A) EATING and MOVING
Section 1: NOT EATING.
If you haven't heard the expression "abs are made in the kitchen", now you have. It's true. Eating is more important than everything else combined, BY FAR.
If you're not eating well, you will not look good. If you are eating well, you'll look at least pretty good even if you're not doing much in the gym. The first thing with food is that HEALTHY IS NOT THE SAME AS GOOD FOR FAT LOSS. These are SEPARATE THINGS. ENTIRELY. Some foods that are healty are GREAT for fat loss (looking at you, spinnach), some SUCK at one and are GREAT for the other, in both directions, some suck for both. The bottom line is: to lose fat (I'll talk about adding muscle later) you need to BURN more calories than you EAT.
Thats pretty much all there is to it.
This is also sometimes referred to as "calories in = calories out"
(though that really should be "calories in + fat/muscle lost = calories out + fat/muscle gained" but whatever, that's nerd shit).
Unfortunately, a lot of people who talk about "calories in = calories out" are idiots.
Many people IGNORE that the right side of that equation ENTIRELY and say that "if you want to lost weight JUST EAT LESS. Duh Doy".
Most of the complexity of this is in the "calories
OUT" side. Calories in is fairly easy, add up EVERYTHING you shove into your face. This includes
-food
-drinks
-sauces
-vegetables
-fruit
-"leafy greens"
-"superfoods"
-Suppliments
-"Healthy" foods
-toppings
-alcohol
even pure alcohol has calories, and a lot of mixed drinks have a TON of sugar too
-things you eat on the weekend
-things you eat when you're hangin' with your homies at the bar
-cheat meals
-cheat days
-"low carb" food
-"gluten free" food
-"organic" food
-"grass fed" food
-anything marketed as "guilt free"
-food eaten after a certain time
-food eaten before a certain time
-"refeed" days/meals
-EVERYTHING THAT GOES THROUGH YOUR FACEHOLE (except water)
Add those up and you've got calories in
(or close, not matter HOW "accurate" you are, you won't get closer than +- 100 calories or so per day. That doesn't turn out to matter that much though).
Calories out is harder. You CANNOT ESTIMATE YOUR CALORIES OUT WITH EQUATIONS. It will also CHANGE based on your calories IN. In engineering we call this a "control system" - fancy way of saying that your body will FIGHT YOU to keep at whatever your "natural" bodyfat is (where you sit if you just eat whatever you feel like eating). It does this by trying to change your calories OUT to match your calories IN.
Math is not how you get ripped
When you start to restrict calories, your energy will drop and the amount of energy you spend moving around (walking, moving to music, fidgeting, standing instead of sitting, everything you DO that's not "exercise") will drop. This is referred to as NEAT. There's not much you can do about this, even if you try to keep your NEAT up, your body will subconsciously change what you do when you're not paying attention. You can do things like walking or biking more instead of driving (I do this for grocery shopping for example - I bike to the store most weeks), using the stairs instead of the elevator, getting a standing desk, etc to recover some of it, but it WILL drop pretty much no matter what you do.
So, what do you need to do?
Eat normally, BUT track EVERY. GOD. DAMN. THING. THAT. GOES. IN. YOUR. FACE. HOLE.
EVERYTHING.s
For 1~3 weeks, depends on how much your weeks vary. If your life is really stable, then 1 week is probably enough to get started. If you go out sparadically (pretty sure I spelled that wrong. Don't care.) then 3 (or more) weeks will probably give a better idea. Then, after that, add up EVERYTHING for the entire couple weeks and divide by the number of days.(so if you ate 30,352 calories in two weeks, that means you averaged 2168 calories per day). Exact
daily numbers
don't matter. Some days will be higher, some lower, what matters is the total, over the course of weeks or months.
I use a google sheet with all of the foods I commonly eat, that automatically adds up calories and macros every day, as well as my weight every day (which I average over several days). Google sheets is nice because it syncs between my phone and computer automatically, and I can add foods at any time and it remembers them. At this point it takes me only a couple minutes total to track my calories for the day. If I can't get exact nutrition facts for something (like restaurant food) I just take my best guess. This is not a precision science, no matter HOW much you try to make it one.
