How To Get Lean & STAY Lean Forever (Using Science)

if you click this video you've most likely set the goal of trying to lose some fat this year this is my goal for the new year as well I'm trying to get under 10 body fat for the first time in a few years however if you follow Fitness content at all you've probably also heard that most diets fail over the long term this is true just take a look at this study on The Biggest Loser contest which followed up on the participants from the 2009 show six years after the show was over out of the 14 people who participated in the study only one person had kept their weight off after six years five of the 14 subjects had regained all of their weight back and two of the 14 ended up weighing more than they did before the show even started so fully half the subjects had at least gained all their weight back similarly this 2020 systematic review on the challenge of keeping it off will the results have eight separate weight loss studies and found that while all the studies were able to induce weight loss during the dieting period they also all saw average weight regain after the diet was over with a few studies showing overshoot beyond the original starting weight now I think a large part of why this trend is so common is that people often don't realize that getting lean for a temporary time frame like a fitness event or a wedding or a photo shoot is a different goal with a different set of strategies than getting lean and staying lean over the long term now before we get into those strategies to get everyone on the same page give me one minute to explain how fat loss actually works fat loss occurs because of a caloric deficit this means that you're consuming less calories than you're burning you consume calories by eating food and you burn calories in four ways there's your resting energy expenditure which is the number of calories your body Burns just sitting there so to keep your heart beating and so on there's your exercise activity thermogenesis this is the number of calories you burn from exercising there's your non-line exercise activity thermogenesis or neat this is any activity that isn't exercise so stuff like getting up sitting down typing and tapping your fingers and then there's the thermic effect of food which is the small number of calories your body Burns digesting the foods you eat so let's say we add all that up and it comes out to 2000 500 calories burned over the course of a day and then we tally up everything you ate that day and it was 3 000 calories that would mean you ran a 500 calorie Surplus for that day but if instead of 3 000 calories you only ate 2 000 calories now that would mean you ran a 500 calorie deficit for the day and if you sustained that 500 calorie deficit over time you'd lose about one pound per week which is actually a reasonable Target for most people to aim for so that's all pretty simple but there's a very important part that many people Miss it's important to realize that as you lose weight the number of calories you burn will decrease this is called metabolic adaptation as you lose weight you won't burn as many calories through resting energy expenditure because your body is getting smaller you won't burn as many calories per unit of exercise because your body is becoming more energetically efficient you won't burn as many calories through meat because your body is becoming less hyperactive in fidgety and you won't burn as many calories through the thermic effect of food because you're eating less food so keep in mind that the 500 calorie deficit you started out with probably won't be a 500 calorie deficit after a few weeks or months of dieting and that's because when you decrease the number of calories you're eating you also indirectly decrease the number of calories you're burning and sometimes these adaptations can happen very quickly even within days so to account for metabolic adaptation which will occur you may need to lower calories a bit further to keep up with your desired rate of weight loss or you can simply accept the fact that your weight loss may take a bit longer than expected alright so in order for any fat loss diet to work it needs to have three crucial things a sustained caloric deficit to cause fat loss weight training to support muscle mass and enough protein to support muscle mass usually 1.6 to 2.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight or 0.7 to 1 gram per pound is a good Target to aim for and pretty much everything else including the number of meals you eat the timing of those meals and what specific Foods you focus on can be largely dictated by your own individual preferences so those are the basics for how you lose fat now from here most people turn to short-term strategies to try to get that fat off as quickly as possible but this is a mistake yes all the most popular fad diets will cause fat loss in the short term that's what actually caused them to become so popular in the first place but low calorie crash diets tend to result in more muscle loss and eventual weight regain and yes isolating yourself from social events and avoiding restaurants may help you fend off tempting foods for some time but can also deteriorate your relationships and eventually make the diet feel unsustainable and yes cutting out entire food groups may help you avoid overeating for a while but can eventually lead to nutrient deficiencies and uncontrollable Cravings that make weight regain inevitable so if you want to not just get lean but stay lean you need to take a better approach so next let's dig into three specific strategies that'll help you not only lose the fat but keep it off over the long term the third strategy on my list is the most frequently neglected in my experience but also probably the most important alright the first long-term strategy is to diet more slowly so that it barely even feels like you're dieting at all now the general science-based cutting rule is that you should aim to lose around 0.5 to 1 percent of your body weight per week on a fat loss phase so if you weigh 200 pounds right now you should try to lose one to two pounds per week or in other words if you want to cut 20 pounds it should take you 10 to 20 weeks to get there this is