered by body fat. (Usually they’ve been very consistent with their training, but less so with their nutrition.) 

In this case, a fat loss phase will completely change said client’s physique, and leave them looking much leaner and more muscular.  

This change isn’t because they’ve added significant muscle during the fat loss phase, but rather because they’ve uncovered/made more visible all of the muscle they already had.

On the other hand, some new online clients will start coaching in a position where their body fat is too high to enter a building phase (usually above 15-20% for men, 30-35% for women), and we need to get them leaner for improved health - after a fat loss phase, their improved health will allow their bodies to prioritize adding lean muscle tissue.  

At the end of a fat loss phase, your physique will look lean and tight - whatever muscle you have on your frame will be much more visible than it was before. Many men and women end this phase with visible abs. 

PROS & CONS OF STARTING WITH A FAT LOSS PHASE FIRST

PROS OF STARTING WITH A FAT LOSS PHASE FIRST 

→ You’ll look leaner. For most people, achieving the look they want ends with the fat loss phase. 

Most of you want a physique that entails more muscle and less fat - so after a building phase, we take you through a fat loss phase to uncover a lean, muscular physique. A fat loss phase is what leads to the lean look that most people want. 

→ If you’re at a higher body fat, it can improve your health and put you in a more advantageous position to build/bulk after.

 CONS OF STARTING WITH A FAT LOSS PHASE FIRST 

→ Most will struggle to build muscle during this time. 

→ If you don’t have a decent amount of muscle going into the fat loss phase, you’ll likely just look “skinny” at the end. 

→ Training performance and recovery suffer.

→ You don’t get to eat as much food. 

WHO SHOULD CUT FIRST?

Again, it’s important to look at where your physique is at objectively here. 

You should probably start by cutting first if: 

→  You’re at a higher body fat percentage (~15-20%+ for men, 30-35%+ for women). Even if you do want to add more lean muscle to your frame, if your body fat is relatively high, it’s a good idea to start the process with a fat loss phase.  

With higher levels of body fat comes reduced levels of health - things like your insulin sensitivity and cellular function can suffer, in turn meaning it’s harder for your body to add muscle tissue vs. if you were a bit leaner. 

→ You already have a decent amount of muscle mass. As mentioned before, if you already have a good amount of lean muscle & strength, but feel like you still don’t “look the part”, you just need a fat loss phase to make all of the muscle you’ve already built much more visible.  

→ You haven’t lost a large amount of weight recently. If you’ve recently dieted and lost a significant amount of weight, it’s not a good idea to jump immediately into another diet, as your hormones & metabolism just need time away from dieting to return to a healthy homeostasis. 

That said, if you haven’t dieted in the last 9+ months, you’re likely in a good position to start a fat loss phase.  

ONLINE CLIENTS WHO FOCUSED ON CUTTING/FAT LOSS 

To help you make your cutting vs. bulking decision, a few examples from our online client roster... 

CLIENT EXAMPLE 1: JULIE

Julie had spent a good amount of time focusing on eating plenty of food and making sure she was doing everything needed to maximize muscle growth leading into the picture on the left. 

She had actually been running her own building phase prior to starting coaching. 

After many months focused on building, we uncovered a dramatically changed physique at the end of her fat loss phase.

CLIENT EXAMPLE 2: KASSIDY

Kassidy started online coaching wanting to lose body fat and build lean muscle. 

That said, we knew at the onset that the #1 focus for improving her overall health was going to be fat loss. 

This transformation is actually the product of several long fat loss phases, with shorter 1-2 month maintenance phases in between. 

WHAT IS A BODY RECOMPOSITION PHASE?

Body Recomposition: Building lean muscle, and losing fat at the same time. 

A.K.A. what everyone wants, right? 

Basically, you’re getting the benefits of the fat loss phase and the building phase at the same time.  

Now, some people can catch this magic unicorn of losing fat & building muscle simultaneously… but it’s really not doable for everyone.  

So if you don’t fit into the category of people who should take on a recomp, please don’t waste your time trying. You’re better off starting a dedicated fat loss or building phase.

PROS & CONS OF STARTING WITH A BODY RECOMPOSITION PHASE

PROS OF STARTING WITH A BODY RECOMPOSITION PHASE 

→ For beginners and detrained individuals, it’s very exciting to see both strength increasing in the gym and your body losing fat so quickly. 

→ Gives you “the best of both worlds”... fat loss and muscle growth. 