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So what you do is, figure out how much you averaged per day, eating normally (i.e. "at maintenance", how much you need to eat to maintain your current physique), then subtract about 15% or so (so if your "maintenance" was 2168, that's 2168 * 0.85 =
1842). Target eating that much ON AVERAGE for the next couple weeks. Use your weight lost/gained to fine-tune exactly how many calories you're eating OR your activity level. If you are losing weight too slow, EAT LESS or MOVE MORE (more on cardio and "supplements" later). If you are losing weight too fast EAT MORE or MOVE LESS.
Exactly WHAT you eat is up to you (but more on that later), if you LIKE doing keto or paleo or carnivore or fat free or sugar free or WHATEVER, and it HELPS YOU STICK TO YOUR CALORIES FOR THE DAY then DO THAT. If it DOESN'T then DONT DO IT. If you nail your calories and its all pizza and ice cream, you'll lose weight. If you go over every day but it's all salads and broccoli and lean chicken, you'll still get fat. Most diets that don't track calories only work because they make you WANT to eat fewer calories.
Tracking calories will let you figure out what diets you LIKE, and will work FASTER than trying it for six months and seeing if you get skinny. So if you try, say, carnivore for a week, and you can stick to your calories without even trying and you feel good, then that's a good diet FOR YOU. If you try it and feel like absolute shit and want to binge every other day, then that's NOT a good diet FOR YOU so stop doing it. There is NO PERFECT DIET PLAN, not only in general, but even just FOR YOU. Some will work better than others, you just need to find something that works for you, whatever that ends up being.
you don't necessarily need to track calories forever, the end goal of all of this is to get to a point where you can just eat intuitively and feel good and still reach your goals, but that is the END GOAL not something you're likely to be able to just jump to. It's like jazz; it's supposed to just be intuitive and felt, but if you just picked up a trombone and tried to play jazz, you would just make weird annoying noises. You FIRST have to learn HOW TO PLAY THE DAMN TROMBONE and you do that by playing NORMAL MUSIC FIRST, THEN you can start to just "feel" it. Same thing for dieting, learn HOW to eat to hit your goals, THEN you can start to LEARN how to continue to hit those goals WITHOUT having to strictly control everything.
Section 2: goals and timeframe
Track your weight every day, weigh yourself AT THE SAME TIME EVERY DAY. I do it first thing when I get up, after peeing but before drinking water. Your weight will change by sometimes up to 10 pounds PER DAY, based on eating, drinking, peeing, pooping, excercising, etc. This is NOT FAT it is FOOD in your stomach/gut/colon and WATER. Weighing yourself at the same time/state minimizes this to some degree, BUT it still depends on what/how much you ate and drank for several days before. Make a graph of your weight, and look for treneds over the course of
WEEKS or MONTHS, do NOT look for day-to-day changes. Here's an actual graph of my weight over the last couple weeks.
Blue is my daily weight, orange is a running average of the previous week
Notice that it's all over the place BUT slowly going down.
Also notice the timescale: I've only lost about two pounds in the last MONTH.
Now I'm already pretty lean, but this should give you an idea of what you can shoot for. YOU WILL NOT LOOK LIKE A MODEL IN SIX WEEKS.
YOU WILL LOOK A LITTLE BETTER THAN YOU DO NOW.
If you are really obese (good rule of thumb: if you cant see all of your abs when NOT flexing, you're fat. If you can't see abs even when you ARE flexing you're probably a little obese) then you can lose faster, I wouldn't advise much above 1-1.5% of your total body weight per week though. So if you're three hundred pounds, that's
300 * 0.015 = 4.5 pounds per week. If you're 200, that's 3 pounds per week. You're smart, you get the idea.
For people who are NOT currently fat/obese (below about 20%, visible but not very well defined abs) you can probably lose 0.5~1% body fat per week. For people who are already lean, its probably below 0.5%. I'm targeting 0.3% currently. That's just 1/2 pound per week at my weight. That's not very much.
So for a fairly average guy, something around 175 pounds, a little under 20% body fat, should plan on losing NO MORE THAN ABOUT A POUND A WEEK TO START. And this will go DOWN as you get leaner and closer to your target.