what I typically recommend as well however there may be some benefits to going even slower in fact on my own current weight loss Journey I've lost 24 pounds or 11 kilos and that Journey has taken me 40 weeks or just about nine months I started my cut at 187 pounds or 85 kilos and now I'm down to 163 pounds or 74 kilos that evens out to an average weight loss of just over half a pound per week and because I've taken my sweet time with it the weight loss itself has felt incredibly easy ridiculously easy I've been eating out at restaurants going out with friends eating pizza and Sushi and the slower pace of things has helped me be very chill about my diet now you can see a few times here where my weight spiked noticeably the first bike was in the middle of August when some friends came to visit Stephanie in Toronto we were eating out almost every night I gained two or three pounds that week but when I back it's really just a tiny blip in the overall trend this other Spike lasted for most of November I gained four pounds that month but I was visiting stuff in New Orleans it was during Thanksgiving and again it's not a big deal at all when you zoom out and look at the overall trend and I think this mindset is not only okay but actually smarter because it'll help you not only be chill throughout the diet process it'll help you stay chill once you get to your goal weight by going slow you won't feel deprived or eager to get off the diet because you won't feel like you've been dieting very hard all along this will help you maintain the leanness you eventually reach much more easily and I think it'll be worth that extra bit of time it takes for you to get there so to make sure you're losing around that ideal rate of 0.5 to 1 percent of body weight per week I'd recommend a caloric deficit around 20 percent below your current maintenance to do this simply take the calories you need to maintain your weight right now and slash 20 from it if you don't know how to find your maintenance calories I'll put two methods up here on the screen that you can pause and read and of course if you don't want to track calories at all you can instead focus on tracking your body weight while making intuitive Common Sense lower calorie food choice choices most of the time for some people those simple Common Sense choices will be enough to get things moving for others a tool like intermittent fasting can be very helpful or if you're like me to relieve tracking stress you can just Loosely track calories and protein without worrying about the carbon fat numbers so for example if I'm eating something that's harder to find the exact macros for like a specialty sushi roll I can just eyeball it as five or six hundred calories and call it a day this way it only takes me a total of maybe five minutes a day to track what I eat I should also mention that in addition to giving yourself plenty of time to get lean you also need to give yourself a realistic end Target no matter how slow you go you simply can't expect to maintain six percent body fat all year round at a certain point your sleep libido energy and mood will all plummet and all you'll ever be able to think about is food so even if you could do it this isn't a state of existence worth maintaining anyway generally speaking most men can expect to maintain something between 10 and 20 body fat which looks something like this granted I do think that your starting place can impact where you end up for example if you've been sitting at a 40 body fat for 10 years it might be harder for you to maintain 20 body fat than it is for someone who's genetically leaner to maintain eight percent body fat but you just need to find an end point that's realistic for you and realize that everyone is unique in terms of how low they can comfortably go someone else's eight percent might be your 18 and that's okay for women the realistic range tends to be between 18 and 28 body fat which looks something like this and once again the bottom line is that if you're trying to maintain a physique that's leaner than your genetic body fat set range it'll be very hard for you to sustain even if you do everything else right okay the second long-term strategy is to leverage habits to make the diet feel as easy as possible regardless of how motivated you feel right now as you watch this video eventually your motivation will dip back down when that happens and it will happen if you haven't built the right habits you'll most likely start veering off track however if you can operate on autopilot you've got nothing to worry about when this happens so I want to share a couple of my favorite science-based habit building techniques that you can use to make your life a whole lot easier in those later stages when most people slip up the first habit building technique is called Temptation bundling this is when you pair an activity that you already want to do with an activity that supports your weight loss goal for example I really enjoy watching true crime video essays on YouTube this Behavior comes naturally for me but I don't love doing cardio and I'm often tempted to skip it however if I link the more enjoyable activity of watching crime videos with the less enjoyable activity of doing cardio a much less tempted to skip the cardio some of my bodybuilder friends do this by playing video games while hitting their cardio at home as another example if you're trying to build the habit of meal prepping on Sundays try saving your favorite podcast for when it's time to do your meal prep that way you'll make that new Behavior more gratifying in the moment my other habit building technique is to align your everyday environment with your goals for example if there's a particular food that you consistently overeat maybe leave it on the Shelf next time you're grocery shopping or if you're regularly stress eating at night keep alternative stress relievers like video games books and puzzles close by so you can use them for stress relief instead if you're missing gym time in the morning because you scroll on your phone before getting out of bed try leaving your phone in a different room or picking up an old school alarm clock to get you up faster now if you do everything that I've said in this video so far or