 CONS OF STARTING WITH A BODY RECOMPOSITION PHASE 

→ For those who aren’t pure beginners or detrained, this will be a slower process. You want see the quick rate of fat loss you would in a dedicated cut or necessarily experience the quicker strength gains you’d get from a building phase. 

→ Requires tightly controlling all of the variables. A body recomposition has you walking a very fine line, as you’re trying to both lose fat and build muscle at the same time - so unless your training, nutrition, sleep, stress management, and nutrient-timing are on point… you’ll struggle to see results (again, excluding the beginners and detrained individuals mention before).

WHO SHOULD TRY FOR BODY RECOMPOSITION?

Really, most of you reading this shouldn’t. I want to make sure that this is clear, as many people waste years always trying to recomp… and never actually seeing their bodies change, as they’re advanced enough that they need to choose to either cut or bulk. 

That said, a few people who can successfully take on a body recomposition phase: 

→ Those who are new to training in a smart manner. If you haven’t been in the gym much at all, or have been training with something like OrangeTheory or F45, and suddenly switch to following a smart, individualized training program for building muscle like our online clients follow, you’ll likely be able to see a significant body recomposition effect. 

→ Those who used to train consistently/have built a solid amount of muscle in the past, but have “fallen off the wagon”. If you’ve previously built more muscle than your body currently has, getting said muscle back is much easier than the first time you built it (your body has “muscle memory”), so you’re able to regain your previous muscle tissue and lose fat simultaneously much easier than someone trying to build muscle for the first time. 

→ Those who aren’t already very lean… but also don’t have a very large amount of body fat to lose. If you’re already super lean, your body will just need more fuel in order to actually prioritize muscle growth - individuals in this case are better off focused on building.

Individuals with a lot of fat to lose of course should still focus on building lean muscle in their training, but the primary target with nutrition should usually be quicker fat loss vs. the slower recomposition approach. 

ONLINE CLIENTS WHO FOCUSED ON BODY RECOMPOSITION FIRST 

Finally (to make sure this is applicable), a few examples from our roster of online clients who started the coaching process focused on body recomposition

CLIENT EXAMPLE 1: JENNA

This is my online client Jenna.

She started coaching brand new to training in a manner focused on building muscle, and while not super lean at the start of the process, she also didn’t have a huge amount of body fat to lose.  

This made her a great candidate for body recomposition.  

CLIENT EXAMPLE 2: KENDALL

This is my online client Kendall.  

As a former college athlete, Kendall had a good amount of lean muscle on her frame in the past, but was detrained. 

This made her a great candidate to lose body fat and build lean muscle at the same time, as we could take advantage of muscle memory for a great recomposition effect.  

And that’s how to know if you should cut, bulk, or body recomp first. 

If you need expert guidance applying these principles to your physique transformation, click here now to apply for online coaching with our team.  

We apply proven, science-backed nutrition & training methods through individualized coaching to help you get the body you want, and teach you on how to keep it for a lifetime.

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If you're sick of always dieting but never looking the way you want, the thing you're missing is nutrition periodization.

The nutrition periodization method we use with online client like you is basically a way to split your nutrition up into different "phases". 

These phases of nutrition periodization are designed to work together to support quicker growth of muscle tissue, better health and hormones, and easier fat loss. 

When applied properly, you'll actually achieve the physique you want sooner when using our nutrition periodization method (rather than always being in a fat loss phase like you've done in the past).

In today's blog, you'll learn exactly how we help our online clients optimize each phase of nutrition periodization for the best possible physique results. 

OPTIMIZING EACH PHASE OF NUTRITION PERIODIZATION

What we often see with online nutrition clients is during each phase there tends to be a rush to get over with the current phase and move along to the next.

When we’re cutting, we focus on the hunger and low energy and just want to get done and move on to building some muscle.  When we’re building we think we’re too fluffy and can’t wait to cut.   

This is just the human condition to look at the negative parts of the current phase we’re in and think ahead to the positive side of what’s coming without considering the cons that will come along with that too….but, I digress. 

Each phase of dieting has its own mindset that comes with it, and each has its “pros and cons” so to speak:

So you can see that each one has good aspects and some less desirable ones.  A huge key to building your best physique and maximizing your genetic potential is to both optimize each one of these phases, and to fully commit to each and give it your best effort.

Let’s take a look through each phase, and see how to optimize and commit to each one.

THE FAT LOSS PHASES 🔥

For most athletes, this phase has the most appeal.  This is where you are revealing all the hard work you’ve done in the past to build your physique, and where you’ll probably feel like you look your best.  For competitors it’s where all the shows and photoshoots finally are completed and you get to show off your work.