Won't bore you with the math, but following a reasonable decrease (tapering off rate of weight loss as you get leaner) it should take around 37 weeks for our 175 pound, 20% guy (which is about my setpoint) to get down to around 8% bodyfat. If you don't understand how I got to that, that doesn't matter, if you just do this, you'll end up following it:
Every two weeks, check your running average weight. If you're obese, multiply it by 0.015, if you're fat, multiply it by 0.01, if you're lean multiply it by 0.005. Try to lose that much weight NEXT WEEK. Again, your weight WILL vary a bit, just aim to get the trend to be about that fast. If you're losing weight too low, EAT LESS or MOVE MORE. If you're too fast, EAT MORE or MOVE LESS. Repeat until you're hot.
I think we're done with math now. Thank God.
Notice that the 37 weeks from a minute ago is NOT a short period of time, that's over 9 months, and that's IF HE DOES EVERYTHING RIGHT.
YOU WILL NOT DO EVERYTHING RIGHT.
YOU WILL MAKE MISTAKES.
YOU WILL CHEAT.
YOU WILL DO STUPID SHIT.
I SURE AS HELL DID, AND STILL DO, ALL OF THEM. ALL THE TIME.
A more realistic goal would be getting to just under 10% in a YEAR.
That doesn't mean you have to wait a year to see results.
That means that every day you will look just a
little better than you did the day before FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR.
THATS NOT "WAITING" FOR RESULTS.
I started getting compliments from people who knew me within a few months of starting to work out and diet (though I started with a bulk, more on that later). After about 9 months I was getting compliments from people I didn't know. After about a year I had ATTRACTIVE GIRLS I barely know HITTING ON ME (occasionally). And I'm not even where I want to be yet. I did stupid shit and fell off the wagon a couple times. If you are even MARGINALLY less stupid than I am
(you probably are, I'm a FUCKING IDIOT) then you can do better than that.
So set a LONG TERM goal NOT A CRASH DIET.
Unless there is a SINGLE EVENT you want to look good for and NEVER LOOK GOOD AGAIN, then a long term eating and excercise plan (on the scale of YEARS) will work 10,000 times better than a crash diet. If you crash diet you'll be so miserable at the end of it that you'll rebound and go right back to where you were. You'll also strip off a TON of muscle in the process. Guys with big muscles are hot. Skinny guys with no muscle generally aren't.
Quick note: The first 2~5 days of your diet you will likely "lose" several pounds (typically 2 or 3, but depending on your body chemistry and size it may be up to 8 or 10). This is NOT fat, it is WATER that was being stored throughout your body. Only start worrying or cutting back if you continue losing MORE than what you planned for maybe 3 weeks in a row. Most people lose too slow (i.e. not at all), VERY few lose too fast.
At higher body fats, this is a fairly continuous process, you'll lose like a pound and a half a week for a couple weeks, then like a pound a week, then like half a pound. But, once you start getting pretty lean, you'll find yourself "running into walls" every couple pounds, you'll stop losing weight entirely. You basically have to start thinking of your different options as "cards" that you can play against these walls. Dropping 100~200 calories is a card, adding 10 minutes of cardio a day is a card (more on cardio in section 4), taking a fat burner (I'll get to this more later) is a card, walking somewhere every day (say to work, if you're close, or to get groceries or something) instead of driving is a card. You play them by doing that thing regularly. Most of these you can only play once, some you can a few times (at some point you'll literally run out of calories to restrict, supplements/drugs to take, or time in the day for cardio). At that point: you're done (or you need to find new "cards" to play). If you play all your cards at once RIGHT when you start, you'll make great progress for a little bit, but you'll stop making progress within a couple weeks/months, and then you're stuck, there's nothing more you can do. If you get AS MUCH as you can possibly get out of every single "card" (play it, and WAIT until you STOP making progress to play the next one. Not being impatient with slow progress, literally STOPPED progress), that will let you get as lean as possible. I'll mention this idea a few times. Basic takeaway is, when you start out JUST drop your calories a LITTLE and do nothing else. You're not doing "better" by dropping to half your starting calories AND doing an hour of cardio every day AND taking a fat burner on day one. You're going to get WORSE results for your impatience. Be patient. This is a slow process.
The other thing your body does to fight you (to try to increase your calories in AND decrease your calories out) is it makes you REALLY HUNGRY - ALL THE TIME and makes you feel like SHIT. CONSTANTLY.
Section 3: Feeling like shit. Constantly.
Heads up: if you want to get lean you WILL BE MISERABLE. A LOT.
