Alright, so you know how to maintain your body at your present body fat So how do we get rid of excess fat?  This is going to require a caloric deficit of some sort.  How much is too much and how much is too little, that depends on the individual.

Most people want to loose as much fat as possible in a short period of time.  The thing is, if you are losing weight really fast chances are it’s mostly lean body mass (LBM), not body fat (BF).  If we drop our calories too low, we trigger our “famine alarm”.  Your body assumes that we are in a famine situation and starts to store BF and burn LBM. 

Basically this is how it works:

After a few days with too high a caloric deficit, your body realizes that it isn’t getting enough fuel to function.  This will trigger your Famine Alarm, in some cases your body can trigger the famine alarm after going as little as four hours between meals.  When this happens, your body seeks most accessible fuel source, this is usually the carbohydrates that you have in your system.

Once this occurs, you will stop burning stored fat and start storing fat with your next meal.  Not only that, but if the famine alarm is triggered for days at a time, you will find that it will hold on to existing body fat levels like they are gold and start to burn muscle (the reason you need more calories) to make up for the caloric deficit.  As you know by now, the less muscle you have the lower your metabolism goes, making it harder to burn calories.

This is usually when people start to experience the diet plateau.  Their bodies have adapted to the lower calories by losing lean body mass, therefore, lowering the amount of calories required to maintain normal bodily function.  They stop loosing weight and generally cut their calories even more.  All this does is start the whole catabolic process all over again.  

By the time they give up on the diet (usually from not feeling as healthy as they did before the diet), they have lowered their metabolic rate so much so that when they start to eat normally again they increase body fat very easily. 

When you are trying to lose fat, you want to keep your basal metabolic rate
 (BMR) at the same level it was when you started your diet, or even better, raise your BMR.  You do this by never letting your body adjust to your daily caloric levels.  This is accomplished by adjusting your calories up and down, keeping the body guessing and keeping your Famine Alarm at bay.  This gets even trickier when your requirements change daily due to changes in activity levels.

To lose fat and maintain as much lean body mass as possible, you should generally follow these “conservative” rules.  Obviously Emerge clients are following a very specific approach and not just general or conservative rules hence the lighting fast results. 

One pound of body fat is equal to 3500 calories, knowing this you can determine your caloric deficit for the day to come up with the amount of weight loss you want to achieve each week.  Subtract 2 calories per pound of body weight from your daily caloric intake.  This calorie reduction should be spread over your daily meals, do not skip any meals to account for your caloric deficit.  Then, by increasing your caloric intake for two or three days a week by 2 calories per pound of body weight, you keep your famine alarm in check.

So for example, if you weigh 150lbs (150 X 2 calories per pound = 300 calories) and you’re eating at least 5 meals per day you could reduce each meal by 60 calories or just randomly take the calories from certain meals.  As long as you deduct the 300 calories over the course of the day without skipping any meals, that is the most important thing.  By reducing your daily calories by 300, you can expect to lose 2.5lbs of fat per month, assuming you are trying to maintain as much LBM as possible. 

This may not sound like much fat loss but this applies to someone who is already quite lean.  If you have a higher level of BF, you can afford to reduce your daily calories more.  You see if you are eating too few calories, this can cause a substantial lean body mass loss, while eating higher calories (but still below maintenance calorie levels) preserves more lean body mass.  However, people with higher body fat levels don’t have to be as cautious as those with lower. 

Experience has proven that I can reduce the calories quite a bit with someone that is fairly overweight VS a leaner individual.  No matter if it is a substantial caloric deficit or a small one, the more overweight person will lose a greater ratio of fat to lean body mass.  In a substantial caloric deficit, the leaner person will lose more lean mass than body fat but with a small caloric deficit the opposite is true.

In both caloric deficits, the people with higher body fat levels will lose less lean body mass then the leaner individual.  This tells us that the leaner we are the smaller a caloric deficit we want to have in order to preserve lean body mass, while the higher body fat individual can afford to have a much higher caloric deficit.

The take home message for dieting to lose BF should be:

You must always use a combination of exercise when taking in a restricted calorie diet in order to maintain lean body mass.  Take your initial body weight  and body composition into account before deciding how severe your diet should be.  The higher your body fat level the more severe you can be.

As you diet and get leaner, you should adjust your calorie deficit so that it actually gets smaller.  So if you start a diet eating 1000 calories below maintenance, as you get leaner, your daily deficit should decrease to 500 calories per day and so on.  If you don’t decrease your calorie deficit as you lose fat, you will begin to lose and unacceptable amount of LBM.  Make sure to change your caloric levels so that you consume more calories on your workout days than on your non workout days.

So how many calories will I deduct from someone’s diet in order for them to lose fat while preserving lean body mass?  It depends on the individual and their many unique factors (metabolic rate, weight/body composition, past weight loss history), but generally it will go something like this.

Someone who has a slow metabolism and a high level of body fat, I will deduct up to 1000 calories a day from their diet.  This would be on both workout on non workout days (the calories will still change from day to day to the original maintenance levels being different for each day).  A weekly 7000 calorie deficit will result in a 2lb fat loss a week.

If the person has a moderate metabolism, I might deduct 250 to 500 calories on the workout days and 1000 calories on the non workout days.  This way, they have more nutrients coming in to support muscle repair and energy yet still have a major caloric deficit on days that the activity level is low.

With a fast metabolism, I might only deduct 250 calories from a workout day and only 500 from a non workout day.   Since the metabolism is fast, I don’t want to risk muscle loss and I am more conservative. 

These of course are very general and each client’s case is different.  As a rule, you usually start slow with the reduction of calories but I have found that you can lose the most fat and retain or build the most muscle in the early stages of a diet so I like to start off big.  If I find that the calories are too low after a couple weeks due to over training symptoms or poor energy levels, I will raise the calories by 1 – 2 calories per pound at that time.

Generally, as long as you don’t deduct so many calories that you are consuming less than is required to meet you basal metabolic rate, you are ok.  Since this is not your average diet and you are consuming high quality nutrient dense foods, you should have a lot of room to play with.

You know by now that I am not a big cardio fan, therefore, I will deduct a higher amount of calories taking this into account.  If you were to perform cardio on a daily basis (I hope after reading my thoughts on it you wouldn’t), you would have to be a bit more careful with your caloric deficit.

Once again, to achieve great results and the lean toned body you desire requires a well tuned approach.  As usual with all aspects of achieving this desired body image it isn’t easy or simple.  Losing weight is very simple, losing just fat is very complex.  At Emerge its what we do 24/7, let us take the guess work out of your quest for a better body and get you on the right track right away.