Cutting and bulking

Before I start talking about weight loss I want to warn people about the cut/bulk cycle. You're body is programmed to fight weight loss, but it will happily take in fat. Hence why most people get stuck bulking and become fat. Even if they manage to cut, it is often temporary and they regain the fat. If you are going to bulk, make sure you understand what you're doing first.

 

Weight loss (Cutting)

Most people go through a breakup or whatever, they enter the anger phase, and they decide to become superman. Start an extreme diet and an extreme lifting routine for a few months, then it all fades off and they regain their fat and get tired of the gym. Most effective diets are slow (losing 0.25 to 0.5kg a week) accompanied with exercise and some cheat days where you don't exceed your calorie requirements. The reason why slowly losing weight is more effective is because you are able to slowly reset your bodies set point. If you're body detects a sudden extreme change in weight loss, it will dispatch it's entire military to stop it.

 

Keep your satiety level (fullness) as high as possible

Satiety is determined by the state of your food (liquid, semi-liquid, solid), and it's fibre, protein, fat content, and carbohydrate type.Resistant starch (RS) has been talked about, but it's difficult to properly implement it's mostly hyped by companies wanting to sell supplements for it that probably don't work. This is a good website that quantifies satiety. Just search the food and it shows you all kind of information on it. The equation used has some limitations to it, but overall it is good.

 

Hyper-palatable food

Also known as junk food, it combines three factors, salt, sugar, and fat to make a calorie dense, delicious, addictive, heart disease causing food. Avoid them as much as you can.

 

Calorie dense foods

Sometimes you don't even notice what you're taking in, extra virgin olive oil can be "healthy" according to so many articles, magazines, or whatever you read. But one table spoon is 120kcals. Get a good non stick pan or find alternatives to frying your food.

 

Keep your protein intake high

Different values are thrown around. But if you are getting 0.6g of protein per pound of body weight a day then you are doing fine. You need this not only for satiety but also to maintain, or build muscle.

 

Drink enough water and get enough potassium

Mushrooms, leafy greens, bananas, all high in potassium. You will probably be getting enough sodium so don't worry about that.

 

Intermittent Fasting

Can prevent your Resting metabolic rate (RMR) from going down, and help your body access fat supplies for energy.

 

Multivitamins

Only if you think you're not getting enough nutrient, but unless you are on an extreme diet, you should be getting enough vitamins.

 

Other nutrition related things

Whenever you can, choose low glycaemic index food, and avoid fructose. For vitamins and other micro nutrient always go for leafy greens and veg before fruits.

 

Diets

If you think you can maintain a diet that provides all the macros and micros your body needs, at a caloric deficit then go for it. If the diet is too extreme and you're probably going to drop it. Then it's a terrible idea.

 

Maintenance

You feel depressed, tired, the weight loss lifestyle you've chose is getting too difficult. Give yourself a break, increase your calories to a maintenance level and stay there for a week or two. (Don't increase it too much by lying to yourself. The results will disappoint you). You don't have to feel bad to do this either. You can go on a maintenance routine every time you hit a milestone decrease your chances of giving up at one point

 

Other things to keep in mind

 

Keep track of everything

  1. Count your calories. Buy a kitchen scale and take into account everything you eat. Don't account for things like a squeeze of lemon. Remember anything you take to an extreme and can't maintain results in failure. Preferably using an app like myfitnesspal (highly recommended, tracks your progress with graphs, calculates things automatically for you, you can scan bar codes on food)
  2. How much you were able to lift, run, swim, etc... And the progress you've made
  3. You're weight at the end of every week. If you see no weight change for a while, you're not counting everything you eat/you're eating at maintenance rate/you're doing something wrong. You lost 5kg in a week, don't tell everyone and start eating pancakes the scale is inaccurate, you were wearing a heavy jacket the last time, etc... You gained too much weight, then the opposite is probably true. If you slowly gain weight every week then you are overeating. Basic logic. You're weight loss should fluctuate between weeks but show a clear decrease over all. Progress pictures can be taken at the same state (relaxed preferably), and in the same light condition.

 

Cognitive dissonance

You're not eating that ice cream because you just worked out and you want maximal muscle growth or because it has a lot of protein in it. You're eating it because it tastes nice. Read about cognitive dissonance, it messes up your routine.

 

Edit: modified the protein recommendation