This is what I meant by "mainly suffering". Most of the actual actions you need to take are pretty simple. Eat less than you use. Lift heavy things.
Having the willpower to force yourself to keep doing them is the hard part.
Most people who say you don't have to are:
a) lying to get you to buy something
b) just naturally thin/lean and don't have to work for it like the rest of us
c) out of shape themselves
or d) using a truly amazing amount of drugs to stave off feeling like shit (more on this later)
THIS WILL BE UNCOMFORTABLE.
There is some good news though.
Most people do not have the drive to do it.
Most people are too comfortable.
Most people live UNBELIEVABLY comfortable lives, even compared to just a few decades ago.
Most people are more concerted with
looking like they made an effort and failed for reasons beyond their control, than actually getting anywhere.
Two hundred years ago, being able to sit in a bed and have any food you desire delivered to your door within minutes would have been a luxury beyond the dreams of kings. Now we call it uber eats. And we're pissed off if they're even a little bit late or it's a bit cold.
We have INFINITE light entertainment (netflix, youtube, Disney+, etc) right at our fingertips, any time, any day.
We have homes heated and cooled to exactly the temperature we desire.
We have cars to take us where we want to go.
Most people, when they have to leave this bubble of constant, perfect comfort get scared and run back. Real work is hard. Its new. It sucks.
They don't make any progress on any of their goals, if they have any at all, because once it gets even a LITTLE bit difficult, they make excuses and run back to their little bubble.
If you've gotten to this though, that means SOMETHING brought you here.
Whatever that is, that's why YOU will succeed.
Maybe its depression. Maybe its insecurity about women. Maybe you're just horny as fuck. Maybe you just want to be really hot.
Whatever it is USE IT. LET IT DRIVE YOU. Remember WHY you started down this path in the first place. Whatever it is, it made your little bubble of comfort not quite comfortable enough. It must have or you wouldn't be here. This is a weird, deep part of the internet. You had to look for it.
Whatever drove you to find this, remember it. Embrace the discomfort it causes. You'll need to remember that to drive you to KEEP AT IT when you feel like shit. When its not fun. When your motivation is gone. Motivation is not your friend. It's great if it lines up with what you want, it makes you feel good, might even push you a little bit harder. But when the chips are down it's remembering that the alternative isn't any better that will really drive you.
I'm hyping the fuck out of this because this is really the only reason I've gotten anywhere. I remember sitting in my room, alone and feeling unloved, and no amount of food or videos or porn or fucking temperature control was doing shit for me.
I was ... uncomfortable.
Most people will never REALLY be uncomfortable, in their entire life.
The good thing is, that makes it easy to push harder, and do better than "most people".
When you're more driven to succeed, more willing to actually put in the GOD DAMN WORK than most people, then you will EASILY stand out in whatever you do before too long.
Ask anyone around here who has already succeeded, I guarantee you almost all them will have had something like this that drove them. Their own, personal rock bottom.
I know that sitting in my little bubble sucks. I know that no matter how bad I'm suffering right now,
the alternative is worse. If this is the case for you, you'll be able to push through. If it's not, you'll give up and go back to eating pizza and jerking off like the other 95% of people who "try". You don't have to hit "rock bottom", simply being aware that giving up is going to make you suffer far more in the long run than whatever discomfort you're feeling now is enough.
When you try, you'll fail occasionally. This won't give you infinite motivation. You won't be perfect just because you're driven. The difference is, if you'll take failure as an excuse to give up, "oh crap I ate a bunch of shit when I was drunk yesterday. My diet is ruined. Might as well just order a pizza tonight".
Versus
"Oh crap I ate a bunch of shit when I was drunk yesterday. Well that's going to set me back a little. I'll drop my daily calories for the next four days to help get me back on track".
One of those is the comfortable option. One is going to be uncomfortable. But which of those people do you think will succeed?
Fun fact: this literally happened YESTERDAY. Went on an unsuccessful date (I always drink a bunch before dates, people like me WAY better when I'm at least a little tipsy) and binged afterward. It's happened before, and it will happen again. When it does, I don't give up. I dust myself off and get back to work.
