Cutting Made Simple
Not too long ago, you got a simple but effective way to bulk up. Of course, somebody read that and asked me if I had one for cutting down as well. Thanks to that lovely person, you’re going to find out how to bring your weight down. Now, you could just slash your food intake in half and drop however many pounds. But if you do that, then you’ll lose a lot of muscle as well as fat. I don’t know of anybody who wanted to lose weight for that reason. Everybody so far has wanted to get leaner, not smaller. So if you’re trying to lean out or drop into a lower weight class, this is the article for you.
The training. Training to cut down isn’t anywhere near as complicated as you’d think it is. Endless circuits and burpees are not the answer (as if anybody likes burpees anyway.) The answer is that you want to keep sending your body the signal to build strength and muscle. You might remember the house metaphor from the bulking article and ask “But Eric, you irreverent yet incredibly charismatic and witty strength and conditioning coach, if I’m not supplying the workers with building materials, I won’t build muscle. What’s the point of doing the strength training and muscle-building work?” Well, very perceptive and critically-thinking reader, you have a point.
The purpose of the training here isn’t exactly to get bigger, but to tell the body that the muscle it has is necessary and should not be eaten. As you know, when you eat fewer calories than you burn, your body eats itself. Your body isn’t stupid, so it knows that muscle is very expensive to keep around. It will start eating that unless there’s a very good reason to keep it around. And your training will be that reason. Since the muscle is going to be used and therefore seen as important, your body will turn its attention to the thing you actually want to get rid of, fat. Another perk of doing this training is that while you can’t gain size when you’re in a calorie deficit (unless you’re on ‘roids,) you can still gain strength because strength is a nervous system thing, not a muscle thing. No, you won’t gain it as quickly or as much of it, but you can still do it, so be sure to hit your training nice and hard.
The diet. This is what makes or breaks your fat loss. First and foremost, you have to eat less than you burn. If you aren’t doing that, you aren’t losing fat. A common rebuttal to this is that if you eat like this or that then you don’t have to worry about that because it alters your hormones. This is like saying you don’t have to worry about how much money you spend vs. earn because refinancing changes your interest rate. Your interest rate affects how much you spend. Just like your hormones affect how much you burn. And I’ve got bad news for you: hormones don’t play that big of a role unless they’re way outside of normal ranges. And by “way outside of normal ranges,” I mean things like you’re taking steroids or your thyroid is totally out of whack. However, this doesn’t mean you can just do literally anything you want as long as you’re in a deficit.
There are a few guidelines. One of them is to keep protein high. This means at least 1g/lb of bodyweight. You’ll notice that I said “at least.” This is because anything beyond that doesn’t help you preserve muscle better. What it does do is help you feel fuller for longer so you’re less likely to get hungry and eat a bunch of high calorie food. Another thing to do is make sure you get plenty of fiber (this means fruits and vegetables.) Fiber is very handy because it takes up a lot of space in your stomach, takes a while to get out, and has way fewer calories compared to other things. I’ve had clients who were cutting down and I told them to ramp up protein and vegetables. It got to the point where they had a hard time eating the prescribed number of calories because they were too full. They were eating to fullness and still losing weight at the same time. There’s no sorcery going on here. It’s just eating a lot of food that makes you full, keeps you that way, and has a low calorie density.
The recovery. There’s actually nothing different from bulking up. If you don’t sleep enough and you’re in a deficit, you might lose the same amount of weight, but you’ll end up losing more muscle than fat. In other words, your body fat percentage will actually go up. If you’re reading this (which is indicative of a high IQ,) I’m pretty sure your goal isn’t to get fatter.
Monitoring progress. The final question you may have is how to know if you’re making progress. How much is too much to lose in a week? How much is not enough? I usually tell people to aim for about a one pound decrease per week on average. Track your weight daily. At the end of every week, find the average. If it’s a pound lower than the previous week, don’t change a thing. You’re doing great. If it’s a half pound or less, eat less food. If it’s a pound and a half or more than the previous week, eat slightly more food.
You probably understand why to subtract food if it’s too slow, but might be confused about eating more food if it’s too fast. After all, isn’t losing more better? The short answer is no. If you’re in too much of a deficit, your very smart body is going to start eating more muscle because there’s clearly a famine happening. All that muscle is wasting food that trivial things like your heart and brain need. By keeping the deficit just the right size, it sends the signal that you need to eat some of yourself, but that the muscle is OK to keep around. This makes fat the main target. Follow this until you either hit your goal or stall out. I would however, advise ending it after eight weeks no matter what. This is because dieting down becomes both physically and psychologically exhausting.
Congratulations, you’ve dropped the fat you wanted to and are now in your new weight class or that pair of jeans you haven’t fit into since the Obama administration. You’ve got a couple of choices here. You can either stay at this weight and food intake or you can bulk up again. For those who have just finished a competition and have a while before the next one, I’d recommend bulking up. This lets you gain back the muscle you lost on the cut and build some more strength.