LOGISTICS

To start out your fat loss phase, you first need to make sure you’re ready for it. A few questions we work through with online clients:

→ How long ago was your last diet? 

→ How long did your most recent last? 

→ How aggressive was your last diet? 

→ How is your current biofeedback, and do you have your menstrual cycle regularly? 

→ What’s your food focus like? 

If all of these are currently in a good place, you’re probably ready to diet.  If not, you may want to consider staying at maintenance for a bit longer until you’re in a healthier spot to start. 

Once you know you’re ready you can go into a calorie deficit.

Typically, anywhere from a 10-25% deficit to start with works well.  You can take several factors into consideration to decide how large of a deficit you need.   

1. What’s your starting body fat? The higher body fat is to start the diet, the more aggressive you can afford to be without running into any issues with muscle loss or hormonal disruption. 
2.  Do you have a deadline? If you’re dieting for an event you need to be ready for you know you need to match the deficit amount to the amount you need to lose to be ready for that event.  The more time the better here, and if you have more time that can leave space for things like diet breaks and refeeds in between. 
3.  How lean do you want to get? 
4.  Are you ok with taking it slow and steady and leaving space for more flexibility in your diet, or do you need to see things move more quickly to stay engaged and motivated?

MINDSET

In order to get through a fat loss phase effectively and efficiently, you need to be able to switch your mindset into acceptance-mode. 

If you don’t go into acceptance-mode, you’re setting yourself up to drag the diet on way longer than it needs to be, and end up with a worse outcome (both physically and mentally.) 

Here’s what I mean by acceptance-mode: 

You will need to ACCEPT during a fat loss phase… 

→ You can eat almost anything you want, but not in the quantity you want, and it will make your life easier if you just abstain from things that make quantity-control hard. 

→ Sticking to 85-90%+ whole foods makes your diet simpler, easier, and quicker. 

→ You don’t have the flexibility to include lots of meals not cooked by you. 

→ You’ll need to meal prep 

→ This will not be the time to include much alcohol 

 The plus side to this is the fat loss phase can be just a short phase you pass through and get over with quickly IF you accept these facts. 

Or you can fight against these things and 3x the time it takes to lose the same or less amount of body fat. Everything is a trade-off.

 It’s helpful to keep in mind that these things don’t have to be as strict during maintenance, and if you execute your fat loss phase and reverse diet properly, the maintenance phase is where you’ll be able to spend a large majority of your time.

THE MAINTENANCE PHASES 📊

LOGISTICS

To find your maintenance range after finishing a fat loss phase, start out by assessing your ending fat loss macros.  Your range has crept down as you lose weight (a lighter body burns less calories than a larger one.)  

So from your ending fat loss calorie level you'll want to maintain is where you have the largest amount of flexibility with all aspects of your diet. 

Of course you don’t want to stray too far off course of your good habits, and a healthy lifestyle with a decently-lean physique will always have a foundation of principles like eating mostly whole foods, drinking moderately at most, training regularly, and hydrating.  

But within that scope, you have the most leeway during maintenance.  This is where you can have the freedom to shift weekly calories to accommodate for food-focused events, shift your food timing a bit more, and get away with some alcohol fit into your macros. 

Your maintenance is a larger range that you’ll be working with than it is for fat loss or building, so that’s another aspect of the flexibility you have during maintenance. 

Jump up to just a bit under where you think the bottom of your maintenance range is. (You can determine an estimate for this by how quickly you're losing...if you're losing about 1 pound per week, you can guess you're at around a 500 calorie per day deficit. I'm on the more conservative side with this so in that case I'd bump up by 350-400.) 

From there you'll just inch your calories up week by week based on how you respond. You can expect an initial small weight gain just from having more food in your stomach, more sodium in food, and more carbs stored in the muscle. 

  

After that initial weight gain, if you start to notice consistent gain you know you've overshot your top end of the maintenance range and you can pull back down to the previous adjustment.  You’ve now found your current top end of your maintenance range.  

This is likely to shift and expand as you’ve been out of a deficit longer, build more muscle, and move more or less, but most people find that they have a comfortable amount of leeway within this range while still maintaining their weight.

MINDSET

During maintenance you don’t have to have as rigid a mindset as in the fat loss phase, but you also don’t have room to eat whatever you want in whatever quantity you want.  This isn’t really a reality for anyone in any diet phase that keeps a relatively lean physique.