If you want more on this, check out GLLs article on being uncomfortable: https://www.goodlookingloser.com/laid/index/the-comfortable-life-of-the-undersexed-male
I'm emphasizing this so much because almost no one talks about it (I haven't read all of the stuff on kyil yet, I'm sure Andy has whole articles on this, but in any case,
it bears repeating), but actually going through trying to be successful at ANYTHING, this is the hardest part BY FAR.
Section 4: Calories out: cardio
Okay so now that you know what you're in for (and why you'll push through) and have a REALISTIC GOAL (6+ months if you've got a ways to go), we can get to less important things.
So when your body starts to make you feel like shit, it's doing that to make you MOVE LESS so you burn fewer calories. You can fight this by moving more. This is commonly referred to as "exercise". It's good for you.
As far as calories in = calories out, exercise is pretty much equivalent to cutting calories. If I add on 15 minutes of cardio per day, and I'm burning 400 calories/hour doing my cardio, then I could (potentially) get the same results by instead removing 100 calories of food every day. For the most part this DOES WORK, but there's some nuance.
For one, you can't really cut calories forever AND STAY HEALTHY. People aren't magic, you can't get energy from the air. Look at anyone who has TRULY faced starvation (holocaust survivors, unfortunate homeless people, severe anorexics), you CAN just cut calories and you'll lose fat, but it takes either severe circumstances or literally giving yourself an eating disorder to force you beyond a certain point. This is generally a few % above 10% body fat. If you're content with 12~15%, which most people will be, most people will look pretty good at this point if they have a decent amount of muscle it's likely you can get there by just eating less. Getting below this point (and to get as attractive as possible) will almost always involve cardio, or else you'll probably start to have some serious problems. Derek from More Plates More Dates actually recently did a podcast explaining this exact topic, so I won't cover it here more, go listen to that.
The second main problem with JUST cutting calories forever is that your body will start to pretty much shut down (sometimes referred to as "starvation mode") where it will try to conserve as much energy as possible by making you feel like shit, making you sleepy more, and will start burning more muscle in addition to fat (this is a sliding scale though, it's not like a switch where you're either burning muscle OR fat. You're doing both all the time, you'll just burn more). You will also become more and more obsessed with food. At some point, your willpower WILL give out.
If it doesn't, then congrats! You've just given yourself an eating disorder!
This is NOT A GOOD THING. Not only will it ruin your health, it won't even give you actual results (remember, we're trying to become MORE ATTRACTIVE NOT JUST LOSE WEIGHT). See a doctor if you think you may be anorexic. Don't keep reading. Go. Now.
At that point, you'll binge and rebound, or, you will "hit a wall". The way to get past this is to do more cardio INSTEAD of just cutting calories.
Particularly when you're very lean already, cardio ends up being significantly different from just cutting calories.
What form of cardio is best? Whichever one you'll do. I HATE running, but I love biking. So I don't run. Ever. I bike a ton though. Some people love jogging. Some people like rowing. Some people hate all of those and can only put up with walking. That's fine. Do WHATEVER CARDIO YOU WANT. Just do SOMETHING THAT GETS YOU MOVING. Do more of it if you're not losing enough weight. Do less if you're losing too fast (or eat more).
Cardio should be done steady-state if your only goal is weight loss (i.e. you are going the same speed/intensity the whole time). I actually prefer sprinting (which is a form of "High Intensity Interval Training" or HIIT) simply because it's fun, BUT it's worse for weight loss so I don't do it very often. I bike VERY often, almost daily, sometimes for HOURS. If you've never heard of HIIT, then just skip this paragraph and ignore it:
You'll burn FEWER calories doing HIIT than regular cardio. So in, say, 15 minutes of running sprints every couple minutes and walking the rest of the time, you'll burn less than you would if you just jogged or biked or something for 15 minutes. Also HIIT can't really scale up, you can't do more than maybe 20 minutes of ACTUAL HIIT without fucking dying, you can easily do HOURS of moderate steady-state cardio once you're used to it. Yes, HIIT may have a any number of benefits, can be fun, AND can do other things for you (like building muscle) BUT for FAT LOSS it's not the best. You'd also be better off from a muscle-building perspective doing normal cardio and hitting the weights harder.
For any dorks who are going to argue about the "afterburn effect" or some shit, that's a TINY effect. Like 40 calories total AT BEST, TOTAL. If you even push hard enough to get it at all. Most people are pussies and won't push hard enough to get ANYTHING from it. It doesn't matter.