even most of what I've said you will reach your goal you absolutely will however that's not the end once you've reached your goal you need a plan for what to do next and this is the part that almost everyone neglects so my third and final strategy is to have a smart post diet plan now there are two very common mistakes that I see people make after reaching their fat loss goal the first and probably most common mistake is when people just don't have any post diet plan at all in this case as motivation decreases they revert back to their old eating habits and gradually creep up up in wait until eventually they're back to square one the solution here is pretty simple you just need a post diet plan we'll get to that in a minute the second mistake which is more common amongst the more sciencey Fitness crowd is meticulous reverse dieting this can be just as bad as the first mistake if it drags out the diet unnecessarily keeps you hungry for longer than you need to be and leads to an eventual breakdown of willpower now I'm planning to cover reverse dieting in detail in a future video but for now reverse dieting is when you gradually increase your calories from your deficit intake up to your maintenance intake over the course of several weeks or months and even though it's quite popular I don't actually recommend it as part of a post diet plan instead I recommend going to your new maintenance calories right away if you no longer have the goal of losing weight why be in a caloric deficit if you're not cutting anymore you should get to maintenance and get on with your new goal of maintaining now finding your new maintenance calories at the end of a diet can take a bit of trial and error but for the most part should be something around 200 to 600 calories above what you were eating at the end of your cut so let's say you're eating 2000 calories by the end of your diet the very next day you should boost your calories up to 2 200 to 2 600 calories probably closer to 2600 if you didn't crash diet from there you should aim to more gradually increase your calories until you get them as high as possible while still maintaining your body weight on average so let's say your cut is over and you go ahead and bump your calories up to your new maintenance intake of 2600 calories that's a great start but it doesn't mean that 2600 calories is now a fixed maintenance for you you should instead think of your maintenance as a dynamic range meaning you might be able to maintain your weight by eating anything from 2600 to 3 000 calories so over time you should try to increase your calories toward the top end of your maintenance calorie range this process doesn't need to be long and dragged out either simply monitor your average weight trend from week to week and if you're still more or less maintaining it may be time to add some calories and the reason this is a good idea isn't because it's a special trick for boosting your metabolism but rather because if you can eat more food you'll feel less restricted which will make it easier for you to maintain your more food also improves training performance which is always a good thing especially if you're looking to enter a lean gaining phase after your cut of course if you don't like to track calories you should still continue to track your body weight once your cut is over regular weighing has been associated with better long-term weight maintenance in the scientific literature and that behavior alone will help keep you accountable to your new goal of maintaining of course this doesn't mean you need to weigh yourself every single day but I usually do recommend weighing yourself at least two or three days a week during a maintenance phase as long as doing so doesn't give you any emotional stress now before we wrap it up I'd like to take a minute to recommend the macro Factor app is yet another tool that you can use to help you reach your fat loss goals I'm a part owner of the app and I've been involved in the app's development since day one and I truly believe it's the best nutrition app on the market first of all unlike most diet apps it isn't just a food logger it's quite literally a nutrition coach that uses science-based algorithms to detect changes in your metabolism and make adjustments to your food intake based on your individual weekly check-ins this is insanely helpful for accountability also unlike most apps macro Factor was designed with both weight loss and weight maintenance in mind in fact after you've reached your weight loss goal there's something called Dynamic maintenance mode that'll help you keep your weight within plus or minus two pounds of your end weight this is a huge feature that I haven't seen any other diet apps use it also has the fastest food logger in existence which means tracking really shouldn't feel like a chore once you give it a few days to get the hang of it and then unlike any other app I'm aware of it also doesn't punish you if you miss a day here and there so you can be more chill about your diet overall so if this sounds like something you'd like to try out for yourself you can get a free two-week trial of macrofactor at the first link in the description box below there's also a very active Facebook group and subreddit that I keep an eye on where you can ask questions or post updates I find these communities are really helpful for accountability so if you do sign up make sure you get in there as well alright that's it for this one guys thank you so much for watching don't forget to leave me a thumbs up if you enjoyed the video subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you guys all here in the next one

Channel: Jeff Nippard

Views: 4,831,483

Keywords: jeff nippard fat loss, how to stay lean, how to stay lean year round, macrofactor app, fat loss, fat loss diet, fat loss nutrition, diet for fat loss, diet plan for fat loss, meal plan for fat loss, fat loss meal plan, fat loss mealplan, meal plan, free meal plan, complete meal plan, how to lose fat, how to lose fat fast, how to eat to lose weight, how to lose weight fast, muscle building meal plan, workout meal plan, athleanx, athlean x, jeff cavaliere, lose belly fat

Id: roHQ3F7d9YQ

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 23 2023