The results are in and I’m happy to say, David has achieved the goal I set for him in just one week. We agreed it would be more suitable now for him to increase calories and increase healthy complex carbs to ensure that he doesn’t lose muscle mass.
This can be a tricky balance and there’s a fine line between lowering the calories enough to see a body fat reduction, and ensuring muscle mass is preserved. In an ideal world, if we’re trying to lose body fat, we want to lose body fat only and not the precious muscle we’ve been working so hard to build in the gym. The reality is, when we lower our calories and the body doesn’t get it’s daily energy requirement met from food, it will resort to burning for fuel, anything it doesn’t perceive as essential tissue. The majority of this is subcutaneous fat but some of it unfortunately, is non-essential muscle tissue i.e. the superficial stuff that looks great in the mirror!
Thankfully we know how to keep muscle loss to a minimum…
- There is a well known phrase “use it or lose it” and it’s true, if you don’t keep up your strength training whilst you’re lowering your calories, you will lose some of your previous lean mass gains. A minimum of 3 days strength training per week is required to help avoid this happening.
- Eat plenty of protein. There is much debate about the ‘sweet spot’ of protein intake but Sports Nutritionists generally accept that anything in the range of 1.2 grams to 2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight (depending on the type of sport) is ideal. For David, that’s now up to 132g of protein per day.
- Keep complex carbohydrates in your fat loss plan. Don’t go for extremes in cutting out this macro-nutrient. This is a hot topic of debate and I can hear the Ketogenic diet community screaming at me right now but let’s face it, fad diets suck and they won’t last because for the majority of people, they are not sustainable. They are also very boring and really, not necessary (as proven in David’s results). We controlled the complex carbs but didn’t eliminate them. That is key, both in burning fat and helping to preserve lean muscle.
The results
| Day 1 | Day 8 | |
| Body weight | 70kg | 66kg |
| Body fat | 16.9% | 14.9% |
| Chest | 38 | 37 |
| Bicep left | 11.8 | 11.7 |
| Bicep right | 12 | 12 |
| Waist | 35.2 | 34.2 |
| Hips | 37.2 | 36.7 |
| Thigh left | 20.7 | 19.6 |
| Thigh right | 21.4 | 20.4 |
| Calf left | 13 | 12.6 |
| Calf right | 13.5 | 13.1 |
A note from David…
“At the start of this plan I was genuinely sceptical, thinking both that such drastic changes are reserved for other people and that I wouldn’t be able to stick to the meal plan. However, as much as there were small daily battles to be fought against temptation, it did get easier and I was floored to see the results after only a week. I have learned an incredible amount in such a short space of time, about myself and about the stuff I put in my body on a daily basis, and couldn’t be happier with not only the outcome but the longer-lasting, habit-changing effects of an experience like this”