Some general guidelines to maintain throughout maintenance (and all phases): 

→ Eat what makes you feel your best in terms of energy, digestion, and satiety 

→ Eat 80%+ whole foods with a variety of different micronutrient sources 

→ Have about 1-1.2g/lb of protein spread between 3-5 meals 

→ Keep an eye on health markers and biofeedback, including: 

• Sleep
• Hunger 
•  Digestion 
•  Stress 
•  Mood 
•  Blood pressure 
•  Blood sugar

THE BUILDING PHASES 💪

Taking time in a building phase is what will give you the physique you want, not just endless fat loss phases.   

When you build up muscle tissue it... 

→ Improves health 

→ Improves blood glucose by giving glycogen (carbs) a larger storage tank 

→ Strengthens bones and ligaments 

→ Gives your physique shape 

 → Speeds up your metabolism (muscle has weight and more weight = a higher BMR) 

→ Improves posture 

→ Decreases pain

LOGISTICS

In order to build muscle you need to have enough protein and a slight surplus of calories. 

Protein needs don’t really change going between the different phases when we’re talking in generalities. They can change a bit based on the individual to adjust for things like trace proteins from plant carb sources, hunger, or preference, but as a general rule protein still falls between 1-1.2 g/lb. 

As far as calories, we know that we have some individuals with rigid metabolisms and those with flexible metabolisms.   

Flexible metabolisms will start to move more and increase NEAT when they eat more calories, so their increase as a percentage of maintenance will need to be larger. 

Rigid metabolisms have a smaller maintenance range, and will need less of an increase when moving into a building phase because they compensate less with increased NEAT. 

So it’s more helpful to look at this as a rate of gain. 

In a build men and women should both look for about 0.25%-0.5% of bodyweight gain per week.  That will probably look like 2-4 pounds of weight gain for men per month, and half that for women. 

Knowing these numbers, you can just adjust calories up until you’re within that range.  Going beyond that amount of calories will maximize the amount of muscle you’re building, but there is a cap to muscle gain, and any weight gained beyond that point will be fat gain, so for most people it’s worth it to take this a bit slower and keep gains leaner.

MINDSET

The mindset in a build is mostly around maintaining meal structure.  You do have more calories to fit things in like meals out, but protein and carb timing becomes more important when you’re looking to maximize muscle gain. 

Peri workout nutrition should be a big focus in a build, since you want to...  

1. Maximize training performance 
2.  Optimize recovery and repair muscle tissue 
3.  Keep about ⅔ of total carbs surrounding training to improve 1 and 2. 

You also have less flexibility in a build to push and pull calories to different days to accommodate meals out, but since your calories are already high it shouldn’t be too hard to fit in a reasonable meal out.

The reason you don’t have as much flexibility with pushing and pulling calories is when you do that you end up in a much larger surplus some days, and going into a calorie deficit on other days.  In a build we really want to have a steady stream of macronutrients to help build muscle tissue.  

If you’re going into a calorie deficit on a training day to allot more calories to another day in order to eat out, you’re cutting your performance and recovery short for that day in a deficit. 

It may be a slightly better option if you have to include a more indulgent meal out, and can’t just decrease portion size to accommodate your calorie target, to accept that if you do that you’re going to end your build with a bit more fat to cut back off when it’s over.

BIG PICTURE NUTRITION PERIODIZATION

Each phase of the diet, when done right, can help set you up to have a more productive next phase.   

A great fat loss phase sets you up to maintain long term, or sets you up for a productive building phase; a well-done building phase sets you up for an easier fat loss phase, and so on.

Each one just needs an intelligent approach, good effort, and the right mindset. 

If you're ready to take the guesswork out of achieving your best physique ever, click here now to apply for Online Coaching with our team. You'll get the structure, accountability, and expert guidance you need through every step of the process of building your best body ever. 

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If you’ve ever dieted on your own you know at some point during the diet things will stall out (plateau) and it can be pretty frustrating.   

We know the fat-loss equation is calories in vs. calories out, so the first thing you might do when you experience a plateau is to cut your calories down more.   

While calorie balance is king and the thing that determines if you’re losing, maintaining, or gaining, there are other levers you can pull first that affect your calorie balance without actually needing to pull calories first thing.

When someone experiences a stall, as coaches we first go through a checklist to be sure it’s a “true” plateau:

But even when those all check out, there are still other levers we can pull before making a drop in calories. 

Why would you want to look for other levers instead of just pulling calories back if that’s a simple way to skew calorie balance? 

We want fat loss, not just weight loss.   

The more calories you’re able to eat while you diet, the more energy you’ll have, the more micronutrition you’ll be able to get since you’ll have more food (which means you’ll stay healthier), and the harder you can train which means you may be able to maintain more muscle mass.  And if you maintain more muscle mass you’ll end your diet with better aesthetics and at a heavier weight which means a speedier metabolism, and less likelihood of weight regain.

1: INCREASE PROTEIN 🥩

The first lever you can pull to increase fat loss without a drop in your calories is to increase protein in your diet. 

Increasing protein can help get fat loss going again for a few different reasons.  First, protein has the highest thermic effect of food.

Just through eating and digesting, you’ll burn 20-30% of the calories from protein.   

Compare that to carbs at 5-15%, and fats at 0-5% and you can see why increasing your intake, especially if you’re starting out below .8-1g/lb, can ramp up your calories burned in a day. 

Protein is also the most filling macronutrient.   

While this doesn’t directly cause your calorie equation to change, it can have an effect on your intake if you’re less hungry.   

If you’re tracking your intake and hitting your targets it wouldn’t theoretically make a difference, but if you’re hungry there’s a higher chance of eating past your targets, or at the very least just feeling more uncomfortable. 

Protein is also the building materials for muscle tissue, and as mentioned above the more muscle mass you have, the easier your fat loss will be. 

While each pound of muscle only burns about 6-7 calories per day, it’s still more than a pound of fat, and that’s at rest.   

There are other factors that can increase calorie burn over the day if your body fat percentage is lower.  The first is that if you have more muscle you are likely heavier.   

A heavier body burns more calories both at rest and during movement. You’re also probably able to put more power into your lifts, making the same training program more thermogenic than at a higher body-fat percentage.   

Muscle also acts as a storage unit for glucose, so the more muscle mass you have, the more carbs you can eat and store within the muscle without spiking blood glucose as high or having them stored as fat tissue.

2: INCREASE N.E.AT 🚶

NEAT stands for non-exercise activity thermogenesis. This includes all of the movement you do outside of structured exercise.  NEAT includes things like walking around, cleaning the house, playing with your kids or dogs, and even things like blinking, tapping your heel while you sit, sitting upright with good posture, etc. 

There are 4 different ways you burn calories that together are called your metabolism. The components are basal metabolic rate, non-exercise activity, digestion, and exercise.

→ Basal metabolic rate: the largest portion of your calorie burn, and makes up about 60-70% of your metabolism. Your BMR is determined by things like your weight, height, and muscle mass.  Short term, we have little control over this. 

→ N.E.A.T.: The next highest percentage of calorie burn comes from NEAT, and we do have some control over this one. While you probably won’t want to try to control your fidgeting and blinking, you can increase NEAT by moving more throughout the day.   

Increasing NEAT has been shown to make up to a 2000 calorie difference per day in individuals of the same size and gender. (Someone who’s “naturally lean” probably moves quite a bit more than someone who’s “naturally heavier”).

When you diet your body tries to conserve energy to prevent too much weight loss.  Our body’s primary goal is survival, so it will down-regulate things like thyroid hormone output and NEAT while increasing hunger hormones to encourage you to stay the same.   

Down-regulating NEAT means you’ll start fidgeting less, slouching when you sit, sit instead of stand, and put off doing chores that require energy.   

Since we can’t quantify most of these, we track steps.   

Step count is a good way of auto-regulating for NEAT, and can be altered willfully instead of something like blinking where you won’t have much control.   

Typically as you diet, if you aren’t aiming to hit a step goal you’ll see them gradually decrease over time, and that can lead to an early stall in fat loss progress.   

You can use a step goal to make sure that stays consistent.   

You can also use it as a lever to pull to keep progress going by increasing your step count over the course of the diet.   

Walking more steps is usually more effective than adding cardio because you can add a cardio session but make up for it by walking and moving less over the rest of the day, in which case you’ll be adding fatigue without actually increasing output.

Walking is also easy to add in small doses throughout the day, and has the added benefits of being a parasympathetic activity you can do in the sun, which is also great for reducing stress and getting more vitamin D.

3: MANAGE SLEEP AND STRESS 😴

Speaking of relieving stress, stress is one of the aspects you can modify to improve fat loss outcome. 

Stress doesn’t directly cause a stall in fat loss, or cause fat gain, but it does do a few things that can have a big effect. 

→ Stress increases cortisol. Cortisol can cause sleep disturbance, blood sugar disregulation, and water weight retention. 

When water weight is up it can mess with a dieter's confidence in their plan because it looks like you’re stalling or gaining weight when you’re actually just puffy and bloated.  If you lose confidence in the plan you can make changes too quickly or give up altogether. 

→ Stress causes a lot of people to overeat, or have cravings for calorie-dense foods, which increases the likelihood of going off-plan. 

→ High stress compromises sleep (and vice-versa) which has its own set of problems. 

Sleep has a direct correlation to muscle mass and fat mass. 

Studies consistently show 7-9 hours of high quality sleep has better outcomes for health, increased muscle mass, better recovery, and less body fat.  Poor sleep means higher grehlin (the hunger hormone), and lower leptin (fat burning, hunger-suppressing hormone).  For a deep dive on sleep check out our blog on mastering sleep. 

If you or your client stalls in their fat loss, check sleep quality and quantity before pulling more calories.  Not only can helping them improve their sleep get fat loss going again, but pulling calories too low at an inappropriate time can make sleep even harder. 

To see an immediate improvement in sleep, try implementing a sleep routine.  Your routine can be tailored to you, but an example might look like:

→ Reading with low light. Bright lights and screens suppress melatonin and make it harder to sleep. 

→ Brain dump journal. This helps keep your mind from racing when you’re trying to fall asleep. 

→ Meditate or deep breathing. These put you into a parasympathetic state and make it easier to fall asleep.

4: IMPROVE FOOD QUALITY 🥦

If you have protein and calories dialed in and see fat loss stall, you may need to check the sources of your calories.   

Believe it or not, the sources of your calories can have an impact on the “calories out” side of the equation, and make a difference in your fat loss. 

One reason for this is the thermic effect of food.  This was covered in the protein section, but notice each macro has a range of percentages of its calories burned through digestion. 

Whole, unprocessed foods will tend to be higher in that percentage range while processed foods will tend to be lower in that range. 

In this study the thermic effect of food was compared between two meals, one “whole foods” meal vs. one “processed foods meal.”   

The processed foods meal burned 10.7% of total calories in digestion, whereas the whole foods meal burned 19.9% of calories in digestion.   

That can add up to a huge difference over time!   

[*Side note:  The processed foods meal was a cheese sandwich made with white bread and american cheese.  The whole foods meal was a cheese sandwich made with whole grain bread and a slice of cheddar cheese.   

Whole grain bread is less processed than white bread, but I still would consider that to be pretty highly processed.   

I speculate that if they were to compare equal amounts of carbs, fats, and proteins in something like whole grain bread and cheese, vs something truly unprocessed like sweet potato and almonds, the sweet potato and almonds would have an even higher thermic effect.] 

Another similar anecdote is that peanuts or almonds will have a higher thermic effect than peanut butter or almond butter, respectively.   

The processing (grinding) of the nuts means your body just does a little less work to break the food down during digestion, and requires less energy output (calories burned) to do so.   

Not only do whole foods have a higher TEF, but they are more satiating than processed versions.   

The unprocessed food typically has more fiber, which is great for fullness and digestive health, but they also are usually more voluminous, which activates the stretch receptors of the stomach to keep you feeling more full, and less likely to have hunger and cravings throw you off-track. 

A great way to visualize this is, again, peanuts vs. peanut butter. Think about a 2 TBSP (⅛ cup) serving of peanut butter. It is about the size of a ping pong ball, and has 190 calories.  A serving of peanuts has the same calories and macros, but is double the size at ¼ cup. 

One more very important reason to make sure you’re including mostly whole foods is for your health.  

In the height of the IIFYM diet popularity this one got completely tossed out the window, but it’s starting to become more well understood that your health is actually an important piece of fat loss. 

You can improve your health with less-than-optimal food selection just by decreasing body fat and/or adding muscle mass.  

But whole foods give you more micronutrients and enzymes that will keep your energy levels up, sleep on point, and hormones in check.  

One example of this is thyroid hormone, which has a large amount of control over your metabolic rate.   

Selenium, iodine, and B vitamins are important for thyroid health.   

Processed foods will have much lower amounts of any vitamins, including these 3.   

The same can be said with other organs and hormones with other vitamins you’ll find in more abundance in whole foods. 

So if you have more than 20% of your food intake coming from processed foods, it would be worth swapping them out for unprocessed sources to eke out more fat loss. 

Making these other adjustments before pulling calories down further and further can make a huge difference in the success and amount of discomfort you feel in your fat loss diet.   

These are the same science-backed strategies we implement with our online clients undergoing the physique transformation process.    

If you're ready to be coached 1-1 by our team to your best physique ever, click here now to apply for online coaching with our team.

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How many times have you been thinking you need to start dieting, or you need to get to the gym… but get stuck waiting for yourself to feel motivated to actually do it? 

Or maybe you’ve been doing all these things on a somewhat regular basis and you all of a sudden hit a wall and lose all your motivation? 

The thing about motivation is that this happens to everyone.   

The people you look at and think...  

“They must be motivated all the time in order to accomplish what they’ve done.” 

...they have those days or weeks too. 

See, motivation is like an emotion. Emotions come and go, and we know that so we don’t rely on them to take action.  

Motivation is like happiness. If you felt like something was wrong with you because you weren’t happy every moment of every day, you’d start to feel pretty defeated. 

Motivation comes from action. If you’re like most people you wait for motivation to come before you take action, but the action itself is what creates motivation. 

Action > Accomplishment > Motivation 

So the more important question is...  

How can you set yourself up to take action?

1: HIRE A COACH 🏋️ 

Having an outside source of accountability that you’re paying for (skin in the game) is a huge step toward reaching your goals because it creates a big dose of motivation, and outsources the decision-making process for things you may not know how to do, like design your training program and diet.   

Just signing up with a coach is one big “action” step you can take that will give you the biggest bang for your buck when it comes to reaching your goals. 

A good coach will not only be a great source of accountability, but will be someone to rely on when you do hit that lull in motivation (it’s bound to happen), plus set up the right processes that will get you seeing that transformation is possible.  From there, all that’s left for you to do is to follow through. 

If you don’t have the means for a coach right now, there are still options that can help.  

OPTION 1: Consume content from a trusted source on things that will get you closer to your goals.  If you can listen to a podcast or read a blog about how to design your training plan or how to periodize your diet, you’ll feel more confident in your plan, be more likely to follow through, and start making progress.  All of that leads to motivation. 

(Check out the Living Lean Podcast, or the other blogs here on our site and scan through the topics. Whatever you need to learn about, there’s a post or episode that’s covered it.) 

OPTION 2: Choose a friend as an accountability partner, and in some way get some skin in the game.  =Whether that’s making a bet, having a reward at the end, or whatever you choose to get just a little bit of a pain point involved in not giving it your full effort.   

One particularly motivating strategy is writing a check for a relatively large sum of money to a cause you’re very much against.  If you reach your goal within the time frame, you rip up the check.  If you don’t, you send the check.

2: SET THE RIGHT GOALS 🎯

There are a lot of potential issues that fall under setting the right goals. 

→ TRYING FAD DIETS/OVERLY-RESTRICTIVE DIETS   

These can over-promise and under-deliver pretty badly.  They might promise big results in a very short time, and when that doesn't happen, or you don’t know how to work it into your lifestyle, it can be pretty demotivating. 

Instead you need a diet structure that can accommodate the way you prefer to eat, with some guidance on how to tailor that to your goals, likes/dislikes, preferred meal timing, and a realistic timeline. 

This is one place a coach can be very helpful.   

Regardless of the type of diet structure you choose, whether it’s monitoring quality, quantity, tracking macros, or just cutting out a few things here and there, situations and occasions will pop up that challenge you.  Having someone to consult is really valuable.

If you don’t have someone to consult, at least make sure to have a plan for what to do in various situations so you don’t default to an all-or-nothing mindset. 

→ ONLY SETTING OUTCOME GOALS, WITH NO PROCESS GOALS 

If you want to lose 100 pounds and that is the only goal you set, you’re going to be working with short bursts of motivation here and there.   

It’s more helpful to break those huge goals up into some weekly outcome goals (like 2 pounds per week), plus some process goals that will get you there.   

There are things you’ll have to focus on on a daily basis in order to get to that outcome goal.   

Examples of process goals could be things like... 

• Meal prepping  
•  Hitting 8k+ steps per day  
•  Sleeping 7-9 hours per night  
•  Training and recovering well 
•  Drinking enough water

Setting these up to check off on a daily basis will get and keep you more motivated than just having a big outcome goal you occasionally think about. 

Process goals will get your eyes off of something you’ve failed at over and over, and start building up some wins. 

Hear me out on this part because I know there are tons of inspirational stories where someone failed at something again and again, then finally did the thing they were trying for so long.   

Those cases are awesome and I’m not suggesting giving up on any of them.  I just recommend looking at things on a smaller scale that you know you can accomplish, then building on that...then repeating that process until you’ve reached the big scary goal that kept tripping you up. 

When you fail at something again and again, your brain starts to decide for you that you’re not able to do it.  Instead of continuing to rack up points for the argument that you can’t do it, chunk it down and start getting some wins.   

Maybe you’ve tried losing 100 pounds several times before and each time you’ve started and given up or gained the weight back.  The feedback from your brain next time you decide to give it a go is that you’re a failure at this, and this time will be no different. 

But let’s say this time you break it up into smaller process goals. 

Now your goal is to eat 150g of protein per day, eat 2000 calories, and walk 8000 steps.  

You also plan out your meals and your schedule to make sure you’re setting yourself up for success in accomplishing those goals.  Now you’re able to rack up a win every single day, so now your brain starts to rewire and automatically think you can set goals and accomplish them because it’s seen the proof. 

Then it’s just a matter of letting those small wins add up for long enough to reach that bigger goal of losing the 100 pounds. 

3: GET HYPER-SPECIFIC & CLEAR ON THE ACTIONS YOU’LL BE TAKING 🔍

In James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, he mentions a study where participants wrote down their intentions to work out. 

→ GROUP 1: The control group - simply recorded what exercise they did daily. 

→ GROUP 2: Read information about why working out is so beneficial for health before going to work out. 

→ GROUP 3: Also read the motivational material, but additionally wrote down...  

“During the next week, I will partake in at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on [DAY] at [TIME OF DAY] at/in [PLACE].” 

Compliance for the first two groups was 35%, but compliance for group 3 was a whopping 91%.   

Since learning about this study, this is something I’ve had a lot of clients write out when they were struggling to follow through on training or meal prep and it works really well.   

Giving your intentions a specific day, time, and place makes you think through when a realistic day/time/place would be, plus gives you a plan that you’re much less likely to procrastinate.  If you just plan to work out “sometime” this week, you can tell yourself each day that you’ll feel better or have more energy the next day.

4: MAKE THE ACTION YOU WANT TO TAKE “THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE” 🚪🚶

If you want to stay motivated you need to be consistently making the right decision and taking the right action.   

One thing that can often get in the way of that is our busy lifestyles.   

There’s always going to be something that pops up and causes us to be out of the normal routine.   

Those are the times when it’s very easy to default to the lowest-resistance option.  

Whether that be a protein bar, fast food, or just skipping meals until you plow through everything in the pantry to make up for it later, it’s not usually the most optimal option.   

Having your meals prepped and ready to take with you, or ready to just take out of the fridge and eat when you don’t feel like cooking makes doing the thing that is the best option, also the path of least resistance.

The same can be said with training.  Find a way to make getting to the gym easy.  This could be setting your clothes out the night before, having shoes in your car, choosing a gym that’s on route to work, or even building out a home gym.   

Making what you want to do the easiest thing to do will eliminate a lot of excuses and will cover you in situations where you inevitably have a dip in motivation.  It makes it easier to just keep checking those boxes which is what will lead to longer-lasting motivation and drive for your goals.

5: HAVE A PLAN FOR WHEN THINGS AREN’T PERFECT 📝

Just like you need to plan ahead to make choosing what you want to do easier, you need to have a plan B.   

Things will go sideways, schedules will get shifted, ball games or meetings will run long.   

Having a plan b in place for those times can take you from staying on track 60% of the time and saying “screw it” when the plan gets interrupted, to being on track 90% of the time and being confident in what you’ll do when the plan gets interrupted.

Look for patterns where you are normally thrown off course and come up with an alternative solution.   

Maybe you do a good job preparing meals and taking your food to lunch but your office has a catered meeting every Friday.  Usually you eat your normal meals, plus have all the snacks and desserts at the meeting and it puts you over your macros.   

If you prefer to participate in that instead of taking your lunch with you, decide on the amount of each food you want ahead of time, not when it’s staring back at you,  plan it in your macros, and take your protein if there is none available.   

There is always a way to make something work, even if it’s not what you would consider to be optimal. 

Looking for bursts of short-term motivation can help when you just need to get fired up for a lift or a training session, but it’s not going to help long-term… it’s like if you’re chronically sad and you watch a happy movie to try to “fix” your emotions.   

Long term motivation only comes from the consistent actions you take to move you toward your goals, and the only way to sustain motivation through periods of loss of motivation is to continue to take those actions when you don’t feel like it. 

Eventually pushing through those days you don’t feel like doing it (especially on the days you don’t feel like doing it!) will give you a massive boost in confidence and motivation and re-route those grooves in your brain away from negativity and back toward “I can and will do this.” 

If you’re sick of “waiting to get motivated” and ready to finally take action on achieving the physique you’ve always wanted, click here now to apply for online coaching with our team. 

You’ll get the structured training & nutrition protocols, expert guidance, and accountability you need to finally get (and keep) your goal physique.

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